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Long-delayed Pittsburgh synagogue shooting trial to begin Monday, igniting pain, fear and hopes for closure

(JTA) — Every Thursday, Brad Orsini gets on a conference call with dozens of other security specialists who, like him, focus on preventing threats to American Jews. But in a few days, and for the coming months, the conference call won’t just address the dangers of the present and future. It will also deal with events that occurred more than four years ago. 

That’s because next week marks the beginning of the trial of the gunman who is accused of killing 11 worshippers in a Pittsburgh synagogue in October 2018. 

Orsini, who oversaw the city’s Jewish communal security on the day of the attack in the neighborhood of Squirrel Hill, hopes to find a sense of closure in the alleged shooter’s prosecution. But he also knows that the trial threatens to broadcast the white supremacist ideas that lay behind the attack, and continue to pose risks for Jewish communities. And he worries that, in addition to providing a possible pathway for survivors and victims’ families to move into the future, it could also thrust them back into a painful past. 

“It’s long overdue,” Orsini said. “This has been looming large over the Pittsburgh community and, quite honestly, the Jewish community in the nation. We’re all looking toward finishing this trial and prosecuting this actor for what he did.”

At the same time, he added, “This trial is going to reopen wounds that this community has suffered for almost five years now, and it’s going to have the ability to retraumatize many people in the community. And we have to be concerned about that.”

Beginning on Monday, those countervailing emotions and expectations will come to bear as the deadliest antisemitic attack in American Jewish history is litigated in court. The trial, which will begin with jury selection, is expected to last about three months. Few doubt the guilt of the accused shooter, Robert Bowers, whose name is hardly uttered by Jewish residents of Squirrel Hill. But what remains unclear is what the trial will mean for American Jews — and for the families most directly affected by the attack.

Some hope for the defendant to get the death penalty — even though that will mean prolonging the legal ordeal — while others have advocated against it. Some hope for the trial to shed light on the threat of white supremacy, even as renewed attention on the attack could inspire other violent extremists. And some hope the trial will help them move past the tragedy, even as they know it will be difficult to hear the details of the shooting laid out in court.

“The country is going to have to undergo this unprecedented trial of the country’s worst mass killer of Jews,” said Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League. “It’s going to be really hard, so I think our community is really going to have to buckle down and brace ourselves.”

The attack on Saturday morning, Oct. 27, 2018, killed 11 people from three congregations, all of which met at the same building, and injured six others, including four police officers. The defendant faces 63 criminal charges, including hate crimes and murder charges. He has pleaded not guilty. The prosecution is seeking the death penalty — a choice some relatives of victims are vocally supporting. Previously, leaders of two of the three congregations that suffered the attack had opposed the death penalty in this case.

“This massacre was not just a mass murder of innocent citizens during a service in a house of worship,” Diane Rosenthal, sister of David and Cecil Rosethal, who died in the attack, told local journalists, according to reporting by the Pittsburgh Union Progress. “The death penalty must apply to vindicate justice and to offer some measure of deterrence from horrific hate crimes happening again and again.”

For the survivors and families of victims, the trial will likely be especially painful. Some told the Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle that they intend to take time off work, delay a vacation or be away from family for an extended period of time to be present at the proceedings. 

“I want to see justice happen, but at the same time, I hate to think about the families having to potentially see images of what happened and things of that sort,” Steve Weiss, who survived the attack, told the weekly Jewish newspaper. “I’m sure they have mental images, but to have to actually see photos of victims and things of that sort I think can really be difficult for them.”

One thing few people question is the shooter’s guilt, despite his plea of not guilty. He offered to plead guilty in 2019 in exchange for taking the death penalty off the table, but prosecutors, determined to pursue capital punishment for the crime, rejected the plea. 

It was the same thing that had happened in the case of the man charged with killing nine Black worshippers in a Charleston, South Carolina, church in 2015. But there, despite the rejected guilty plea, the trial took place a year and a half after the attack, and the shooter was sentenced to death. (In an illustration of the length of death penalty cases, his latest court proceeding happened in October, and he has not yet been executed.)

In contrast, the Pittsburgh trial is not starting until four and a half years after the shooting there. Part of the reason for the delay stems from the work of the defense team, which has pushed back the trial through various court filings. The alleged shooter’s lead attorney, Judy Clarke, has defended a series of high-profile attackers: the Unabomber, the attacker in the 1996 Atlanta Summer Olympics bombing and the Boston Marathon bomber, among others. According to Pittsburgh’s local CBS affiliate, her singular goal is to avoid the death penalty for her client.

But in many other ways, the parallels between the Charleston trial and this one are clear. Both concern shootings by alleged white supremacists in houses of worship, tragedies that have become gruesome symbols of a national rise in bigotry. In both, the culpability of the defendant was assumed before the trial began. Like the Pittsburgh defendant, the Charleston shooter has been lionized by white supremacists, including some who cited him as an inspiration for their own violent acts. 

And in both cases, there is an understanding that a conviction does not heal the wounds opened by the shooter.

“This trial has produced no winners, only losers,” said the judge in the Charleston shooter’s trial, Richard Gergel, according to the New Yorker. “This proceeding cannot give the families what they truly want, the return of their loved ones.” 

Still, some who are watching the Pittsburgh trial closely hope that it will bring new facts and connections to light. Amy Spitalnick, the executive director of Integrity First for America, a nonprofit that spearheaded a multimillion-dollar victory in a civil trial against the organizers of the 2017 far-right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, hopes that the Pittsburgh trial illustrates the links among different white supremacist shootings — such as the attacks in El Paso, Texas; Christchurch, New Zealand; and at a synagogue in Poway, California. 

Those attackers spouted similar conspiracy theories and referenced other recent violent attacks in their manifestos. Spitalnick said that the accused Pittsburgh shooter allegedly communicated with the organizers of the Charlottesville rally on the social network Gab, which is known as a haven for right-wing extremists. 

“Trials like this can really be illustrative of how deep the poison of white supremacy and antisemitism goes,” she said. In the Charlottesville trial, she said, “The reams and reams of evidence… really helped pull back the curtain on what motivated the defendants, how they operated, the tools and the tactics of the movement, the conspiracy theories at its core.”

There’s also the possibility that, with the attack resurfacing the shooter’s motivations, and putting him back in the spotlight, it will act as an inspiration for other white supremacists. In the years following the synagogue shooting, Pittsburgh became a kind of pilgrimage site for the defendant’s admirers — leading to continued harassment of local Jews. 

“We’re giving a platform to an individual who is a Jew hater, who wanted to kill all Jews,” Orsini said. “What does that spark in other like-minded people? We need to be very cognizant throughout this trial on what kind of chatter is going to be out there on the deep dark web, or even in open portals.”

In the face of concerns about retraumatization, Greenblatt said the ADL is preparing resources on how to discuss the trial with students and amid the Jewish community. 

“To relive the horrors of, the grief of, the event — this thing being constantly in the news — it’s going to be hard to avoid, it’s going to be difficult and it could be grisly and upsetting,” Greenblatt said. “I would much prefer this trial didn’t happen — I would much prefer this crime never happened, I would much prefer that those people were all still with us today — but this is where we are.”

He added, “If there might be some ability to raise awareness among the non-Jewish population of what we’re facing, [that] would be of value.” 

One potential challenge for American Jews as a whole, Spitalnick said, is that federal prosecutors don’t necessarily share the needs of Jews who will be following the proceedings. While the trial will conjure a mix of emotions for Jews locally and beyond, she said, prosecutors will be more focused on the nuts and bolts of what happened that day and the details of the accused attacker’s actions and motives. 

“We’re going to probably spend a lot of time hearing from the prosecution about what motivated him, but it’s not through the lens of what we as Jews think about when we think about Jewish safety,” she said. “It’s through the lens of making the case that this guy did what he did motivated by this extremism and hate… It’s going to be very deliberate and tactical and precise, versus where we as American Jews have been thinking about this from a deeply personal, communal safety perspective.” 

The deliberate and detailed work of prosecutors, however, may not be at cross purposes with the emotional needs of Jews, Orsini said. When the trial ends, he said, the establishment of Bowers’ guilt may itself prove to be transformative for how Jews relate to the tragedy, in Pittsburgh and beyond. 

“The fact that this individual has not been fully brought to justice… and is not convicted yet of this mass shooting — in some way, yes, that closure and finality will be done at the end of this trial,” he said. “The community can kind of regroup and truly become resilient once this phase is over with.” 

—
The post Long-delayed Pittsburgh synagogue shooting trial to begin Monday, igniting pain, fear and hopes for closure appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

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House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries calls for ‘dramatic change’ in Israel policy

(JTA) — U.S. House of Representatives Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, a New York Democrat poised to become the chamber’s speaker in January, called for a significant shift in the U.S.-Israel relationship but stopped short of opposing defense partnerships.

“The status quo is unacceptable, and we need dramatic change,” Jeffries told reporters at a Thursday press conference.

Jeffries expressed a need for such change with respect to the West Bank, to Gaza and to a memorandum of understanding with Israel over military aid set to expire in 2028. That agreement, signed by the Obama administration in 2016, pledged $38 billion in military aid for Israel from fiscal years 2019 through 2028.

President Donald Trump has said he will wind the aid down before it is set to lapse, citing Israel’s unpopularity, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also backs ending military aid and replacing it by strengthening U.S.-Israel military cooperation.

But when asked about recent demands from Sen. Chris Van Hollen to remove provisions on defense collaborations with Israel from the National Defense Authorization Act – the model of what Netanyahu hopes to sustain – Jeffries responded that he hadn’t spoken with the senator. Van Hollen, a Democrat from Maryland, plans to challenge Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer leadership of the Senate Democratic caucus when Democrats take over the chamber in January.

Instead, Jeffries said that “things have to dramatically change over in the Middle East,” without elaborating on the details of such changes. He stressed the importance of ensuring “a safe and secure Israel living side by side as a Jewish and democratic state with an independent Palestinian state that provides dignity and self-determination for the Palestinian people.” Netanyahu and much of the Israeli public oppose the establishment of a Palestinian state.

While Jeffries noted that he wasn’t saying anything he hasn’t “previously said publicly,” his decision to reiterate this need for change following the election as Democrats are set to seize control of Congress demonstrates how the party is adopting a more critical posture on Israel.

This past summer, Jeffries wrote to colleagues urging them to reject an amendment proposed by Rep. Thomas Massie, a Republican from Kentucky, that would have cut military aid to Israel. While a slight majority of Democrats voted in favor of the measure, it was defeated after getting no Republican support aside from its sponsor.

Jeffries had argued at the time that “there are more decisive ways to achieve the urgent change necessary when it comes to the far-right Netanyahu government,” warning that Massie’s amendment would have restricted Israel’s ability to confront Hamas, Hezbollah and other terror groups.

Nonetheless, Jeffries also noted in the letter that the Obama-era memorandum of understanding “expires imminently,” and that “a meaningful change in direction is needed.” Writing that Israel has a robust economy and is capable of paying for its own weapons, he said that future security arrangements “should be structured consistently with defense agreements that exist with our other Western allies.”

Since writing that letter in July in the lead-up to the midterm elections, Jeffries focused primarily on domestic issues and didn’t often address the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. On Thursday, however, the topic was back on the table.

“We’ll work as a caucus to make sure that we can bring about the just and lasting peace that Israelis and Palestinians deserve,” Jeffries said.

This article originally appeared on JTA.org.

The post House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries calls for ‘dramatic change’ in Israel policy appeared first on The Forward.

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Ahmed Moor, John Fetterman’s first challenger, envisions ‘Palestine-Israel, from the river to the sea’

(JTA) — When Ahmed Moor started his freshman year at the University of Pennsylvania in 2002, he remembers navigating an atmosphere of Islamophobia around the one-year anniversary of Sept. 11.

He recounted how as he was exiting a derelict math building known for what Moor described as its “dungeon-like” interior, he overheard a kippa-clad student commenting on the grossness of the neighborhood, noting that “it’s not like Ramallah or anything.”

“It was a tough environment,” Moor said, recalling that during a campus protest in 2003 against the Iraq war, he was met with “Go home, terrorist” and other such slogans. “You kind of build a muscle around that early on.”

More than two decades later, the 42-year-old Palestinian American writer is now Pennsylvania’s first candidate to announce a 2028 bid for Democrat John Fetterman’s U.S. Senate seat – running on a platform of dignity, equal rights and affordability.

Though still two years away, this high-stakes race could change how much support Israel gets from the Democratic Party. Fetterman, who hasn’t declared if he will run again, has irked many fellow Democrats by joining Republicans on certain issues, particularly in defending Israel, but has also maintained a powerful voice in a caucus that has held just 47 seats for the past two years. But that influence may soon dissipate, with the Democratic caucus poised to have at least 55 out of 100 seats when Congress convenes in January.

Regardless of whether Fetterman chooses to run, for Moor – a Democratic Socialists of America member from Philadelphia – to secure the seat would require a dramatic shift in voter trends across purplish Pennsylvania.

Moor enters the playing field with radically different stances on Israel and foreign policy from those that Fetterman has espoused. Moor’s priorities include stopping the funding of wars and trimming the military’s budget in general, as well as many domestic issues that Fetterman has historically supported, such as universal healthcare and childcare and affordable housing.

“The DSA presents a really good opportunity for the Democratic Party to re-energize, reinvent itself,” Moor said, describing the DSA as “a blood transfusion.”

An avowed anti-Zionist, Moor wants economic sanctions against Israel and to hold the country’s leaders accountable for what he alleges are war crimes. Ultimately, he said he hopes to see the development of one “Palestine-Israel” state that has equal rights for all — a dream that he said is rooted in American principles of emancipation.

Born in Gaza, Moor moved to Philadelphia as a child and went on to earn degrees from both Penn and Harvard, and started a career in finance. He then switched to journalism, reporting in Beirut and Egypt for The Guardian and other outlets, and co-editing the book “After Zionism: One State for Israel and Palestine.” He also spent many years in Jordan, where he launched a peer-to-peer lending organization, before returning to Philadelphia in 2021.

Looking back at his years as a college student, Moor recalled experiencing some “ambivalence about being an American, the promise of life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, the equality before the law,” particularly while he felt like people viewed him as an outsider.

But he said that things began to look up when he joined the Free Palestine Action Network, a fledgling campus group that existed before Students for Justice in Palestine.

Turning to the situation in the Middle East today, Moor said he still has family members in Gaza, as well as some in the West Bank. Many of his relatives in Gaza, he added, were killed during the war.

He noted that his aunt “was diagnosed with cancer and died a very painful death shortly after that because the hospital itself was destroyed.”

In the future, Moor said he would envision “all of Palestine-Israel, from the river to the sea” as one state with equal rights for “Jews, Palestinians, Druze” and everyone else, including “all of the East Asians who work there, who built lives there.” Lebanese areas currently under Israeli military occupation would go back to Lebanon, while the Golan Heights, captured by Israel in 1967, would go back to Syria, he added.

The leaders of this hypothetical state, according to Moor, would need “to represent everyone who lives under its authority,” with the Knesset legislating laws, the military serving all the people and Palestinians earning a right of return.

Moor compared the current phase of this conflict to mile 15 of a marathon: “Every footfall from here to the finish, 11 more miles, is painful.” Crossing the finish line, he argued, will require “the emancipation of the Palestinians, the right-sizing of our understanding of equal rights, where Jews don’t have superior rights in that country.”

Whether Moor’s Middle East positions will resonate with Pennsylvania voters when they choose their next senator in 2028 remains uncertain.

“If we look at the surveys leading up to the election, that issue didn’t come up a great deal,” Berwood Yost, a public policy expert at Franklin & Marshall College, told JTA. “It was the concerns about personal finances and economics and affordability that were largely driving voters.”

Daniel Hopkins, a political science professor at the University of Pennsylvania, told JTA that although the conflict is “highly evocative and emotive,” his polls have shown that “relatively few voters rank it as an important issue,” except in deep blue Philadelphia.

Yet even if the conflict doesn’t have a direct influence on most voters, Hopkins said that its divisiveness helps candidates distinguish themselves from rivals. For example, he continued, a stance on this subject can often serve as a shortcut to other views.

“The issue partly functions as a within-party issue that helps certain Democrats differentiate themselves from other Democrats,” he added.

For Moor, the idea of maintaining the status quo, which he described as preserving alliances just “to shore Israeli apartheid” would be inconsistent with American ideals.

He rejected the notion of a possible path forward with Gadi Eisenkot, the leader of Israel’s opposition bloc, who recently received a mandate to form a government to replace Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ruling coalition.

“Jewish Israelis are confronted with a difficult frame now,” Moor said. “They don’t have any credible leaders who aren’t also implicated in genocide or massive war crimes.”

Asked if he considered Hamas militants to be war criminals, he responded that “everybody who’s committed a war crime is a war criminal.” But he argued that naming Hamas as such would be irrelevant, as the Israeli military had already killed most Hamas combatants, including former leader Yahya Sinwar.

Fetterman was still posting on X this week about “disarming Hamas,” noting that “this vote and voice will always follow our special ally.” Fetterman’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

Moor characterized the senator as “in the rearview mirror for Democrats,” adding that “Fetterman’s story is finished.”

Hopkins, from Penn, disagreed with that conclusion, pointing out that “no one knows whether Fetterman will seek reelection,” and that if he does so, it’s also unclear “whether he will do that as a Democrat.” Hopkins acknowledged, however, that the senator’s vote would be less powerful when it comes to legislating because of the decisive Democratic majority.

As for other possible candidates, Hopkins is looking at  potential contenders such as U.S. Rep. Chris Deluzio, who represents southwestern Pennsylvania residents in Beaver and Allegheny counties, including some Pittsburgh suburbs. He also named Conor Lamb, an attorney who served in Congress from 2018 to 2023.

Yost, from Franklin & Marshall, cited these names as well, while noting that “Fetterman has alienated a number of people in his party.”

“There’s been increasing dissatisfaction among his base, including people who voted for him,” added Yost, who directs the college’s Center for Opinion Research and its Floyd Institute for Public Policy.

But Yost also stressed that “running in a state like Pennsylvania for an office like the U.S. Senate is a significant undertaking” that requires large amounts of travel, networking and fundraising.

“Starting now is not a bad idea,” he said. “Two years will be here before you know it.”

Although voters might not be “dialed in” to the 2028 elections for a while, Penn’s Hopkins added that “now is the period of time when candidates are beginning to jockey.”

“One strategy by declaring early might be to try to tell other contenders who would be in your lane, ‘Hey, I’m in this lane,’” Hopkins said.

As for the chances of a Democratic socialist in a swing state like Pennsylvania, Hopkins didn’t rule Moor out but said that “any such individual would have an uphill climb.”

Another Democratic socialist who Moor said he finds inspiring, Chris Rabb, recently won a U.S. House seat in Pennsylvania, but he did so in a heavily Democratic district of Philadelphia, Hopkins noted.

“Pennsylvania has not often nominated candidates who are on the extremes of their party,” he said.

But Yost also acknowledged that “these days, people want to see non-politicians running,” so Moor’s novice status would not necessarily create a barrier to his success.

Despite his relative inexperience, Moor said he is reaching for the Senate seat due to his passion for foreign policy. He said he has concrete ideas for optimizing the military, by deflating a “bloated weapons program,” focusing more on drones and then reinvesting in both jobs programs and climate resilience initiatives.

Recognizing the mammoth expense that running in a state like Pennsylvania involves, Moor said that his fundraising efforts have started out strong, with a lot of “small-dollar” contributions, including from many Jewish donors.

Asked if he had a message for Jewish voters, Moor said that he would convey that “we’re Americans first” and that he believes “in the dignity agenda for all Americans.”

“Poverty is indifferent about whether you’re Jewish or Palestinian, Black, white, whatever,” he said.

This article originally appeared on JTA.org.

The post Ahmed Moor, John Fetterman’s first challenger, envisions ‘Palestine-Israel, from the river to the sea’ appeared first on The Forward.

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What Muhammad Ali taught me from his Jerusalem hotel

The one time I got to talk to Muhammad Ali was a summer evening when I was working at one of my favorite college internships — in the McClurg Court newsroom of WBBM Newsradio 78, the Chicago affiliate of CBS Radio.

The scene came to mind earlier this week when I released a new audio documentary called Broken Hologram about Ali and his brief stint as a Broadway star. But back then, I was one of a quartet of interns who included a cool girl from Hyde Park named Gwen Billings with whom I occasionally took lunch at a nearby hot dog stand and discussed important news figures like, say, Depeche Mode and The Smiths. There was also Linda, a hard-nosed news reporter in the mold of Holly Hunter in Broadcast News. Sometimes she came around to my cubicle and took sips of my Dr. Pepper. Not in a flirtatious way, more in a proto-Daniel Day-Lewis “I drink your milkshake” kind of way. There was a fratty guy named Scott who wore a class ring from (redacted). He went on to a lucrative career, just not in journalism. There was one other dude; he was from Crown Point, Indiana, but that’s just about all I remember.

My job consisted of answering phones, ripping wire copy from the AP and UPI machines, getting sources on the phone and calling every major fire and police station every night to see if there was a story to be reported (“Hi, Sergeant Kupka, it’s Adam from WBBM: Do you have anything working in your area?”).

Even though every sergeant told me the same thing every night, I kept calling because that’s what journalists do: You keep making the calls. In fact, I did pretty much whatever was asked of me, and turned feisty only when one of the few asshole reporters tried to get me to run downstairs to the loading area to fetch him a “Green Streak” edition of the Tribune so he could check on his stocks or intimated that my job description should include making him coffee.

“Sure could do with a cup o’ coffee right now, Adam.”

“Cool, why don’t you make yourself one?”

Note: The individual referred to is decidedly not John Cody, a truly great man who remains a friend to this day. (Fun fact: During Vietnam, John worked for Stars & Stripes alongside Seth Lipsky, founder of the English language edition of the Forward)

Nor am I referring to sports reporter Rich King, a prince of a man who always offered to get people sandwiches from the White Hen Pantry (“Anyone need anything from ‘The Hen?’”).

Sometimes, when the news day got super-slow — for example, when Notre Dame football coach Lou Holtz was in the studio doing a live call-in show — I passed the time by trying to guess the usually ridiculously easy passwords for the WBBM staff’s new computers and snooping in the reporters’ early version of email in a futile effort to find anything interesting. Apologies to the late Dale McCarren (DMC123).

Father Lawrence Martin Jenco. Photo by Cynthia Johnson/Getty Images

I was working the evening shift when the top news story was about Father Lawrence Martin Jenco, a Catholic priest from Joliet, Illinois, who had been taken hostage in Beirut while he was working for a relief agency. Muhammad Ali was part of a delegation that had flown to the Middle East to try to arrange his release.

Meet Broken Hologram | RSS.com

My supervisor was a terrific guy named Duane Gray, an African-American Conservative who was big on conspiracy theories (“You should read this book. It’s called The Terror Network.”). He was a great manager and colleague who made sure that we kept to the schedule and that traffic, weather, sports and news headlines always came right when they were supposed to. On this particular night, Duane gave me a mission: “Get ‘The Champ’ on the phone.”

“Uh, how do I do that, Duane?”

“Call every hotel,” he said.

He scrawled a list of hotels in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem on a legal pad and I started calling Information to get their numbers. Advantage of working for a CBS affiliate: You got to make all the long-distance calls you wanted.

How many calls did I make? What were the names of all the hotels? I have no idea. But I do remember that one of them was the King David Hotel in Jerusalem because this time, when I asked to be transferred to Ali’s room, no one said, “Sorry, no one here by that name.”

Ali picked up. His voice had that raspy quality it got after he retired from boxing. “Hullo?”

“Hi, I’m calling from Newsradio 78. I was hoping one of our anchors could speak with you.”

“You’re calling from Chicago?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

“Man,” Ali told me, sounding weary but amiable. “It sounds like you’re calling from right next door.”

Duane could be a wise-ass and a cynic, but now he was star-struck. He sprang to his feet. “Is that the Champ?”

I nodded.

Duane grabbed the phone. “How’re you doin, Champ? You’re gonna be on with Dale McCarren. I’m gonna patch you through, Champ.” He gave me a hearty high-five.

Some time later — perhaps after a week, perhaps after two — when Madonna was in town for some concert, movie junket or photo shoot and Duane told me he wanted to get her on the air, I knew exactly what to do.

After I got her on the phone at her hotel and transferred the call to Duane, he shouted: “This kid,” he said, complimenting both me and his own managerial talent, “has the best news instincts of anyone in this newsroom!”

“Hello, Madonna?” Duane said into the phone. “You’re gonna be on with Dale; let me patch you through.”

The post What Muhammad Ali taught me from his Jerusalem hotel appeared first on The Forward.

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