This month, thousands of otherwise fascinating speakers will be delivering breathtakingly dull monologues to antsy, hungover graduates and their parents. A good commencement address is like Elijah: long awaited, rarely encountered. Like the Bar Mitzvah boy’s d’var torah and the best man’s wedding toast, the graduation speech is so well-trod that attempts at originality in structure or content are themselves necessarily clichéd. It’s an inescapable loop of lameness.
That being said, it’s hard to resist tossing a few parting words in the general direction of the Jewish students of the class of 2008. Let’s just agree that the following isn’t a graduation speech. I assure you that I’m not standing at a podium in the rain, and I will assume that you’re not wearing funny flat hats.
This not being a graduation speech, I will not begin with words of congratulations, nor will I thank you for inviting me. Rather, I will take you directly to the Madrid living room of a Spanish journalist named Miguel Ángel Gozalo.
In the photograph printed atop his daily column on the back page of the business daily La Gaceta de los Negocios, Gozalo leans against an invisible bar, a black fedora slung low across his forehead. It’s the pose of an old-school European reporter, a literary man who leaves the café for a few hours in the afternoon to file an article or two. Gozalo points out the picture with a chuckle. Having served as the head of Spain’s official news agency, he’s clearly no ink-stained bohemian. And yet, there’s something about him that recalls that venerable mold. It might be his cultural literacy, which he shows off through the relentless application of relevant quotations to all matters at hand, or maybe the contemporary art and walls of books on display in the apartment. Either way, he harbors an unmistakable nostalgia for the old days of print.
Gozalo graduated first in his class from Spain’s state-run journalism school in 1960. At the time, the Franco regime maintained strict control over journalists, licensing and registering anyone who wanted a byline. According to Gozalo, this meant that those entering the journalism school took a narrow, non-political view of the profession. The journalist was simply a craftsman. Says Gozalo, “We don’t change the world, we don’t help the poor, we don’t stop wars. We’re a filter, a filter to help people see things a little better, to explain what’s happening.”
Gozalo’s first job out of school was with SP, a newsmagazine. “There I learned the fundamentals of the profession,” he says. He was taught to write precisely and economically, in the style of the magazine. “There is a phrase from the poet Rilke that says, ‘He was a poet and hated the approximate.’ I remember that I wrote the phrase ‘our army’ in SP, and the editor said to me, ‘Does the magazine have an army?'”
Before printing, SP would send its copy off to the censors. It would return covered in red marks. The sight had a profound effect on the young reporter. “I felt enormous frustration,” Gozalo remembers. “It was as if one said to a doctor during a consultation, ‘You can operate on the arm, but don’t touch the hand.'”
At this point in his career, Gozalo could have remained at any of the scores of newspapers and magazines in Spain that simply accepted the regime’s censorship and did what they could to stay out of trouble. Instead, he went to work for Madrid, a daily paper that was developing a reputation as the only newspaper that dared to consistently defy the regime. Gozalo was filling in for the top editor one day in May of 1968 when the publisher handed him an editorial that all but called for Franco’s resignation. Nothing like it had been printed in Spain since the Civil War. When it ran, the paper was fined and suspended for four months. It subsequently returned, but continued to displease the regime and was suspended again and again until 1971, when it was shut it down for good.
Furious, Gozalo secured a position as a foreign correspondent for a different Spanish newspaper, leaving the country. In his absence, other newspapers took up Madrid’s mantle, playing a key role in the transition to democracy that took place following Franco’s death in 1976.
Instead of accepting a state of affairs which he knew to be fundamentally incompatible with the principles of his profession, Gozalo became one of the first in what was to be a wave of young journalists who reformed the Spanish press, dragging it out of its Franco-era malaise and building it into a democratic institution.
What does this have to do with you, the Jewish senior graduating from a North American university in 2008? The American Jewish community is rife with states of affairs that we accept without question, but which we know to be fundamentally incompatible with our own principles. Why do conversations about Israel and the Palestinians on campus need to be fueled by shrill rhetoric from Jewish community activists? Why is Hillel run by adult professionals, with little input from the students it serves? Why are the concerns of the public voices of the Jewish community so different from our own? Why is Israel the only Jewish political issue? Why are synagogue membership fees so high?
These questions don’t need to be rhetorical.
In this issue, we address the first question with a piece by Saul Elbein on disagreements between students and community members over the appropriate response to anti-Israel activism at UC Irvine.
Also in this issue, an interview with Newark mayor Cory Booker by Emily Seife. And, a personal narrative by a former online gambler who once won ten thousand dollars in a week and lost in the next. Plus, Marissa Brostoff on Jonathan Richman and the birth of the weepy Jewish hipster. Also, Jeremy Gillick on Birthright Israel’s effect on assimilation and ethnic identity in America. Enjoy.
