Jewish Review extremely relevant

By Joshua Burstein

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Growing up in Queens, N.Y., I was a member of the local Jewish center and the son of a newspaper reporter. Now, as a resident of Eugene with my own children, I realize how my upbringing—both in my religion and in a world of newspapers—explains why the Jewish Review is so relevant to me.

My father Joel was a child of the Great Depression, born in 1929 in a New York that was far poorer than the New York of today’s Great Recession. His grandfather, father and brother were rabbis, and one sister married a rabbi. In contrast, he was a college drop-out who moved to Israel after its birth in 1948 to help the new country (and probably for the adventure as well). Two years later, he returned to New York to get married, have two children, and get divorced, while struggling to hold a job as a newspaper reporter. He later married my mother (another Jewish New Yorker) and had three more children, including me.

His view of “tikkun olam” included not only to fight for truth and democracy, but also “to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable” (with thanks to Finley Peter Dunne and H.L. Mencken).

It also extended to fighting for workers’ rights. Fast forward to 1990—after 40 years working for large daily newspapers, which even then many called a dying industry, he became an unexpected martyr. He was on strike against the Daily News, posting a note at his union headquarters about his mother’s death the day before, when he collapsed. His union brothers and sisters called him a new Joe Hill, the IWW songwriter who told his supporters “don’t mourn; organize” just before he was executed by Utah in 1915. Earl Robinson, Pete Seeger, Paul Robeson and others sang of how Hill “never died” in this sense. My father was not as much a radical as he was a Jewish son of America who infused his religious belief system into everything he did.

How have my dad’s teachings about justice and fairness affected my life? How much of it was rooted in his Jewish identity? And what does all this have to do with community newspapers such as the Jewish Review and my life now in Eugene?

My wife’s mother Carole was a Jewish Australian young woman living in New York when she met and married a Jewish man from Minnesota. They returned to Sydney, where my wife Rachel was born, but they yearned for the United States. Already products of areas not known for large Jewish populations, they inexplicably chose Portland off a map and moved there. Almost 35 years later, my mother-in-law still lives in Tigard.

Meanwhile, Rachel and I lived in New York, Los Angeles and then again in New York. Throughout our decade plus in those two major cities, Carole would send us clippings from the Jewish Review. I saw these as almost-quaint depictions of Jewish life in the “other” America—states such as Oregon where Jews were such a minority that community newspapers were not just important for their readers and for the communities they serve, but were indispensible lifelines. I realized that Jewish Oregonians needed a specialized community newspaper for their cultural and religious survival.

Then we moved to Richmond, Va., in 2005. With a regional population of more than 1 million people, it felt to Rachel like the Portland where she grew up in the 1980s. Enough Jews for a handful of synagogues, representing all forms of Judaism, but nothing like New York or Los Angeles. She had left Oregon in 1990, never expecting to return.

Yet after three years in Richmond, we moved our family to Eugene last year. I have come to love my job at the law school at the University of Oregon and we have settled happily into our community. My father’s Jewish-based sense of justice lives on in me, through my work with the ACLU and Basic Rights Oregon. I volunteer with the synagogue, where my kids attend pre-school and Sunday school. And now I read every issue of the Jewish Review cover to cover. Not quaint, but relevant—extremely relevant.