My Times

This must be what is meant by a love-hate relationship, an affair where I can’t live with it and I can’t live without it.

I’m talking about the New York Times, the paper of record. It well deserves its fame and followers. It also well deserves its haters and every batch of new un-subscribers whose only problem is where will they go for all the features they just can’t live without. Where will Metropolitan Diary and Food and Styles and Real Estate and Travel go? Will they lie there, fallow and unread? Will I, a contemplative member of their elite group, regard them as I do Fashion and all the other frivolity? Will I not continue to curl up on Sunday mornings to read the wedding announcements and, conversely for sure, the obits? Will I grow to love again my untinted, untainted fingers, no longer feeling like Lady Macbeth, constantly washing the inferior quality ink from my hands?

Oh New York Times, you are an enigma, and a Jewish one at that. What to do?

I’ve come close to cancellation so many times.  Maybe that’s why it’s called the Times? Some things are so abhorrent, evil, unfair. Nick Kristof, you know I’m talking about you! I’m not a violent woman, merely  a peace-loving ancient one. But your latest article, and we all know it well by now, was so virulently antisemitic, so much more than anti-Zionist, so very much more! I cannot help but wonder why you hate us so much. But you do. Indeed you do.

Please don’t intellectualize me! That article was trash. Not a museum piece but a wrap-your-fish-up-in-it piece of trash.

And the damage you’ve brought to dogs pales to what you’ve done to people — to my people. You’ve portrayed them as animals. My God, what have you said about us, with proof only coming from those who despise us and those who have killed and raped our innocents.

But then I read Brett Stephens or Thomas Friedman or Maureen Dowd, or  today’s incredibly powerful op-ed, and I think that I cannot exist without their brilliance, fairness, and ability to countenance evil rationally, peacefully, and intellectually.

What is there to do?

I have been a reader since high school when a very erudite English teacher at Newark’s Weequahic High School saw me reading the New York Post, which was then a bastion of liberalism, albeit tinted yellow. Try the Times, he suggested, and under his influence, I did — and I have not looked at the New York Post ever since.

That was in the mid 1950s, so I’m pretty sure I’m at the upper age of Times readers. Sometimes that actually makes me very proud. Sometimes it is deeply embarrassing. Nick, you are embarrassing!

This week, when the travesty by Nicholas Kristof appeared, I wasn’t ready for it, but I was quickly in fight or flight mode. Do I cancel my subscription (see above) or do I seethe? No way the Times will print my letter, out of the thousands that column will evoke.

But then this morning, when I’m already going to My Account to cancel, I glance at the enemy and there it is. “There Has Never Been an Example of Presidential Corruption Like This,” by the editorial board. And I know they are reading my mind and no one else will ever say exactly this, as sharply, as clearly, as brilliantly. They are right on target, calling it without fear of the monster, with no threat of being bought out by a billionaire.

Where else can I possibly go to see my thoughts and fears confirmed? Someone has to tell the king he has no clothes. They are the only ones to do it, and to do it so well. How can I end this relationship? Simply, I cannot!

So, Jews, pick your poison. Will  you abandon it and miss editorials that are unstintingly unafraid, that call it exactly like it is, without nuance? I’ve made my decision.  I won’t At least for now! But I don’t rule out some future change of heart.

Rosanne Skopp of West Orange is a wife, mother of four, grandmother of 14, and great-grandmother of 12. She is a graduate of Rutgers University and a dual citizen of the United States and Israel. She is a lifelong blogger, writing blogs before anyone knew what a blog was! She welcomes email at rosanne.skopp@gmail.com