CAMERA, pro-Israel media watchdog, fires longtime CEO, spurring public acrimony
Dueling email blasts announce Andrea Levin’s departure after 36 years running the organization
Emails sent one day apart by Andrea Levin and board chair Russel Pergament announced Levin’s departure from the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting after more than three decades. Photo-illustration by Arno Rosenfeld/Forward
If you’re a reporter you may dread an email from Andrea Levin, who for decades has led CAMERA, the pro-Israel media watchdog.
If you’re a CAMERA fan, you may look forward to savoring her latest victory: a trenchant expose of media malefaction, or even better, an abject retraction in an august publication.
Last month, the group’s more than 60,000 subscribers got a different kind of thrill when a reality TV grade spat between Levin and the group’s chairman, Russel Pergament, popped into inboxes.
Squeezed between dispatches like “Reuters’s confused coverage” and “the Financial Times’s shameful silence,” Levin had news, and not the fake kind: she was fired.
In the stark language she usually reserves for errant journalists, she made clear she was not happy.
“This is a letter I never thought I’d be writing, especially at such a positive and pivotal moment for CAMERA,” Levin, who has led the group since 1991, wrote on May 9. Levin said that the board had fired her two days earlier.
“I would be less than honest if I didn’t say that I’m deeply disappointed by this turn of events,” she added, offering her personal email address for anyone who wished to stay in touch.
Pergament, who first met Levin in the mid-1980s when she wrote an op-ed about biased media coverage in a Boston tabloid he published, sent his own note to the email list the next day. “A majority of the Board’s 16 members ultimately determined that it was no longer possible to work collaboratively with Andrea on important, forward-looking initiatives that would sustain and evolve CAMERA’s important work,” Pergament wrote.
The late Win Meiselman founded the Boston-based Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis in 1982. There soon were chapters around the country monitoring the media for unfair reporting on Israel.
Levin was credited with launching a direct mail campaign in the early 1990s that grew the group’s membership from 2,000 to more than 35,000.
The Forward named Levin to its list of the country’s 50 most influential Jews in 2002, writing that media monitoring was a “great proxy war” and “its general is Andrea Levin.”
“Levin became the bane of newsrooms from Jerusalem to Atlanta, with widely read reports, press releases and columns that tapped into a deep vein of frustration among American Jews over perceived anti-Israel bias,” the profile stated.
It credited Levin’s work at CAMERA with inspiring copycats like Honest Reporting, which made headlines at the start of the Israel-Hamas war for claiming that photojournalists that documented the Hamas assault on Israel were working with the terrorist group. (The Associated Press extracted an admission from the group’s director that he lacked any evidence to support his contention.) Pro-Palestinian alternatives like Electronic Intifada also emulated CAMERA’s approach.
The organization has also faced criticism for presenting itself as a neutral arbiter of fair media coverage, rather than one seeking to put its thumb on the scale for Israel.
“A true news report, the organization’s activists seem to believe, is the one that does not upset what they previously believed,” Gershom Gorenberg, a liberal Israeli journalist, wrote in 2008 after the group came under fire for seeking to insert more pro-Israel messaging into Wikipedia.
Levin did not respond to an email asking the conditions of her departure and Pergament declined an interview request. In a statement, he praised Levin’s tenure but said “to strategically guide the organization in the future, CAMERA’s Board determined it was time for new leadership.”
The board hired Kurt Schwartz, a former director of the Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency, as the new CEO. Schwartz has also served on the boards of U.S. branches of IsraAID and Magen David Adom, the Israeli aid groups.
“I understand that transitions may be difficult and often present challenges,” Schwartz wrote in his own note to CAMERA members on May 30. “But I am pleased to report that CAMERA’s staff has risen to the occasion and is working with me through this period.”
“CAMERA’s future is bright,” he added.
