No Thanks, Helen Thomas
Let’s shed no tears for Helen Thomas. She exemplified the adage that reminds us to quit while we’re ahead. In her case, how much neater it would have been if she had simply stepped away from her front-row seat to the nation’s business before the ravages of age further loosened her tongue to utter some pretty deplorable thoughts. In her later years, her questioning of presidents and their spokespeople didn’t reflect a kind of praiseworthy skepticism. She was mean, violating journalistic values that some in the press still hold.
But say this about her flight from the stage: It was fast. And there is a weird solace in that.
Her remarks, so well known by now that they are not worth repeating here, were clearly unacceptable. There were a few voices of sympathy, or perhaps empathy, but very few. Her slurs against Israel and the Jewish people — against the historical record, really — were indefensible, and nobody in the mainstream was going to try to rationalize them.
At a time when the movement to delegitimize Israel is gaining strength in some unpleasant quarters, it is good to know that what accounts for mainstream America won’t accept Thomas’s suggestion that Jews don’t belong in a Jewish state. It’s not just the ridiculous notion of “going back” to Poland or Germany (or Syria or Yemen) that is beyond the pale.
Thomas’s swift fall from grace reflects an understanding in the broad American public that, more than 60 years after the birth of the State of Israel, an indigenous Jewish presence is there to stay. Under what conditions, within what borders — there’s still work to be done. But there is no going back.
A message from our Publisher & CEO Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.
At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.
Readers like you make it all possible. We’ve started our Passover Fundraising Drive, and we need 1,800 readers like you to step up to support the Forward by April 21. Members of the Forward board are even matching the first 1,000 gifts, up to $70,000.
This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism, because every dollar goes twice as far.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
