The First Jewish Jerusalem Bureau Chief of the “New York Times”

In June 1984, A.M. Rosenthal, executive editor of the New York Times, transferred Thomas Friedman from his assignment as a foreign correspondent in Lebanon to the position of Jerusalem bureau chief in Israel. According to Friedman’s recollection, Rosenthal chose him with a specific purpose in mind: “to dispense with an old unwritten rule at the New York Times of never allowing a Jew to report from Jerusalem.” That “unwritten rule” was based on the notion that Jews would be incapable of reporting objectively on their own people in their historic homeland.

Rosenthal’s discard of the old rule marked a welcome change. Evidently, though, neither Rosenthal nor Friedman knew that he was not the first Jew to become chief Jerusalem correspondent for the Times. That honor belonged to Joseph M. Levy, who assumed the position in 1928 at a time when the newspaper lacked a reporter in the city. In fact, the now-forgotten Levy not only was the first Jew to fill the role; he also pioneered the newspaper’s biased reporting on Palestine and Israel. In more ways than one, Friedman, some of his successors, and an array of Times op-ed contributors seem to have inherited his complicated legacy.

Born in New Jersey in 1901, Joseph Levy was taken to Jerusalem as an infant by his parents. He spent his childhood in that Ottoman-ruled city before attending the American University of Beirut. During the 1920s, the early years of the British Mandate, he served as private and political secretary to Sir Ronald Storrs, governor of Jerusalem, and spent seven months living with a Bedouin tribe in what was then Transjordan. In 1928, fluent in Hebrew and Arabic, Levy was hired, according to his November byline, as “Palestine correspondent of the New York Times.” He would write under this and similar titles for more than a decade.