Jews as letter-writers

Editorial

An odd exchange in last weekend’s National Post brought into the open something that has probably not gone unnoticed by most readers. The Post’s letters editor responded to a query about the obviously Jewish surnames of many letter-writers.

“With letters regarding the Holocaust, Israel and antisemitism, why don’t you ever publish ones from people with names like Homer Hockeybag, Boris Bison or Larry Lunchbucket?” asked Alex Doulis. “It seems more than coincidental that the same [Jewish] names pop up once a month. Perhaps an explanation is due your readers.”

Paul Russell, the editor, responded that letters are selected because they are “passionately expressed letters about the subject at hand.... Obviously, Jewish readers generally exhibit a statistically disproportionate interest in the
Middle East.”

Fair enough. The editor addressed the issue at hand, which was the implication that the paper shows favoritism toward Jewish letter-writers who are pro-Israel. Just as one might think that Catholics would be expected to show disproportionate interest in Vatican affairs and Syrian Canadians are probably more interested than most in events in Syria. It should surprise no one that Jewish readers may exhibit a “statistically disproportionate” voice in defending the Jewish state. (One wonders, also, what sort of diversity of non-Jewish opinion Doulis wishes to see on the topics of the Holocaust and antisemitism.)

Beyond this, if Jewish names frequently appear in the letters page, and anti-Israel letters less often, it is probably partly because people of an anti-Israel bent are simply not reading the Post to begin with, given the paper’s impressive record of fulsome support for Israel.

While Doulis seems to have inferred a sort of philo-semitism in the Post’s letters page, forgive us for smelling a whiff of its opposite in his insinuation. He seems to suggest that surnames like Hockeybag, Bison or Lunchbucket are more legitimate Canadian voices than Goldstein, Honigsberg or Rotenberg.

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