1 week Ago
The year: 1949. Fresh out of the Rutgers University School of Journalism , my hopes for what looked like a great job opportunity in Manhattan were dashed. The employment agency interviewer was painfully blunt.
“Your name is Liberman. That’s your problem. You’re well qualified but no use wasting your time and mine.
That company will never hire you.” Antisemitism, it seemed, like racism, was still alive and well in sections of the U.S.
A., In alphabetical order starting with the a’s, I began sending my resume to New Jersey’s 28 daily newspapers (17 remain today). “Bound Brook High School correspondent for the Plainfield Courier News, ’42-’43.
. . Army Air Corps, ’43-’45.
. . Rutgers campus correspondent for the Newark Star-Ledger, ’47-’49.
. . Rutgers correspondent who initiated and promoted idea of Intercollegiate Football Hall of Fame.
” An interview at the first paper responding to my missile clicked, and I was hired as a news writer for WJLK-FM, the radio station owned by the Asbury Park Press. There were three other Jews that year among The Press’ 143 white employees – none in a supervisory position, though. Soon to be married to the brainy coed I had met at a Hillel dance, $40 a week and promise of $10 more in a month if retained in the job was a deal not to be dismissed.
After stints as reporter, copy editor, night editor and city editor, I was appointed editor of the Sunday edition in 1956. Its circulation, about 27,000, was a few thousand less than the daily edition. The job involved assigning news and feature stories, deciding where and how they’d be displayed in the paper, designing page 1, editing sensitive articles, writing editorials and serving on the Press Operations Committee.
As the years flew by, Sunday circulation surpassed the daily’s by 70,000, reaching 223,000, accounting for nearly two-thirds of the newspaper’s annual gross revenue of $114 million, winning the New Jersey Press Association’s most coveted General Excellence Award and establishing the Asbury Park Press as New Jersey’s second most widely circulated newspaper. To the chief compositor charged with following page design instructions, I was “Caesar.” But to one of his aides who rarely smiled, I was “the pushy” Hebrew editor addicted to playing up stories about Israel.
And, yes, there were times when expletives and ethnic slurs filled the air under pressure of a rapidly approaching deadlines. Early on, it was shocking, maybe even hurtful. After a while, you shrug it off, justifying the occasional coworker outbursts as tension breakers.
Then four terrorists who had hijacked the Air France Airbus carrying the hostages and were threatening to kill them unless 53 of their convicted colleagues were released were themselves killed. So was the leader of the rescue team, Lt. Col.
Yonatan Netanyahu , the American-born older brother of Benjamin Netanyahu, the man who’d become Israel’s longest running prime minister. Seeing the updated page, the compositor, who rarely smiled, approached me smiling. “Let me shake your hand,” he said.
“I never knew Jews could fight.” To this day, 48 years later, I still feel the warmth of that measured smile and his right hand. Si Liberman, a 100-year-old retired editor of the Asbury Park Sunday Press.
lives in Palm Beach, Fla..
