Last Thursday, at the American Jewish Press Association‘s 45th Annual Simon Rockower Awards Reception and Dinner in New York, I received the David Twersky Journalism Award for Is Israel Losing America? Thanks Bibi, a long-form piece I published here on Jewlicious about how Netanyahu’s choices have eroded the bipartisan American support that has sustained Israel for decades.
The award is named for David Twersky (1950-2010), a journalist, Zionist, and peace advocate who served as deputy editor and Washington bureau chief of the Forward from its founding, and later as editor of the New Jersey Jewish News. He was, by every account, exactly the kind of writer who believed that loving Israel and telling hard truths about it were the same project. I’ll take that comparison.
The award was established by Amir Cohen, a colleague of Twersky’s. When Amir first reached out, I assumed it was a prank. When he followed up, I assumed it was a scam and started mentally calculating how much this “award” was going to cost me. Turns out I was getting a modest cash prize and a really cool trophy, which is the best possible outcome of a suspected scam. The judges, who selected my piece unanimously from all submissions received, were JJ Goldberg (author and former editor of the Forward), Amir Cohen, and Anna Twersky Newdorf and Michael Twersky, David’s own children. This was indeed legit.
Past recipients include Andrew Silow-Carroll, longtime editor of the New Jersey Jewish News and currently editor at large of the New York Jewish Week; Larry Cohler-Esses, former managing editor of the Forward; Johanna Ginsberg, staff writer at the New Jersey Jewish News; Jane Eisner, former editor-in-chief of the Forward; JJ Goldberg, author and former editor of the Forward; Danielle Berrin of the Los Angeles Jewish Journal; and Adam Langer, novelist and executive editor of the Forward. I am in good company.
I’ve been running Jewlicious since 2004. I don’t have a press pass. I am not a member of the AJPA. Nobody funds us, nobody tells us what to write or what not to write, and no institution has ever had any stake in what we publish. The fact that an award named for one of American Jewish journalism’s most respected figures went to an independent blogger this year says something, I think, about the broadening of the Jewish media landscape and about what independent voices can contribute to it.
In light of the attention this piece has received, I am also working on translating it along with its companion pieces, Global Chaos Machine: How Foreign Adversaries Turned Your Righteous Anger Into a Weapon Against You and Israel is Losing its Friends. Here is How We Get Them Back, into Hebrew. The message is as relevant to Israelis as it is to diaspora Jews, and frankly, David Twersky would probably have appreciated the shit-disturbing potential of that.
Thank you to Amir, to the judges, and to everyone who read the piece and pushed back on it. That’s what it was there for.
― Tom Robbins
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