The Tribune has changed so much since Colonel Robert McCormick died in 1955 that if the press baron were given to spinning in his grave he’d be a dervish already. But Joseph Aaron, editor of the Chicago Jewish News, is sure the Colonel will be set off by the flying feet of Sam Zell, the real estate mogul and self-described “grave dancer” who’s buying the Tribune Company. “Colonel McCormick was pretty anti-Semitic,” says Aaron. “I enjoy the irony of his paper being in the hands of wealthy Jews.”
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In a column in the April 9 Wall Street Journal, Chicago author Joseph Epstein recalled that when he was a boy “the Chicago Tribune was not allowed in our house.” As recently as the 1980s, Epstein went on, “Jewish funeral directors advised families of the deceased not to bother placing paid-for obits in the Chicago Tribune, since no Jews read it.”
Former Tribune editor Howard Tyner says it never occurred to him that there was any kind of corporate glass ceiling for Jews to crack their heads on–though on second thought, he says, “I have to say there were times when I thought the Irish Catholic mafia was a little thick in there.” As for Jewish board members? Tyner, an Episcopalian, stopped to think. “Newton Minow was a player.”
If Zell had made his run at the Tribune Company six or seven years ago, I think a lot of Jews in Chicago would’ve prayed for him to get it and set the Tribune straight. One local leader, Rabbi Michael Siegel of Anshe Emet Synagogue in Lakeview–a moderate in most eyes–was leading demonstrations outside the Tribune Tower in 2001. After Yasser Arafat responded to Ehud Barak’s peace deal with the second intifada, Siegel told me then, “I realized the war being fought was not only being fought with bombs and suicide bombers and the rest, but it was being fought in the pages of American newspapers. So when the Tribune continued to lambaste Israel for its policy of quote, assassination, end quote and not allow its readers to fully appreciate that the people being killed were terrorists themselves and not simply political leaders, I found that to be unconscionable.”
Bruce Dold took over the editorial page from Wycliff and still runs it. “From my vantage point, relations are better,” he e-mailed me. “I think there are two reasons. First, we spent a lot of time listening and talking to Jewish leaders and we’ve kept that dialogue going, as we do with other community leaders in Chicago. Second, there has been a shift in the editorial page’s perspective on the Middle East, placing more emphasis on how terrorism retards progress on peace. That shift dates to 2000, but I think it took a couple of years for it to be widely recognized.”
