Spring Break
Off the Record?
Yaelle Frohlich
Issue date: 11/25/09 Section: Thoughts of Student Leaders
When you're working for a journalistic cause, deadlines can take on a sort of divine significance. And, as anyone who's ever had to hand in a sensitive topical piece knows, it can be difficult to get information and quotations from interviewees. Journalism code dictates that one may quote anything a person says, unless the person specifies that the remark is off the record before he or she actually says it. If you make this specification, however, a good journalist may try to coax you into relaxing your terms. Yet, many individuals-politicians and laypeople alike-are unaware of reporters' etiquette, pointed out Dr. Tsuriel Rashi, chair of the department of mass communication at Jerusalem's Lifshitz College of Education, following his November 9 lecture on Yeshiva University's Wilf Campus.
Rashi's presentation explored the way mass media communications is viewed in Judaism. During temple times, our ancestors received messages from prophets situated beside the heavily visited Temple Mount during the three pilgrimages. They also heard the proclamation of death (a mandatory announcement) of idol worshippers leading the people on the same wrong path or a Sanhedrin member who deviated from the majority's ruling. During the Babylonian exile, the torch system alerted Israel of Rosh Hodesh (new month) at the first sighting of each new moon. Our generation has television and the Internet.
What interested me most, however, was Rashi's description of media integration in the contemporary Orthodox Israeli world. Only after the society-polarizing assassination of Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin, he argued, did the religious finally come to the realization that "there should be a journalist with a kippah [yarmulke], and there should be a journalist with a sheitel [wig]."
Other agenda-pushing parties long ago figured out the power of media. The seventh Lubavitcher rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, said that anything-including concoctions of the communications world-could be used to sanctify God's name (which explains the earliness of chabad.org's creation).
Rashi's presentation explored the way mass media communications is viewed in Judaism. During temple times, our ancestors received messages from prophets situated beside the heavily visited Temple Mount during the three pilgrimages. They also heard the proclamation of death (a mandatory announcement) of idol worshippers leading the people on the same wrong path or a Sanhedrin member who deviated from the majority's ruling. During the Babylonian exile, the torch system alerted Israel of Rosh Hodesh (new month) at the first sighting of each new moon. Our generation has television and the Internet.
What interested me most, however, was Rashi's description of media integration in the contemporary Orthodox Israeli world. Only after the society-polarizing assassination of Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin, he argued, did the religious finally come to the realization that "there should be a journalist with a kippah [yarmulke], and there should be a journalist with a sheitel [wig]."
Other agenda-pushing parties long ago figured out the power of media. The seventh Lubavitcher rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, said that anything-including concoctions of the communications world-could be used to sanctify God's name (which explains the earliness of chabad.org's creation).
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