Jonathan S. Tobin

Jonathan S. Tobin is the senior online editor of Commentary, a neo-conservative monthly magazine covering politics, international affairs, Judaism and social, cultural and literary issues.

Tobin was executive editor of The Jewish Exponent in Philadelphia from 1998 through 2008.

He is a frequent commentator on domestic politics, Israel, and Jewish affairs. His syndicated weekly column, “View from America,” [1] appears in The Jerusalem Post. Tobin lectures widely across the United States on college campuses and to Jewish organizations and synagogues, and has appeared on CNN, BBC Radio, FOX News, and local network affiliates to discuss politics and Jewish issues.

Blogger Luke Ford has called Tobin “the most right-wing editor of a Jewish weekly in the US,” [2] but according to Tobin, “I lost my credentials as a real right-winger any number of times because I've taken stands on issues they disagree with. I've taken shots at the right consistently when I think they're wrong. More consistently than when my colleagues on the left take shots at the left."

In his 2001 book, “Pack of Thieves,” U.S. News & World Report correspondent Richard Chesnoff wrote that Tobin is “one of the most thoughtful figures in American Jewish letters.” In 2006, in the Israeli weekly Yated Ne’eman, columnist Jonathan Rosenblum referred to Tobin as “probably the best writer in the Anglo-Jewish Press.”

In 2003, Tobin told an interviewer that Jewish journalism has improved in quality over last 20 years, but that there are constraints because many American Jewish newspapers are owned by Jewish federations, rather than being independent corporations. This problem, he said, is not different from the problems faced by other newspapers: “Nobody at the Philadelphia Inquirer reports aggressively on Knight-Ridder Corp.” He told an interviewer for the New York Times that “"My job as editor is to talk about things people are not willing to talk about." [3] In the same article, the Times wrote that “In his three-year tenure at The Ledger, an independently owned newspaper, Mr. Tobin, a Long Island native, has turned the once-stodgy weekly into a plucky newspaper with stories on abuses at a local Jewish nursing home and domestic violence among Jews.”

Tobin was profiled in the Philadelphia Business Journal on July 26, 2002 (“Faith in the press” [4]) and in Press – the magazine of the Pennsylvania Newspaper Association — in its November 2002 issue (“Exponential Editor”).

Awards

References

  1. ↑ A View From America, The Jerusalem Post
  2. ↑ "A Chat with Jewish Exponent Editor Jonathan Tobin," Jan. 7, 2003, lukeford.net
  3. ↑ An Editorial Provokes A Debate on Intermarriage; Jewish Weekly Touches a Nerve in Connecticut, By Jonathan Rabinowitz, July 13, 1995, New York Times,
  4. ↑ Faith in the press, by Adam Stone, July 26, 2002, Philadelphia Business Journal
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