Jerry Lippman, the indefatigable publisher of the Long Island Jewish World and the Manhattan Jewish Sentinel, who passed away Sept. 1 at age 76, was more than just another Jewish newspaperman.
He was, in many ways, the personification of everything he thought a Jewish weekly should be. He knew the names and faces of every colorful personality around town, the machers and the minyan makers, and they knew him. He was intimate with senators and mayors and nonprofit CEOs.
And yet, behind the smiles and hugs, he unnerved and unsettled an establishment that saw him as a perennial gadfly.
All of that, however, would hardly describe the typical Jewish newspaper publisher when Jerry first came on the scene almost 50 years ago. Back then, Jewish weeklies were, for the most part, milquetoast affairs. Most churned out reliably puffed-up profiles of dinner honorees, touched-up sermons by local rabbis and travelogues of “solidarity missions” to Israel. If they weren’t owned and operated outright by the local Jewish federations, many acted that way anyway.
Lippman was determined to change that. He had no background in journalism or Jewish organizational life. He’d owned a gas station before he launched the Long Island Jewish World with his then wife, Naomi Lippman, in 1976. His distinctive Brooklyn street drawl, full of unintended neologisms, set him apart from the bookish wordsmiths he would lead as an editor in chief.
He recruited talented and ambitious young journalists, expressing a passion for Jewish politics that made them suspect among Jewish leaders unused to their scrutiny. He encouraged his staff to stay with a story, yielding features that ran longer and deeper than anything else you’d find in a community paper. And they pushed boundaries — in part because Jerry fiercely cultivated independence, whether from Jewish organizations, wealthy advertisers or convention.
Among the writers who passed through his office were Yossi Klein Halevi, the author and fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute; Larry Cohler-Esses, an investigative reporter at the Washington Jewish Week, the Forward and the New York Daily News; Jim Sleeper, a former columnist for Newsday and the New York Daily News; Annie Karni, a White House correspondent for the New York Times; Larry Yudelson, the publisher of the Ben Yehuda Press; Jonathan Mark, the longtime columnist for the New York Jewish Week, and Shira Dicker, an author and publicist.
He took chances on young nobodies. I was one of them. As a teenager in Israel, I filed stories about Scud missile attacks and Ethiopian Jewish airlifts, followed by years of stringing in and around Manhattan. Writing for Jerry became, in effect, my college major, and his offices were like a second home. I can still hear his voicemails, left at 5:30 a.m. after he had already devoured the dailies and a dozen wire service stories, firing off “idears”: “Let’s do a series on grass roots activists fed up with the establishment.” “Let’s talk about a cover story on Modern Orthodoxy.”
In some ways, the Long Island World appeared to be no more interested in the 500,000 Jews living in its backyard than in the global Jewish community. Walter Ruby, who wrote for the paper in the 1980s and ‘90s, remembers assignments in Algiers, Geneva, Paraguay and Germany, and travel-writing gigs in India, Greece and Jamaica.
When I finished college, Lippman asked me to be his assistant editor, in part to recruit the next generation of Jewish journalists. To that end, I introduced him to Uriel Heilman, later an editor at the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, along with his colleague Ben Harris, now the managing editor at My Jewish Learning (JTA and My Jewish Learning share a parent company, 70 Faces Media); Andy Wallenstein, who became co-editor in chief of Variety; Chanan Tigay, the author, academic and Jewish newspaper editor, and a handful of others.
Not every one of my “recruits” was a good match for Jerry. For all his dedication to writers and their freedom, he was a tough boss, who rarely minced words or lowered his voice. Yet if he fought hard, he forgave easily. And while he was careful with his cash, Jerry rushed to provide what he could, be it connections, barter at hotels or airlines, even heaping trays of cold cuts and potato salad from delis that advertised in his pages.
Besides, we all knew the occasional spats were just the inevitable steam blasts of a locomotive struggling to keep its freight on track. And it wasn’t easy. Jerry’s insistence on independence cost him. While his federation-backed rivals benefited from automatic funds and subscribers, Jerry had to hustle, scrounging for readers and advertisers and, at times, office space.
In 1984, Lippman butted heads with UJA-Federation of New York, which subsidized the rival New York Jewish Week. In a challenge that drew national attention, Lippman argued that by paying for subscriptions to people who made a minimum donation to the federation, it had created an unfair market advantage.
In a 1994 settlement, UJA-Federation agreed to allow its Long Island contributors to choose which of the two Jewish newspapers they would receive. He took over the Manhattan Jewish Sentinel the same year.
The dispute occurred as Lippman was serving as president of the American Jewish Press Association, some of whose members were engaged in similar disputes that pitted federation-backed papers against independent rivals.
As the digital revolution — which Jerry never really joined — helped hollow out or shutter other Jewish weeklies, the Jewish World kept coming, loudly and colorfully through the pandemic and the aftershocks of Oct. 7. In his final years, Jerry lured back some reporting veterans like Ruby and Stewart Ain.
As Jerry somehow kept the Jewish World afloat, even through his decade-long battle with cancer, it seemed to return the favor. More than his nearly constant medical interventions, the Jewish World seemed to be keeping him alive. That and his family — daughters Sarah and Hannah and son Michael — the only thing that, as far as I can tell, obsessed him more than the paper.
To the rest of us, his other “family” of current and former writers, the small world of Jewish journalism and the larger world it brought to light, has lost an irreplaceable spark.
