Readers frequently ask novelists where the ideas come from and usually we don’t know unless you get me started on the spiritual side of writing.
We who are not Rashi, we too, in much smaller measures, experience a rush of spirituality (ruach ha’kodesh) when the going is so good we can’t stop. Something happens even higher than inspiration; more like intervention. A divine spark is lit and sometimes we amaze ourselves.
The epiphany for a novel will come from a person, a friend, a stranger, whether real or imagined. Along came Jay Garfield.
Readers familiar with the novel “The Bathsheba Deadline” now more than ever ask if there really is such a person, the hero of the novel.
Yes there was and yes there is and we shared a few newsrooms together. He always kept to himself. He was a recluse, a man of mystery, the genius who foresaw the coming whirlwind. He got everything right at the same time when the rest of journalism got everything wrong.
Jay Garfield said. “Who appointed these blood-drenched cannibals to sit in judgment over Israel?”
How would he have reacted to the latest outrage from Radical Islam, namely ISIS and today’s barbaric execution of a Jordanian pilot?
After 9/11, while the rest of Big Journalism ran in the other direction, Jay K. (for Krebs) Garfield ran this in the paper and in the novel:
“The Koran Has Arrived And It Has Come To Devour The Bible.”
True writing comes with a touch of prophecy. Next, he saw our campuses so devoured. It’s happening.
I had never met a man so dignified, so driven to the truth.
Just when it seemed there was no honor among journalists, along came Jay Garfield to prove himself one of a kind, perhaps the last of a kind.
I used him as my voice for the novel, the model for what a newsman should be. I had seen him bend an entire rebellious newsroom to his will, using tact or grit.
“Blood runs our newsprint,” he used to say and to know what he meant you had to know that newsgathering is a blood sport. The newsroom is a battlefield. The infighting among reporters and editors is vicious. How news is presented can tip the balance of the entire world.
Valiant journalism could have made the difference.
If journalism had done its job, the tilt would have favored us, the civilized world. But cowardice on the part of journalists empowered the enemy. Hamas, Hezbollah, Fatah, ISIS, Boko Haram and all the rest of them grew bolder as journalism retreated and toyed with terms, naming them “fighters” or “activists” instead of Islamic Extremists – thus leaving us in the dark.
When its moment came to speak up, journalism shriveled. Jay Garfield stood stall.
We became brothers the day after the UN just passed a resolution equating Zionism with Racism.
“Those sons of bitches,” Jay Garfield said. “Who appointed these blood-drenched cannibals to sit in judgment over Israel?”
Then, after a silence, “Don’t worry,” he said. “There is a God.”
Jay Garfield was no god, but he was a newspaperman without peer. He was not perfect. The ladies fell for him and one time in particular he succumbed to a scandalous temptation. I put that in. He wouldn’t mind. “Warts and all,” he would say. Using that as a measure the novel is half fact, half fiction, but true to the man.
He foresaw the errors of Oslo and Gaza and was terrified at the encroachment of literary and journalistic repression that pandered to the left.
It was Jay Garfield who ran the Mohammad cartoons, also in the novel. This goes back some 10 years ago. Yes, the frenzy over cartoons happened before.
He risked his job, his career, his life to make the point that no one intimidates an American journalist.
The newsroom was entirely to the left, same before as it is today. Liberals all.
“Tell it like it is,” he said, “and to hell with them.”
Into the teeth of mutinous newsrooms, Jay Garfield insisted on calling a terrorist a terrorist and if it quacks like Islamist, it is Islamist. There would be no “Occupied Territories” in his pages. Instead this was Israeli land from Biblical times forward and so likewise there were no “settlers.” These were Israelis, plain and simple when he had the power.
He once caught a copy desk editor trying to sneak the term “Occupied” Jerusalem into a dateline.
There was hell to pay -- and there was hell to pay for Jay Garfield himself when he ran Rabbi Kahane’s “Dear World” in the Feature Section.
“The Manhattan Independent” was his newspaper and my book.
He knew his newspapering. He knew his Bible.
When the national leadership of his Church sought to delete references to Israel and Jerusalem in their book of prayers, he wrote a withering editorial. If so, he argued, then you must delete more than half of all Christian liturgies whose devotions are taken mostly from Hebrew Scriptures. “Good luck,” he snapped.
Jay Garfield was the guts and the glory of journalism. He remains a recluse. He appears nowhere in the search engines. He is my catch to share.
Jack Engelhard writes a regular column for Arutz Sheva. The new thriller from the New York-based novelist, The Bathsheba Deadline, a heroic editor’s singlehanded war on terror and against media bias. Engelhard wrote the int’l bestseller Indecent Proposal that was translated into more than 22 languages and turned into a Paramount motion picture starring Robert Redford and Demi Moore. Website: www.jackengelhard.com