AWARDS AND RECOGNITION
Winner, Pulitzer Prize for Special Local Reporting
Finalist, Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting
Oversaw and Edited Series "Education, Inc."
Winner of the Gerald Loeb Award
Winner of the George Polk Award
Winner of the Education Writer's Hechinger Grand Prize
Winner of the National Headliners Award
Finalist, Pulitzer Prize for Public service
National Jewish Book Award for Broken Alliance
New York Association of Black Journalists, First Place for Feature Writing
for Coverage of the 2008 Presidential Campaign
Columbia University School of Journalism Award for Outstanding Coverage
of Race and Ethnicity, (2008, 1999)
Unity Award in Media for Public Affairs and Social Issues Reporting
National Headliners Award, First Place for Feature Writing,
for Articles on the Workplace
Journalist-in-Residence Lectures Delivered in Shanghai, Beijing and Nanjing
sponsored by U.S.-China Education Trust
Alicia Patterson Fellow
Henry Luce Fellow
Reviews of Books by Jonathan Kaufman
A Hole in the Heart of the World
National Jewish Book Award Finalist
“Carefully researched. . . . Profoundly chilling. . . It’s clear that Kaufman’s sympathies are fully engaged by the narrative he records, by the family histories so eventful they keep us reading with unflagging interest. . . . We’re grateful to Kaufman for introducing us to a number of exemplary—and memorable—characters.”
--Francine Prose, Newsday
“Kaufman portrays these people with great feeling and compassion. . . . In Kaufman’s book, one hears the echoes of a world that might have been.”
--Zachary Karavell, The Boston Sunday Globe
“One closes this book astonished at the persistence of Jewish hope in the brace, new post-Nazi, post-Communist Europe.”
--Andrei Codrescu, National Public Radio
"Beautifully written. . . . Engrossing. . . . Unlike so many accounts that depict Eastern Europe as a kind of extensive cemetery for Jewish life and culture, this book provides real, if modest, evidence of Jewish resilience and renewal. This is a work of exemplary journalistic research and narrative.”
--Kirkus Reviews
“Deeply engrossing. . . . Expertly crafted.”
--Publisher’s Weekly
Broken Alliance: The Turbulent Times Between Blacks and Jews in America
Winner, National Jewish Book Award
Winner, American Jewish Committee "Common Sense" Award for Best Book on Current Events
“Perceptive and even-handed. . .extraordinary perspective. . .One is grateful for Mr. Kaufman’s graceful analysis.”
--Christopher Lehman-Haupt, The New York Times
“A first-rate job of recounting telling episodes that reveal the emotional dimensions of the great divide now separating blacks and Jews.
--Juan Williams, The Washington Post
“The book’s tone is that of a good novel in which human complexity tempers conflict . . . readable and informative.”
--Shelby Steele, The New York Times Book Review
“Compelling and important . . . . Jonathan Kaufman’s portraits-and-contexts description of this Jewish-black deterioration is accurate and insightful.”
--Richard Robbins, The Boston Globe
THE FOLLOWING ARTICLE APPEARED IN THE COLUMBIA JOURNALISM REVIEW, SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER, 1999:
Reporting Race: Jonathan Kaufman: "By the Throat, By the Heart"
Jonathan Kaufman is a big friendly man, a talker. He began to be fascinated by the subject of race after joining The Boston Globe in 1982, in a city whose white working-class neighborhoods had been traumatized by the school-busing controversy. In 1984 he was part of a Pulitzer Prize-winning team that took on Brahmin Boston by exposing the poor racial hiring records of its institutions, including the Globe. He moved to The Wall Street Journal in 1995. There he has been recognized as one of the the nation’s more sophisticated and compelling writers about racial issues. A Kaufman story often works on two levels. A November ’97 piece, Inside Outsiders, was, at one level, about whether blacks in corporate America must "act white" in order to succeed, but at another, it was a fascinating tale of sibling rivalry between two successful brothers with opposing views on the subject. His Locked-In story last October was, on an intellectual level, about whether the threat of prison – so much a part of inner-city life – might be losing its sting, as imprisonment becomes more the norm. On a human level it was about the troubled heart of a ten-year-old girl, Sabrina Branch, whose world is circumscribed by prison walls. Sabrina has trouble accepting that her father, along with other relatives, is locked up. Kaufman spoke in Boston with CJR’s senior editor, Mike Hoyt.
By Mike Hoyt
Mike Hoyt ([email protected]) is cjr's senior editor. The stories mentioned in this Reporting Race package are available at www.jrn.columbia.edu/workshop.
Q&A
HOYT: You suggested at the Columbia workshop that most readers don’t really want to read about race. Why?
KAUFMAN: Readers are tired. Shelby Steele had a fascinating essay a number of years ago. He wrote, If you look at what Martin Luther King said to white people in this country, it was, ‘I believe in you. You’re better than this.’ He believed in the nobility of whites to rise above. He would quote the Constitution and the Bible.
Starting with the Black Power movement, that shifted to a question of blame. As anybody who has grown up Jewish can tell you, the other side of guilt is resentment. There is a way in which whites have felt guilty about these issues, but now feel resentment about them. They’re tired of hearing about them. They don’t like being blamed for them.
Also, a lot of the writing about race contradicts their own experience. When I did my book about blacks and Jews [Broken Alliance, Simon & Schuster, 1995], one of the chapters was about the change of neighborhoods from largely Jewish to largely black. And one of the consequences of that was that you had many situations in the sixties where there were Jews who were quite liberal who had parents or grandparents stuck in transitional neighborhoods – in Brooklyn, on the south side of Chicago, and all around the country. These neighborhoods were becoming more dangerous, more frightening. Many Jews found their liberal ideas conflicting with a kind of very scary experience.
Similarly, I think a lot of whites have been scared by crime, which to them often has a black face. A lot of reporting about race has tended to ignore those complexities, and basically said to whites, you’re to blame for this. I think people just tuned it out. You have to grapple with the ambiguous feelings that people have about race. It’s not a simple good and bad, right and wrong.
Also, whites have become a group that thinks they understand blacks, especially poor blacks, very well, but in fact doesn’t understand them well at all. That’s the paradox. It used to be, perhaps, that there was just ignorance. Now what there is is, ‘Oh, well I know all about that problem.’ But in fact they don’t. It’s easier to write about Kosovo than about inner-city Baltimore, because people think they know all about inner-city Baltimore.
HOYT: Your stories are usually about an idea, but they’re embodied in a person. I don’t know which comes first, the chicken or the egg.
KAUFMAN: Usually we have the idea or at least the sense of a theme, and we then look for a way to tell the story. You sort of call around and churn the waters, and try to find a way to tell the story. When you home in on the human part of these stories, you realize, not just that they’re more interesting, but that the trajectory of the people’s lives becomes much more understandable.
HOYT: How does the Baltimore story, about the little girl Sabrina, fit in with that? You started with a theme in mind, the effect of prisons on communities. How did the reporting unfold?
KAUFMAN: Bill [Grueskin, who is often Kaufman’s editor at the Journal] thought maybe we should look at a probation officer, or probation office, and see who passes through. I was thinking maybe we should look at a street or a neighborhood, to see the impact on the community. We discovered early on that on Sunday visiting day you have all these vans that go from the neighborhoods to the prisons to visit the prisoners. And I had this image in my mind, which was true, that on Sunday people get dressed up, not to go to church, but to go to prison.
I tend to do these stories from the outside in – you start out trying to find someone, a group of people you can sit with. I basically had four or five things I was doing at once. There were twin fifteen-year olds I was spending some time with, thinking that might be the story. There was Vernon [Sabrina Branch’s father]. I met Vernon at this men’s group for ex-cons, and one of the things he told me was that he was worried about his sister because, although she had succeeded and moved out to the suburbs, she was going out with an inmate. And he worried about his nephew. Then when I finally met his mother-in-law and the kids, it became clear that this was a great extended family that dealt with all of these things.
I thought Vernon was the story – Vernon passing through, touching on people’s lives. I sent in the story. I knew it wasn’t right, but I couldn’t figure out what wasn’t right about it. And when Bill read it, he basically said, ‘There’s no journey in this story. It starts out in prison, he ends up back in prison. He meets all these people, but in the end he’s not very sympathetic.’ But he said, ‘I could read 100 inches about Sabrina.’ And he was right.
Turning the story inside out enabled us to focus on the story through the eyes of a ten-year old, which I think really broke down a lot of the barriers readers might have against it. Who wants to read about a thirty-year-old drug dealer? But a ten-year-old girl who reads Goosebumps books? – that was interesting.
That was a way to ask, even if you think Vernon should be locked up, are we, as a society, doing right by his daughter? By having her grow up in this world where prison is all around her, and that’s all that she sees?
HOYT: You set out to show something. Did you also discover some things?
KAUFMAN: I discovered that the problem of what can be done for neighborhoods like Sabrina’s isn’t as overwhelming as we thought. I don’t leave Sabrina’s community feeling this problem can never be fixed.
Basically we’re talking about giving kids a good education, supporting them, giving them mentors, opening up opportunities, and treating them the way we like to treat our own kids. Our inability to do that is devastating, for them and for us. I would like to find some way to unlock that idea in the readers. So that they put down the paper and, in some small way say, ‘gee, you know, I never thought of it that way before.’
HOYT: You’re a man on a mission?
KAUFMAN: Yeah, I guess I am. I tell these stories in part because I think, God, if we got all of these people in a room together, they could really learn from each other.
HOYT: Many journalists might have found Sabrina but perhaps not focused on the positive possibilities. We do a lot of stories about how bad things are.
KAUFMAN: As journalists we can get so focused on the worst cases, the pathological families and so forth. I thought that story had been done a lot, and I was very influenced by colleagues who are black who warned me not to do that. A very good friend of mine who’s a black writer at the Globe said to me, I don’t want your readers sitting in their living rooms going, ‘Oh, well, there those people go again’.
I’m not sure I consciously thought this, but I think what drew me to Sabrina was that she was ordinary. She was not an overachiever. And she’s not among the bad kids who you just know are going to get into really bad trouble. She’s everybody else.
HOYT: You called searching for a Sabrina – for a way to tell these stories – a search for narrative. Is that how you think of it?
KAUFMAN: I don’t think people will read these stories just because they are about an "important issue," these days. The story itself has to be intrinsically interesting. Maybe that’s a function of people becoming tired of race, maybe it’s a function of a Jerry Springer-Oprah Winfrey-ization of media. But I think people want a good story, a narrative. And then along the way they realize, ‘Hey, I’m learning something about race as well.’ You really have to grab people by the throat, by the heart.
National Jewish Book Award Finalist
“Carefully researched. . . . Profoundly chilling. . . It’s clear that Kaufman’s sympathies are fully engaged by the narrative he records, by the family histories so eventful they keep us reading with unflagging interest. . . . We’re grateful to Kaufman for introducing us to a number of exemplary—and memorable—characters.”
--Francine Prose, Newsday
“Kaufman portrays these people with great feeling and compassion. . . . In Kaufman’s book, one hears the echoes of a world that might have been.”
--Zachary Karavell, The Boston Sunday Globe
“One closes this book astonished at the persistence of Jewish hope in the brace, new post-Nazi, post-Communist Europe.”
--Andrei Codrescu, National Public Radio
"Beautifully written. . . . Engrossing. . . . Unlike so many accounts that depict Eastern Europe as a kind of extensive cemetery for Jewish life and culture, this book provides real, if modest, evidence of Jewish resilience and renewal. This is a work of exemplary journalistic research and narrative.”
--Kirkus Reviews
“Deeply engrossing. . . . Expertly crafted.”
--Publisher’s Weekly
Broken Alliance: The Turbulent Times Between Blacks and Jews in America
Winner, National Jewish Book Award
Winner, American Jewish Committee "Common Sense" Award for Best Book on Current Events
“Perceptive and even-handed. . .extraordinary perspective. . .One is grateful for Mr. Kaufman’s graceful analysis.”
--Christopher Lehman-Haupt, The New York Times
“A first-rate job of recounting telling episodes that reveal the emotional dimensions of the great divide now separating blacks and Jews.
--Juan Williams, The Washington Post
“The book’s tone is that of a good novel in which human complexity tempers conflict . . . readable and informative.”
--Shelby Steele, The New York Times Book Review
“Compelling and important . . . . Jonathan Kaufman’s portraits-and-contexts description of this Jewish-black deterioration is accurate and insightful.”
--Richard Robbins, The Boston Globe
THE FOLLOWING ARTICLE APPEARED IN THE COLUMBIA JOURNALISM REVIEW, SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER, 1999:
Reporting Race: Jonathan Kaufman: "By the Throat, By the Heart"
Jonathan Kaufman is a big friendly man, a talker. He began to be fascinated by the subject of race after joining The Boston Globe in 1982, in a city whose white working-class neighborhoods had been traumatized by the school-busing controversy. In 1984 he was part of a Pulitzer Prize-winning team that took on Brahmin Boston by exposing the poor racial hiring records of its institutions, including the Globe. He moved to The Wall Street Journal in 1995. There he has been recognized as one of the the nation’s more sophisticated and compelling writers about racial issues. A Kaufman story often works on two levels. A November ’97 piece, Inside Outsiders, was, at one level, about whether blacks in corporate America must "act white" in order to succeed, but at another, it was a fascinating tale of sibling rivalry between two successful brothers with opposing views on the subject. His Locked-In story last October was, on an intellectual level, about whether the threat of prison – so much a part of inner-city life – might be losing its sting, as imprisonment becomes more the norm. On a human level it was about the troubled heart of a ten-year-old girl, Sabrina Branch, whose world is circumscribed by prison walls. Sabrina has trouble accepting that her father, along with other relatives, is locked up. Kaufman spoke in Boston with CJR’s senior editor, Mike Hoyt.
By Mike Hoyt
Mike Hoyt ([email protected]) is cjr's senior editor. The stories mentioned in this Reporting Race package are available at www.jrn.columbia.edu/workshop.
Q&A
HOYT: You suggested at the Columbia workshop that most readers don’t really want to read about race. Why?
KAUFMAN: Readers are tired. Shelby Steele had a fascinating essay a number of years ago. He wrote, If you look at what Martin Luther King said to white people in this country, it was, ‘I believe in you. You’re better than this.’ He believed in the nobility of whites to rise above. He would quote the Constitution and the Bible.
Starting with the Black Power movement, that shifted to a question of blame. As anybody who has grown up Jewish can tell you, the other side of guilt is resentment. There is a way in which whites have felt guilty about these issues, but now feel resentment about them. They’re tired of hearing about them. They don’t like being blamed for them.
Also, a lot of the writing about race contradicts their own experience. When I did my book about blacks and Jews [Broken Alliance, Simon & Schuster, 1995], one of the chapters was about the change of neighborhoods from largely Jewish to largely black. And one of the consequences of that was that you had many situations in the sixties where there were Jews who were quite liberal who had parents or grandparents stuck in transitional neighborhoods – in Brooklyn, on the south side of Chicago, and all around the country. These neighborhoods were becoming more dangerous, more frightening. Many Jews found their liberal ideas conflicting with a kind of very scary experience.
Similarly, I think a lot of whites have been scared by crime, which to them often has a black face. A lot of reporting about race has tended to ignore those complexities, and basically said to whites, you’re to blame for this. I think people just tuned it out. You have to grapple with the ambiguous feelings that people have about race. It’s not a simple good and bad, right and wrong.
Also, whites have become a group that thinks they understand blacks, especially poor blacks, very well, but in fact doesn’t understand them well at all. That’s the paradox. It used to be, perhaps, that there was just ignorance. Now what there is is, ‘Oh, well I know all about that problem.’ But in fact they don’t. It’s easier to write about Kosovo than about inner-city Baltimore, because people think they know all about inner-city Baltimore.
HOYT: Your stories are usually about an idea, but they’re embodied in a person. I don’t know which comes first, the chicken or the egg.
KAUFMAN: Usually we have the idea or at least the sense of a theme, and we then look for a way to tell the story. You sort of call around and churn the waters, and try to find a way to tell the story. When you home in on the human part of these stories, you realize, not just that they’re more interesting, but that the trajectory of the people’s lives becomes much more understandable.
HOYT: How does the Baltimore story, about the little girl Sabrina, fit in with that? You started with a theme in mind, the effect of prisons on communities. How did the reporting unfold?
KAUFMAN: Bill [Grueskin, who is often Kaufman’s editor at the Journal] thought maybe we should look at a probation officer, or probation office, and see who passes through. I was thinking maybe we should look at a street or a neighborhood, to see the impact on the community. We discovered early on that on Sunday visiting day you have all these vans that go from the neighborhoods to the prisons to visit the prisoners. And I had this image in my mind, which was true, that on Sunday people get dressed up, not to go to church, but to go to prison.
I tend to do these stories from the outside in – you start out trying to find someone, a group of people you can sit with. I basically had four or five things I was doing at once. There were twin fifteen-year olds I was spending some time with, thinking that might be the story. There was Vernon [Sabrina Branch’s father]. I met Vernon at this men’s group for ex-cons, and one of the things he told me was that he was worried about his sister because, although she had succeeded and moved out to the suburbs, she was going out with an inmate. And he worried about his nephew. Then when I finally met his mother-in-law and the kids, it became clear that this was a great extended family that dealt with all of these things.
I thought Vernon was the story – Vernon passing through, touching on people’s lives. I sent in the story. I knew it wasn’t right, but I couldn’t figure out what wasn’t right about it. And when Bill read it, he basically said, ‘There’s no journey in this story. It starts out in prison, he ends up back in prison. He meets all these people, but in the end he’s not very sympathetic.’ But he said, ‘I could read 100 inches about Sabrina.’ And he was right.
Turning the story inside out enabled us to focus on the story through the eyes of a ten-year old, which I think really broke down a lot of the barriers readers might have against it. Who wants to read about a thirty-year-old drug dealer? But a ten-year-old girl who reads Goosebumps books? – that was interesting.
That was a way to ask, even if you think Vernon should be locked up, are we, as a society, doing right by his daughter? By having her grow up in this world where prison is all around her, and that’s all that she sees?
HOYT: You set out to show something. Did you also discover some things?
KAUFMAN: I discovered that the problem of what can be done for neighborhoods like Sabrina’s isn’t as overwhelming as we thought. I don’t leave Sabrina’s community feeling this problem can never be fixed.
Basically we’re talking about giving kids a good education, supporting them, giving them mentors, opening up opportunities, and treating them the way we like to treat our own kids. Our inability to do that is devastating, for them and for us. I would like to find some way to unlock that idea in the readers. So that they put down the paper and, in some small way say, ‘gee, you know, I never thought of it that way before.’
HOYT: You’re a man on a mission?
KAUFMAN: Yeah, I guess I am. I tell these stories in part because I think, God, if we got all of these people in a room together, they could really learn from each other.
HOYT: Many journalists might have found Sabrina but perhaps not focused on the positive possibilities. We do a lot of stories about how bad things are.
KAUFMAN: As journalists we can get so focused on the worst cases, the pathological families and so forth. I thought that story had been done a lot, and I was very influenced by colleagues who are black who warned me not to do that. A very good friend of mine who’s a black writer at the Globe said to me, I don’t want your readers sitting in their living rooms going, ‘Oh, well, there those people go again’.
I’m not sure I consciously thought this, but I think what drew me to Sabrina was that she was ordinary. She was not an overachiever. And she’s not among the bad kids who you just know are going to get into really bad trouble. She’s everybody else.
HOYT: You called searching for a Sabrina – for a way to tell these stories – a search for narrative. Is that how you think of it?
KAUFMAN: I don’t think people will read these stories just because they are about an "important issue," these days. The story itself has to be intrinsically interesting. Maybe that’s a function of people becoming tired of race, maybe it’s a function of a Jerry Springer-Oprah Winfrey-ization of media. But I think people want a good story, a narrative. And then along the way they realize, ‘Hey, I’m learning something about race as well.’ You really have to grab people by the throat, by the heart.
