Meet the Forward 50 – fifty Jewish Americans designated worthy of special attention as 2015 draws to a close. That “Forward” in “The Forward 50?” It’s The Jewish Daily Forward. A newspaper founded in 1897 as a Yiddish language publication, it has also published in English for the past 25 years, won a ton of awards, and at one time in the 1920’s had a larger circulation than the New York Times!
Every year, most likely as circulation-building clickbait, the paper publishes a list of fifty Jews who are “deeply, loudly and passionately embedded in some of the most pressing political and social issues in the nation.”
Not so unusual, but I was pleased to see that nearly half (21) were women so I decided see who they are, and they’re pretty interesting and modern.
Two of their “Top 5” are women, one an academic, one a star: Princeton professor and newly minted MacArthur “genius” Marina Rustow – who is also the first Jewish Studies person to receive a MacArthur — and our own beloved Amy Schumer.
Four of the six “Activists” are women: Rachel Sklar and her daughter Ruby, Emma Sulkowitcz who carried a mattress – everywhere – through her last years at Columbia University to protest the school’s inaction in her rape allegations. Ruth Messinger, long-time crusader and organizer, who in the 17 years she spent running the United Jewish Word Service, “created a uniquely Jewish way to promote economic and gender equality in the developed world” and street harassment activist Shoshana Roberts .
In general, this is a varied, original and exciting list. Twenty-one of 50 isn’t perfect but what’s kind of cool is how many of these women are closer to the edge not just of Jewish culture but the culture of the US generally. Which is nice, given the battles going on in some other Jewish institutions.
We need to do something (HINT: #boycottNFLsponsors)
Why is it so hard to affect the NFL and its disgraceful responses to abusive players? After all, women are45% of the NFL fan base. It makes sense to care what we think.
Sadly, there’s that other thing. To see what we’re up against, follow the money.
Team owners make money from tickets and souvenirs but even more from TV contracts and the networks who pay for them. It’s all nicely divided up. In the 2011 9-year NFL-broadcast contract, CBS gets American Football Conference games – and is asking $500,000 for thirty second spots, according to Forbes, Fox carries the National Football Conference and NBC broadcasts Sunday night in prime time – with ads going for $628,000/30-second spot. Each network gets an exclusive crack at three of the nine Super Bowls and all the revenue that comes with it. (Bloomberg News)
Here’s what Forbes said this time a year ago, “Live appointment television—already extremely important—will only grow in significance in coming years, as television programming and audiences continue to fragment. On TV, the NFL is king.”
This morning (9/15/14) Joe Scarborough, never one for impulse control, lashed out at NYT columnist Alan Schwarz for his mention of the failure of broadcasters to acknowledge their own complicity in the shameful collaboration among the NFL, sponsors and the networks who charge them for their ads.
It’s like the story of the nail and the horse and the war*: Sponsors pay the networks, networks pay the NFL, the NFL divides the revenue among the teams and the owners combine these huge paydays with their ticket sales.
The auction was a sign of the NFL’s huge leverage over television networks, which are increasingly looking to the NFL to help fortify them against the rise of online video services, the stagnation of pay TV and other threats. “It’s almost like the networks are afraid to say no to the NFL,” says one senior TV executive involved in the bidding process for Thursday night games.
So. If the NFL is king and everyone, especially the TV networks who profit from ad revenue, ratings and football programming in general, are enablers then we have to make it scarier to continue than to take a stand. That means finding, and boycotting, NFL sponsors and letting the network brass know what we’re doing. (I boycotted Greece for years during the Junta years. Then an Amnesty International leader told me “If they don’t know why you’re not coming, it doesn’t do any good. You need to write to them and tell them why you’re not there.“)
That’s the other part of it. We need to be noisy and bold and brassy and (forgive me Ms. Sandburg) bossy about this – holler like hell in support of our sisters and put our money where our mouths are. Nobody needs any of the stuff that advertise on NFL games and there are alternatives for all of them anyway.
Women’s bodies should not be paying for the bad business planning of television networks; if they won’t take a stand with the NFL, let them find another way to make their money!
Here are a few major #NFLsponsors — MAKE SURE TO LET THEM KNOW WHAT YOU’RE DOING AND WHY:
What is it about women who blog that scares so many people – even other women —
even the New York Times? Once again this time, they’ve decided to offer an “analysis” or a “portrait” or an I don’t know what
about bloggers who are women and moms. And when they do, they write with
a condescending, bemused attitude that is what I remember from the early days
of the women’s movement, when men would joke about our desire to open our own
doors, earn our own livings, make our own decisions. It was kind of cute
to want to be able to get credit cards without a husband’s permission, to cover
a story without having to go up in the balcony, to keep our names when we got
married. Feminism was just so adorable.
Now, we’re free on so many levels, and one manifestation of that freedom is the
vibrant world we’ve created online. Sisterhoods that cross race and
politics and religion and age as we share ideas and pain, joy and pride, birth
and loss and every other story that is part of living a life. There have
been a couple of wonderful responses to this irritating TIMES piece (and it’s
not the first…) One of my own favorites, Mom-101,
whose admirers are legion, wrote
“…once you
get past the first half of the article, there’s actually some solid information
in there….But I wish [all] that had been to focus of an article about my
favorite blogging community that just made the front page of my favorite
section of my favorite Sunday paper. I wish it had opened with the yearning
of bloggers for the community to return to good writing, and the evidence that
in the end, that’s mostly what pays off….
Of course, there
are more. My friend Danielle Wiley, known to many of her friends as Foodmomiac but also an executive at Edelman PR, has also weighed in.
I invite you to read the full piece and form your own opinions, but sentences like “bringing
together participants for some real-time girly bonding” might very well stop
you in your tracks. As I write this, my husband (and fellow Edelman executive
Michael Wiley) is at SXSW. Would Mendelsohn classify that experience as macho
bonding? Or would she write that he is attending a conference for the purposes
of education and networking? Why do people, including Ms. Mendlesohn, continue
to refer to networking among women as girly bonding? I seriously doubt the
participants at Bloggy Boot Camp were wearing jammies and braiding each other’s
hair. However, from the tenor of the piece, it was pretty easy to jump to that
conclusion.
Here’s the bottom line: I’m old enough to be the mother of both of these women
and many of their peers yet they have welcomed me as a sister – a blogger and a
friend. They’ve honored the sappy posts I’ve written about my sons
and my marriage and they’ve shared ideas and advice in comments, in twitter and even in real life.
They and their compatriots are talented, compassionate, ornery pioneers
who have built what I think of as the new quilting bee, the new Red Tent where they share the wisdom and mysteries that are women’s lives. And they do much more – just go check out the list in Liz’s post. Not for one moment are they
silly or unaware or careless or trivial. And to gain a few points with
silly headlines and denigrating phrases isn’t bad taste, it’s also bad
journalism. Go see for yourself.
