David Twersky

David Twersky, who died Friday evening of cancer, was one of the most remarkable journalists of his generation — a reminder of the impact that can be made by one person with a pen and a passion for the issues. He took up newspaper work relatively late in a life that had been devoted to Labor Zionism. He instantly showed an uncanny ability to analyze a political situation and sense a scoop where others weren’t looking — and an honesty that brooked no pleading on the right or left as he pursued the truth as he saw it and the Jewish cause for which he lived.

We first met him when the staff was being assembled to bring out the Jewish Forward in English. The meeting took place over dinner, where Twersky, then with the American Jewish Congress, told, among other things, of one day in the Bronx when he was a boy and his father sent him to the news-stand for a copy of the Forward, which was then issued daily in Yiddish. The lad raced out and, in a ghastly error, came back with a copy of the Freiheit, the communist paper. His father was so upset that he threw his son out a window. The window part may, or may not, be apocryphal, but it was clear that Twersky had never stopped looking for the right paper.

So the Forward took Twersky on and sent him to open its bureau in Washington, whence, in the closing years of the administration of President George H.W. Bush and the early years of the administration of President Clinton, he landed scoop after scoop by working sources that few, if any, other reporters were working. They were often sources from the right wing of the labor movement or the Social Democrats. It was Twersky who first reported on concerns of the labor movement over President-elect Clinton’s decision to put at the head of his transition team in health, education and labor an educator with far-left connections.

Twersky’s sources were alarmed because the educator, Johnnetta Cole, while widely admired as president of Spellman College, had nonetheless once been on the national committee of the Venceremos Brigades, which brought young people to help harvest sugar in Castro’s Cuba and which, according to the New York Times, the FBI had maintained was connected with Cuban intelligence. She had also been on the national committee of the United States Peace Council, an affiliate of the World Peace Council, which was regarded by the FBI as a communist front. According to the Times, Twersky’s report started the furor that led to Ms. Cole being dropped from contention as secretary of education.

It was Twersky who first reported the controversial views of Lani Guinier, who had been nominated by the president as assistant attorney general for civil rights. Twersky had read the writings of Ms. Guinier, then a law professor at the University of Pennyslvania, and discovered that she had suggested that the Civil Rights Act could be construed to require the election of minorities. Neither Twersky nor the Forward opposed the elevation of Ms. Guinier to Justice Department, but he and the Forward did want her views to be vetted in a hearing. As other newspapers, particularly the Wall Street Journal, came in on the story, Mr. Clinton and Senator Leahy of the Judiciary Committee dropped her nomination.

After his years in Washington, Twersky became editor of the New Jersey Jewish News. Eventually he joined The New York Sun as foreign editor and a columnist. In one piece, he wrote of confronting one of his early heroes, Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg, over an interview the former president of the American Jewish Congress had, in his later years, given to Lyndon Larouche’s Executive Intelligence Review and used to launch what Twersky characterized as a harsh attack on President George W. Bush and to “hint darkly,” as Twersky put it, that Natan Sharansky was a Soviet communist agent.

“I don’t know whether that shocks you,” Twersky wrote, “but it certainly shocked me.”

When, upon calling Hertzberg, Twersky failed to get a satisfactory explanation, he wrote a column that concluded on a classic Twerskyian note: “The real problem is that this veteran leader of dovish Zionist opinion should entertain the notion that there are no enemies on the left, that anyone combining support for the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel with harsh criticism of the Israeli right, must be all right. This is no small thing for people like me, who over the years found much logic and idealism on the left.”

Twersky met with a wide array of people. When a future prime minister of Israel, Ariel Sharon, stopped by the Forward for an editorial meeting, some of the left-of-center veterans exited the building, rather than shake his hand. Twersky came to the meeting and found himself helping the general light a Channukah menorah and down a plate of latkes. Twersky later shook his head in amazement at how much he enjoyed the man he’d so often criticized. He shook his head in a similar astonishment years later, after an editorial dinner of the Sun with Henry Kissinger.

Late in his career, Twersky returned to full time work at the American Jewish Congress, and his role in public life became less visible but no less important. He traveled to Pakistan to meet with President Musharraf. The visit resulted, months later when the president was in New York, in the first meeting between a Pakistani president and the American Jewish leadership. Twersky made important visits to France and, not long ago, a joyous final visit to Israel. When, in November, Twersky was among the honorees at a dinner of the progressive Zionist organization Ameinu, so many people came that registration had to be closed.

It was the last time we saw him. We telephoned him at the start of the summer and said we looked forward to a visit in the fall. He had no doubt that he would be dying soon. He faced the end with courage and humor. He talked about how he’d switched back to the Democrats in 2008 after voting, on foreign policy grounds, for President Bush in 2004. He said he wished he could be around to see whether President Obama won a second term. He died Friday evening, peacefully and at home with his children. He will be missed terribly, by, among many others, his friends from his days at the Forward and the Sun.

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