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Israel's Leadership Needs Heroes

Journalist Steve Linde ... pictured addressing a meeting of ESRA Ramat Hasharon in January 2018. Photo by Barbara Slator

When I became editor of The Jerusalem Post in 2011, president Shimon Peres invited me for a meeting. We had a long chat together with veteran journalist Greer Fay Cashman at his Jerusalem residence. At the end of the meeting, I asked him what advice he had for me. "Your job is to tell your readers what to think about, and not what to think," he said.

Peres was one of many important personalities I met during my 20-year career at the Post. As I look back, my mind is flooded with warm memories and a string of one-liners. Peres himself once reminded me that "it's nice to be important, but more important to be nice."

I never got the chance to meet Elie Wiesel, but I did get to interview him in 2014 via a video link-up between his childhood home in Sighet and his home in New York. "Do you know why God made people?" Wiesel asked. "Because He loves a good story."

Later that year, I and Jerusalem Post intern Aviva Loeb visited Holocaust survivor Hannah Goslar Pick, Anne Frank's friend, in her Jerusalem home. "We are all human beings and we have to try to live in peace together," she told us.

That sentiment was echoed by sex therapist Dr. Ruth Westheimer, whom I interviewed at The Jerusalem Post Conference in New York in 2016. "There has to be more of a dialogue, and not just about sex," she quipped.

At that conference, when I handed over the mantel of editor to Yaakov Katz, I also had the honor of interviewing American actor Michael Douglas, the Genesis Prize laureate. "I'm a secular Jew, I'm not formally religious, but I wanted to be part of this tribe," he said. "I love its values."

In 2013, I moderated a panel discussion in Jerusalem with three wonderful men: Jewish Agency Chairman Natan Sharansky, Dr. Mehmet Oz and Rabbi Shmuley Boteach. "Hope can't exist if you deprive others of their freedom. Tikkunolam [healing the world] is the only way to heal and find meaning," Sharansky said. "Healing is contextualizing the wounded," said Boteach. "What changed my life is traveling through a country that has been traumatized, yet sees so much hope," Dr. Oz added.

Perhaps the highlight of my career was interviewing Peres at The Jerusalem Post Diplomatic Conference in Herzliya that year. At the end of the interview, I asked him my own version of Bernard Pivot's famous question, "If Heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive – or what would you say to Him?" Peres paused for a moment, and then said: "I have some suggestions on how to improve the world."

If you ask who's on my bucket list to interview, I would put Gal Gadot on top. "I want people to have a good impression of Israel," she once said. Gadot has provided the Jewish state with what we all need right now: a superhero. In The Jerusalem Report, which I started to edit in June 2016, I am doing my best to highlight the positive developments in Israel, as well as the heroes it has in every field, as we prepare to celebrate the Jewish state's 70th birthday.

The writer is now editor of The Jerusalem Report, which can be purchased at Steimatzky or accessed via http://www.jpost.com/Jerusalem-Report. Subscriptions can be taken out by calling *2423 in Israel. 

 

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