Subscribed to Israel.

I’m thinking of canceling my subscription to the Jerusalem Post.

It’s not their own fault; I just don’t want to read what they are saying anymore. What they are saying isn’t really their own fault either.

It begins to hurt to read the paper here everyday. Disappointment is painful and I feel like being Israeli is partly being disappointed on a fairly regular, cyclical schedule.

I’ve been a big newspaper reader – especially The New York Times – since high school. Since subscribing to an Israeli-centric paper, I realize that there is a major difference in American and Israeli papers. There is so much diversity, so many different issues to report in an American paper: the status of immigration, elections, news from your town, news from the next town over, latest trends – fashion or otherwise, education, nuclear threats, celebrities, 12 different sports, and on and on. It seems like Israeli papers have their priorities cut out for them – Hebrew or English – and they go like this: war -> peace process -> disappointment -> war -> peace process -> pain -> everything else. And the thing is, it’s all personal, even when it’s not war or peace process… Eeverything happening here is personal – from elections to Ethiopians to Maccabbe Tel Aviv. It’s all mine, and it’s all painful when it goes wrong.

The JPost print edition contains tidbits from the NYTimes a few days a week – Week in Review, Business, Op/Eds. Those niblets of American life for me are like finding the cashews in a package of mixed nuts. It’s a few minutes of reading about someone else’s troubles or joys. It’s a few minutes of feeling not-angry, not-frustrated, not-sad (concerning Israel).

In the States, when I used to read about Israel, emotions would flow, and I thought it was personal, but I never realized how personal it could be. Israel, no matter how much I loved her, was always a concept.

Now, Israel is daily life, Israel is where I pay my taxes, Israel is the news I read, the only news that rings in my ears.

Every. Single. Day.


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  1. Yoel.Ben-Avraham Avatar
    Yoel.Ben-Avraham

    I subscribe to Makor Rishon, just so I can read a “Real” right-wing newspaper. But during the week I’ll pick up an HaAretz to see what the “other side” has to say. Most importantly my “Google Agents” collect articles from world press (including Maariv, JPost and Yidiot) on topics of interest … and I click to read when I’m in the mood and have the time to waste.

    In the Internet age conventional newspapers are quickly becoming a thing of the past … an adjunct to the REAL news source, the Internet version!

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