First Person: Political v. Partisan

006

One of my favorite parts of serving as Editor of BAR is reading the letters I receive from our readers. Many ask informed questions about the articles we publish. We include many of these questions along with responses from the articles’ authors in our Queries&Comments section. Some letters thank BAR for a job well done. I like these letters. Others request that we investigate certain issues and serve as suggestions for future articles.

And then there are those other letters, the complaints. Believe it or not, I like these too, for various reasons. Some of them provide valuable feedback on the job we are doing, offering helpful suggestions for improvement. Others are off-base, off-color, and downright nasty. Some are comical, including one that complained about my unreadable signature. I use some letters to respond further to important issues. We can’t publish them all, but I try to print a sample of the letters we receive to give you an overall sense of the various reactions to each issue.

Recently I’ve noticed an uptick in the number of letters we’ve received regarding the issue of politics, specifically, asking why BAR has gotten “so political” as of late.

I do not believe this is the case, and I reaffirm and maintain BAR’s long-standing policy of keeping partisan political debates out of the pages of BAR.

However, in the hyper-partisan world in which we find ourselves, everything appears politicized to some, whether intended or not. The pages of BAR are no exception. Think about it—this magazine deals with archaeology and the Bible in Israel and the Middle East! There is simply no way to avoid what some readers are bound to interpret as “political commentary.” This is because the nature of what BAR covers necessarily involves writing about issues that some readers will interpret as “political.” BAR cannot avoid printing the words “Israel,” “Palestine,” “Temple Mount,” “Jerusalem,” or “West Bank,” and yet simply mentioning these words alone will be inferred by some as a political stance.

But there is a key difference: While we cannot avoid what some consider political matters simply because they find the very word “Israel” political, BAR avoids partisan commentary. For instance, some readers bring to the magazine strong political opinions about various excavations in the Golan Heights, the West Bank, the City of David/Silwan/East Jerusalem, and other politically contentious areas. (Again, even the choice of terminology is enough to set some readers off.) And while BAR brings you archaeologists’ most recent discoveries and their interpretations, the mere fact that some of these excavations are even being discussed in BAR is deemed by some as a political act. But note, this is because the reader has a strong political opinion on this particular issue, not because BAR has engaged in partisan discourse.

Another example may be this issue’s cover story, an autobiography of sorts by a living legend of Aramaic studies, Professor Yona Sabar, titled “Saving the Aramaic of Jesus and the Jews.” A Kurdish Jew and native Neo-Aramaic speaker, Dr. Sabar tells the story of how he fled Kurdish Iraq for Israel and ultimately the United States and has spent his career attempting to save his native tongue, Aramaic, from extinction. And yet, because his personal story involves words like “Iraq,” “refugee,” “immigrant,” “Islam,” “Kurdish,” etc., there may be some who think of this as a “political” article when it simply is not—it is a story of a brave man who became one of the last native Aramaic speakers on earth and whose mission is to save the “language of Jesus.”

There is a difference between being political and being partisan. As Editor, I will not bring partisan politics into the pages of BAR. This is simply not the place for it. Let’s face it: Topics like the Middle East and the Bible are already politically charged without introducing partisan politics into the mix!

If we discuss immigration in BAR, it will be ancient immigration—and the archaeological and textual evidence of it. If we discuss attitudes toward war and taxes, it will be a survey of Late Bronze Age warfare and of Roman tax policies in Syro-Palestine, not what Republicans and Democrats think in 2018. And if we discuss Israel and Jerusalem, BAR will do so from archaeological standpoints, not from partisan political ones. Because while BAR cannot avoid discussing what some will inevitably consider to be political issues, we can do our best to report on archaeological research in the Holy Land and preserve the collective cultural heritage of the people living there.—B.C.

One of my favorite parts of serving as Editor of BAR is reading the letters I receive from our readers. Many ask informed questions about the articles we publish. We include many of these questions along with responses from the articles’ authors in our Queries&Comments section. Some letters thank BAR for a job well done. I like these letters. Others request that we investigate certain issues and serve as suggestions for future articles. And then there are those other letters, the complaints. Believe it or not, I like these too, for various reasons. Some of them provide valuable feedback […]