Photo of Peter Beinart:

http://www.medill.northwestern.edu/inside/2001/beinart.html

By Susie Davidson

Advocate Correspondent

WASHINGTON - Peter Beinart’s dossier smacks of Wunderkind, and he’s still only 30ish. Currently editor of the New Republic, his is an extraordinary tale of accomplishment. At Yale, he won the Alpheus Henry Snow Prize for leadership and academic excellence; he had already won both Rhodes and Marshall scholarships to Oxford. He graduated with distinction in history and political science in 1993.

At Oxford, he wrote for the New Republic, Newsweek and London’s Financial Times. Following a master’s in international relations in 1995, he became managing, and then senior editor, of TNR in June of 1997.

No cartoons, pure wonk, TNR has covered Washingtonian issues for over 85 years. Unabashedly liberal for most of its existence, it has evolved and expanded; its opinions are now as multifarious as its subject matter.

In October 1999, only six years after graduating from Yale, Beinart became editor-in-chief. He’s also written for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe and the Atlantic Monthly, and is a regular contributor to Time.

Last October, he was named a Poynter Fellow of Journalism at Yale College.

His writings encompass issues of globalization and shifting American political and media landscapes. He has also extensively covered black-Jewish relations and Jewish education.

Beinart’s mother, Doreen Beinart, is the Film Series Director at the JFK School of Government’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy and the wife of Robert Brustein, Artistic Director of the American Repertory Theatre.

On February 5 of this year, Beinart cast a foreboding projection on black-Jewish interaction in Bush’s faith-based charitable era, based on a chasm in their respective recent histories.

"White Democrats, particularly college-educated white Democrats--and particularly college-educated Jewish Democrats," Beinart recaps, "were the most secular group in America. Black Democrats were the most religious. Republicans [have] tried to exploit that divide."

He cites ideological differences on religious involvement in public life and school vouchers. Jews tend to be overwhelmingly opposed to both, where black clergy and their followers tend to sway their elected leaders to support these issues.

"Maybe," Beinart writes, "Bush's proposals will fizzle and blacks and Jews will continue to stand happily together against the John Ashcrofts and Katherine Harrises of the world. But I doubt it. The debate over religion's role in American public life is growing, and the Republicans have finally found a way to enlist blacks on their side. Jews and blacks may soon look back wistfully to the days when all they disagreed about was race."

Are we too secular in private practice as well? Not necessarily. Indeed, the number of Jewish children in full-time Jewish schools has tripled since 1962 (to about 200,000 today), as public school enrollment has declined from 90 percent to about 65 percent. Why? Assimilation. Studies have shown that graduates of supplementary, rather than full-time, Jewish schools are more than twice as likely to marry outside the faith.

"The Orthodox community, for its part," Beinart notes in "The Rise of Jewish Schools" (Atlantic Monthly, October 1999), "has rarely celebrated the melting pot, and generally worries less about total acceptance by the broader culture."

"But the mind-set is different at a place like New Jew [Waltham’s New Jewish High School]", he continues, "which aims to correct the troublesome aspects of Jewish integration -- pervasive intermarriage and religious illiteracy -- without accepting even the slightest diminution of the opportunities that full integration brings."

No doubt, this unconstrained and gifted writer will enhance the annals of American media for many years to come.