A FEMALE JOURNALIST REPORTER IN 1930s PALESTINE: DOROTHY KAHN BAR-ADON AND THE PALESTINE POST

Abstract

The article follows the footsteps of the American Jewish newspaperwoman Dorothy Kahn Bar-Adon, who immigrated to Palestine in 1933 and became a central field reporter of the most important English-language newspaper in the country, The Palestine Post, owned by pro-Zionist proprietors. It explores how she transformed the newspaper over the years as a site of dialogue between the Jewish and the Arab societies, especially by her narrative journalism and her human-interest story angle, and how her writing in English – the language of the international power (Britain) designated by the League of Nations to administer the country, rather than in local languages – enabled her to propose a somehow distanced perspective on Palestine, while still promoting Zionism.

KEYWORDS:

• Newspaperwomen
• human-interest reporting
• daily newspaper
• Jewish-Arab conflict
• mandatory Palestine
• The Palestine Post

Introduction

Founded by Gershon Agronsky (Agron) in Jerusalem in 1932, The Palestine Post became the most important English newspaper in British Mandate Palestine. It was distributed in 20,000 copies daily in Palestine and abroad in the 1940s. The journal, pledged to defending the Zionist cause, changed its name to The Jerusalem Post in 1950 and as such operates in Jerusalem to this day. One of the most prominent journalists with The Palestine Post during the Mandate era was Dorothy Kahn Bar-Adon (1907–1950), a talented Jewish newspaperwoman of American origin who worked for the Post for seventeen years until her premature death. One of the few female journalists in pre-1948 Palestine, she was a central personality at the English-language newspaper.

This article examines Kahn Bar-Adon’s place as a woman journalist at The Palestine Post during the 1930s. Using the biographical approach, it tries to answer the two-fold question: How did a woman journalist operate in a profession dominated mostly by men and how did her Jewish American background feature in that political context of 1930s Palestine? The first section focuses on her move from Atlantic Jersey in the United States to Palestine, a step both completing her support for the Jewish cause and hybridizing her journalistic style at an English-language newspaper. The second section focuses on Nazi Years and explores what may seem a paradox to us – i.e. that Kahn decided to opt out for a human-interest story style in writing up about the immigrant society to Palestine. Section three moves on to decode her unblemished enthusiasm about the 1930s Palestine, which she constantly portrays as a thriving and peaceful society where Jews and Arabs live happily together and which very much inspired by The One Thousand and One Nights. The last sections of this article examine how in the midst of tensions between communities from the mid-1930s, Kahn transformed The Palestine Post into a site of conciliation, before she decided to plea her political vision across American-Jewish and Palestinian Jewish journalistic spheres at the end of her career.

Dorothy Kahn Practicing Journalism: From Atlantic City, New Jersey, to Tel-Aviv

Dorothy Kahn (who added the name Bar-Adon after her marriage to the Israeli archeologist Pessah Bar-Adon in 1939) was born in 1907 in Philadelphia and grew up in Atlantic City, New Jersey, as the product of a wealthy family and in a Reform Jewish milieu. She lost her father when she was sixteen and, just after completing her high-school education, went to work as a staff reporter for the local newspaper, The Atlantic City, writing under the bylines of Dot Kahn or Dorothy Kahn. She was a member of the paper’s staff for ten years, until her immigration to Palestine in 1933. Kahn achieved much success during her stint in Atlantic City. She started out as a reporter for the women’s section but soon was transferred to coverage of the national and, later, the international scene. Among her tasks, she was assigned to interview important American and foreign visitors such as politicians, authors, movie stars, gangsters, industrialists, and trade-unions leaders who came to enjoy the luxurious hotels of this seaside resort, which flourished under the Prohibition regime of the 1920s. She proved herself to be a talented writer who knew how to tell a story in a dynamic, precise, and dramatic style. Soon her submissions appeared on the front pages of the paper under her own name.¹

Dorothy Kahn was an assimilated Jewish woman who considered herself American first of all. However, the massacre of 133 Jews in Palestine by Arabs in Hebron and Jerusalem during the 1929 riots definitely changed her attitude toward the Jewish national question and transformed her into a fervent supporter of the Zionist cause, considering the Jews a national group that had the right to sovereign self-determination in Palestine. Then, a longstanding dispute between Muslims and Jews over access to the Western Wall in Jerusalem had escalated into violence, with riots ensuing for a week, mostly on the part of Arabs against Jews. Casualties were high on both sides – with 133 Jews (especially from the towns of Hebron, Jerusalem and Safed) killed, mostly by Arabs, while 116 Arabs were killed mostly by British Mandate Police in trying to stall the riots.² This was a turning point in her personal life and career. After 1929, she started publishing in The Atlantic City furious articles against the British commission that investigated the riots and against the decision of Sydney Webb, then Secretary of State for the Colonies, in 1930 to limit Jewish immigration to Palestine under a new Palestine White Paper (the third one since 1922). Kahn supported the Balfour Declaration, issued in November 1917 by the British Foreign Secretary, which affirmed the Jewish people’s right to a national home in Palestine.³

In 1933, the twenty-six-year-old Dorothy Kahn decided to immigrate into Palestine. On her way to the Holy Land, she stopped in New York to obtain a visa from the British Consulate and collect letters of introduction that would help her, once ashore in Palestine, to obtain a correspondent’s position with the local English-language Jewish newspaper, Gershon Agronsky’s Palestine Post.

When Kahn debarked at Jaffa port in the summer of 1933, she found some 250,000 Jews and 850,000 Arabs in Palestine – figures that would respectively grow to 500,000 and 1,100,000 ten years later. The Jewish population was concentrated in three main towns—Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and Haifa—and in several small towns, villages, and kibbutzim (collective settlements). The country had three main Hebrew-language daily newspapers, two published in Tel Aviv (Haaretz and Davar) and one in Jerusalem (Doar Hayom), and one important English-language daily, The Palestine Post, published in Jerusalem.⁴

The Post had been founded in Jerusalem in December 1932, only six months before Dorothy Kahn’s arrival, by Gershon Agronsky. Its distribution grew steadily from 4,000 copies in its first year; by World War II it was the second-largest Jewish newspaper in Palestine (after the Hebrew-language Davar), with an average distribution of 20,000 copies. Its record circulation was attained on D-Day, June 6, 1944, some 49,000 copies being sold.⁵ This relatively strong distribution of an English newspaper in a country where most Jewish inhabitants were Hebrew readers may be explained by the fact that some of the Post’s readers were Jews of Anglo-American and German origins. The number of the latter increased after the Nazi accession to power in 1933 triggered a sizable flow of German Jewish immigration to Palestine. Apart from local Jewish readers, the Post had non-Jewish readers as well—members of the British administration and the military and police staff posted in Palestine, of the clergy, and even of the Arab elite. Additional readers were Jewish and non-Jewish tourists. Additionally, the Post had 3,000 subscriber readers abroad. Most were Jews in Britain, South Africa, and the United States, but 300 subscribers were Egyptian Jews, most of them from Cairo and Alexandria. The paper had additional subscribers in other Middle East cities such as Beirut and Baghdad.⁶

The Palestine Post was headquartered in the building that also hosted the Hebrew-language newspaper Doar Hayom, on Hasolel Street (later Hahavatselet) in Jerusalem. It functioned as an intermediary between the Jewish society and establishment in Palestine and non-Jewish readers, on the one hand, and Jewish readers abroad on the other. As such, it served as an instrument of propaganda for the Jewish Agency, which depicted the Jewish people in a positive, vivid, and colorful way. Given the journalistic function of The Palestine Post as a combination of tour guide, ethnologist, and psychologist that was supposed to reveal a certain land to the foreign eye and expose the variety of its portraits, its tone could be sometimes critical but always positive.

On the whole, the newspaper was conceived as an elite journal, well-written and carefully edited, produced in elegant, rich, and witty English, and well-designed graphically by a team of journalists, most of whom were born and educated in England or the United States. By far and large, The Palestine Post was patterned after the American liberal press of the 1930s, first and foremost The New York Times.

Kahn & Human-Interest Stories: Conjuring Up Immigrant Society in Palestine in Print

After settling in Tel Aviv for a few months, Dorothy Kahn moved to Jerusalem and started working for The Palestine Post in August 1933 as a field reporter. Unlike some of her colleagues who remained in their comfortable offices, Kahn preferred reporting from the field, traveling around by bus and writing about Jewish and Arab activities all over the country—from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, from Upper Galilee to the Negev desert. She did not limit her coverage to ‘hard news’. Instead, she specialized in human-interest stories and retold them as features with a narrative structure, a plot, and characters. In these stories, Kahn discussed a person or people in a psychological and ethnological way. She presented people with their problems, concerns, and achievements in a manner that evoked readers’ interest, sympathy, or motivation. Sometimes a human-interest story can be a ‘story behind the story’ about an event or an historical happening; this is exactly the kind of content that Dorothy Kahn wrote.

She described from a highly perceptive and particular point of view Jewish immigrant society on one side and Arab society on the other side in the 1930s and 1940s, a time when a period of peace and coexistence transitioned into one of war and bloodshed. She visited Jewish immigrants who had just arrived in Tel Aviv from Nazi Germany, the ultraorthodox in Jerusalem, the young socialists on the Jezreel Valley kibbutzim, and the Bedouin in the Negev desert. One also finds Dorothy Kahn in Nablus interviewing Arab artisans at a soap factory or at the wedding of Crown Prince Talal, Emir Abdullah’s son, in Amman, Transjordan. One can also meet her speaking with Arab dock laborers at Jaffa port, visiting the central market in Damascus, or again striding down the large avenues of Baghdad. These feature stories so well written, so colorful, and so rich in surprising details, always written in first person and with good humor, that they kept the readers entertained. This was Kahn’s goal, but her main objective was to deliver a more profound analysis of the Jewish and Arab societies, decoding their manners, practices, beliefs and mentalities, fears, and dreams.

Dorothy Kahn published her first article in The Palestine Post on August 4, 1933 and featured a depiction of Tel Aviv that tells us much about her journalistic/ narrative strategy. The article was entitled ‘What Hitler Had Done to Tel Aviv: A Bewildered Visitor’s Impression.’ Adopting the standpoint of a traveling foreigner, she observed the streets of Tel Aviv, crowded by masses of immigrants freshly arrived from Germany: ‘The streets of Tel Aviv have been transformed by Herr Hitler. In fact, they are no longer street but Strassen […].’ She remarked that the seashore town, which resembled Atlantic City with its long promenade, changed colors as quickly as a chameleon. But she also recounted how Tel Aviv, which was once called ‘Little Odessa’ and then ‘Little Warsaw’, was then becoming ‘Little Berlin’: ‘The shops which display strings of fat, red sausages, varying in size and shape, are doing a rousing business and schnitzel has leaped into the limelight […]’.⁷

But of course, German immigrants were only one of the waves of Jewish immigration to Palestine. Kahn was astonished at the immense diversity of the country’s Jewish population. She saw a strong resemblance between American society and local Jewish society: both were defined by mass immigration and were characterized by a variety of languages and customs.

Visiting the Post Restante office in Tel Aviv in August 1933, she discovered the fascinating scene of the revival of the Babel Tower. She describes a stream of men and women of every nationality and disposition who approach the small Post Restante window in search of mail from every portion of the globe:

[…] On the days when mail arrives from Europe and America the office resembles Hyde Park […] German physicians in morning trousers, giggling American school teachers in flowered chiffon frocks; laconic Polish carpenters in shorts jostle each other in the quest for mail. Some wait nervously for money remittances, others for love letters from sweethearts from Kansas City or Bialystok; and others phlegmatically for the expected ‘All’s well, wish you were here’ from the wife […].⁸

Dorothy Kahn also discovered broad diversity among the population on the Tel Aviv beach, which still went by its French name, La Plage. The young journalist considered the beach one of the most interesting venues of the local melting pot where local inhabitants, tourists, Jews, and Arabs met. This is the scene that she depicted in mid-August 1933:

Rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief, doctor, lawyer, Arab chef, they are on the beach, all of them. The girl with the exaggerated sun tan bathing suit who would be at home on the beaches of Miami or Lido is rubbing shoulders with two Moslem women who have daringly lifted their veils for a moment to glimpse the sea. A substantial looking real estate dealer from Brooklyn applies olive oil to a newly acquired sun burn, while an Arab in the neighboring chair gather his purple silk robe about his feet and settle down to enjoy ‘the big parade’ for a few hours […].⁹

The beach reminded the writer of the beach in her hometown Atlantic City, but the scene here is populated by different figures: bearded Orthodox Jews walking along the shore, an Arab girl whose face is partly hidden, or a group of thirty scantily attired men and women sprinting down the beach in single file that has to break ranks to make way for a caravan of camels bearing sand from the south.¹⁰

Dorothy Kahn and Her Representation of Palestinian Arabs

Dorothy Kahn’s enthusiastic and optimistic attitude toward the Jewish future in Palestine clashed with the general state of mind in the United States and Western Europe, which wallowed in economic crisis following the Great Depression, and the rise of anti-democratic regimes throughout Europe, especially in Germany. Kahn had found her salvation in Palestine and was optimistic not only about the future of Zionism but also about the possibility of Jews and Arabs living together peacefully.

It is true that she was shocked by the brutal deaths of 133 Jews in the 1929 riots, but in 1933, Palestine was quiet and flourishing. A brief burst of economic prosperity had begun, spurred by the Jewish immigration from Germany. Kahn was caught up in the exuberance, believing that both peoples would benefit from the efflorescence and that the Oriental and Western cultures would establish a creative and productive dialogue.

From her early reporting one can see Dorothy Kahn’s love of the Orient, its culture, and its people. In one early piece (September 1933), she describes an Arab feast at the Muslim shrine of Nebi Rubin near Jaffa. It was part of an annual pilgrimage and festivity that lasted several weeks, she reports, attracting thousands of Arabs from all over the country.¹¹ Kahn presents her readers with a scene that could have been taken from One Thousand and One Nights:

[…] It was midnight. The moon played with the colorful scene of oriental festivity creating panorama of fantastic beauty. The silence was broken intermittently by the chanting of an ancient love song by two Arab youths who were lying on the bank of a small stream below. A caravan of camels, etched in the uncertain light, passed a nearby sand dune. Silence, and then the half mournful, half lilting dance tune of the young peasant girls who had been circling untiringly for several hours, drafted through the clear air.¹²

During the night there seems to be nothing here. But in the morning, Kahn describes a huge camp of more than 60,000 people. A real city has gone up, composed of thousands of tents, huts, and barracks and the sounds, smells, and sights of the Orient. One can find here a temporary café, restaurants, and even cinemas, a bazaar, and a marketplace. She notes that there are no social distinctions among the temporary inhabitants: the fellah, the Bedouin, and the wealthy effendi all come together wearing traditional dress and dancing, singing, and praying.¹³

Kahn is fascinated by the Arabs and their culture. She is interested in their daily routine and carefully observes their traditional practices. In one of her articles, she writes about how Fatmeh, a young Arab girl, is taught by her mother to carry a jug.¹⁴ In another, she tells her readers how she learned the secrets of artisanal soap-making in the small town of Nablus from a local Arab artisan.¹⁵

In July 1934, she probed the Arab pottery industry in Ramallah.¹⁶ She describes the small shop in that Christian-Arab town that sells everything from canned sardines to oil lamp wicks. She chats with the proprietor, a Christian Arab, about politics and religion in Palestine, cinema in America, and local pottery—clay jugs with red splotches painted on them. As she prepares to leave, he wraps her pottery in great wads of brown paper ‘so the passengers on the bus won’t stare at you.’ Invoking a New Journalism style, the inquisitive journalist tells her readers how her shopping tour in Ramallah ended. Just as her bus was about to set out, she spied a dark-haired Arab girl wearing a white shawl embroidered in red silk: ‘just what we were looking for. We leap out and purchase her handiwork from her head.’ The transaction could not be consummated, however, because the girl refused to go home bare-headed. Therefore, the author and everyone else on the bus had to wait until the girl borrowed something from a friend nearby … .¹⁷

Dorothy Kahn did not limit her visits to the narrow alleys of Jaffa, Haifa, Ramallah, and Nablus. In November 1934, she toured the great bazaar of Damascus.¹⁸ A month later, she published a very colorful article about modern and traditional Baghdad and its inhabitants, again fascinated by the craftsmanship that she found there.¹⁹ One of the highlights of her reportage on Arab society is her account of the wedding of Crown Prince Talal, son of Emir Abdullah of Transjordan, in late November 1934. Reporting from Amman, the author again brings to the readers of The Palestine Post the old taste of One Thousand and One Nights by describing the guests’ arrival at the ceremony in the small desert town, with one question on their minds: ‘What does the bride look like?’ It was a great mystery indeed; nobody had seen the Egyptian-born princess-to-be. To solve the matter, the distinguished guests sent their womenfolk—wives, daughters, sisters—to spy in the corridors of the palace. The enigma was finally cleared up after the prince’s mother invited a selected group of women to five o’clock tea at the palace. There, as if it were a theatrical production, the bride appeared—confirming the rumors of her beauty and glamor.²⁰

Dorothy Kahn and the Abu Jilda Affair – The Palestine Post Versus Filastin

Dorothy Kahn covered not only ‘soft news’ but also ‘hard news’—doing so, however, from a human-interest angle. A case in point is the Abu Jilda affair. Abu Jilda was a local bandit who evolved in the 1930s into a notorious highwayman. The British police repeatedly tried in vain to arrest him and his gang. By the end of 1933, he was the most wanted criminal in Palestine, responsible for the murder of twenty-two Arab civilians and one policeman.²¹ Slowly he became a legend and a myth among the Arab public, especially after he sent a series of his photos along with a long letter describing his ventures to the most popular Arab newspaper in Jaffa, Filastin. The photos, showing Abu Jilda dressed in traditional clothes and heavily armed with rifles and pistols, were published in the Friday and Sunday editions of the paper on January 26 and 28, 1934.²² This elevated him in the local imagination, as Dorothy Kahn put it, into the figure of a fairy-tale villain: ‘[…] Mothers of Palestine no longer resorted to the bogey man to make children eat their spinach. They just had to say ‘Abu Jilda will get you if you don’t watch out’ […].’²³ One should add that despite of his mythical and national fame, Abu Jilda never pursued any political agenda. Even so, various Arab political groups used his name to glorify anticolonial discourse and Arab nationalism. ²⁴

Dorothy Kahn reacted to the lionization of Abu Jilda in the Arab press by tackling it from a very special angle: parody. On February 2, 1934, several days after Filastin published Abu Jilda’s photos, she ran an article titled ‘Glorifying the Bandit.’ She created the imaginary scene of a secret meeting that the notorious bandit had held with her in his cave somewhere in the hills around Nablus. He stood there ‘with one hand on his trigger and the other stroking the neck of his pet white lamb.’ In his fictitious interview, Abu Jilda reveals that he is a loyal reader of The Palestine Post and a great fan of its bridge column … . His real goal, he asserts, is to get out of the banditry business and go into cinema. He wants to become a movie star and asks the journalist for tips. When asked about fellow hoodlums such as Al Capone, he refuses to discuss his contemporaries but claims that he is more photogenic than the American gangster … ²⁵

Two months later, in April 1934, Abu Jilda was arrested after a fierce battle in the hills near Nablus.²⁶ Dorothy Kahn marked the occasion by arranging a second fictive interview with him, which she reported in an article titled ‘Excursion in Interview Land: Reporter ‘Sees’ Abu Jilda.’ The imaginary scene is situated in the cave where Abu Jilda had found shelter just after he was caught and before he was hauled off to prison. Again, the point of the parody is to neutralize the effects of Abu Jilda’s mystification and heroic image in the Arab press after his last battle and capture.²⁷ In Dorothy Kahn’s story, however, Abu Jilda appears happy and relieved. He assures the interviewer that no battle had taken place before he was nabbed; in fact, he had turned himself in, seeking a more comfortable life and sending his love and flowers to everybody.²⁸

In late June 1934, Abu Jilda was sentenced to death after a two-day trial in Nablus that Kahn attended.²⁹ After the sentence was handed down, she published an article about the man.³⁰ True to form, Kahn did not report the event in the manner of ‘hard news,’ giving straight facts about the trial. Instead, she produced a human-interest story in her typical New Journalism style, insinuating herself into the story. The article begins with the editor suggesting that his journalist produce a color piece about ‘Bandits and Manacles.’ Compliantly she seats herself at her typewriter, drawing on the wealth of material accumulated during the two days of the Nablus trial and attempting to produce a portrait of ‘Bandits in Manacles.’ She hesitates, however, about choosing the angle from which she should portray them. She has already used the parody genre. Now Abu Jilda and his aide, El Armeel, had just been convicted for the murder of a policeman and twenty-two additional human beings. After the death sentence, however, she admits that while watching him with his chains clanking across the stone floor of the Nablus courthouse, she felt a bit sorry for him. For her, the two-day trial seemed more like a movie in which two men, Abu Jilda and his associate, fought for their lives. For Dorothy Kahn, it was surreal to watch the popular hero being moved from his natural environment, the exciting and vague stronghold in the hills, to the witness stand in front of four judges with their white wigs and crimson robes. It was even more surreal to hear him explaining to the judges that he carried all those weapons and ammunition for the purpose of hunting partridge and gazelle. … The judges did not buy it; Abu Jilda was executed at the end of August 1934.³¹

Throughout the Abu Jilda affair, Dorothy Kahn tried to fight the campaign of mystification of the Arab bandit, whose persona was politicized and nationalized by the Arab press, by means of parody and feature stories. The Palestine Post served in a sense as a bridge between the Jewish and the Arab elites and, as such, it conveyed the Jewish critique to the other side. However, I found no Arab response to Dorothy Kahn’s articles in the leading English-language newspaper of the Arab community in Palestine.

Dorothy Kahn During the Arab Revolt

When Dorothy Kahn was living in Tel Aviv and later in Jerusalem, she started to write her autobiography—quite an early thing to do for a woman who had not yet celebrated her thirtieth birthday. The book, titled Spring Up O Well, recounting Kahn’s early life in America and her path to Zionism and Palestine, was published in 1936 by Henry Holt and Co. in London.³² In 1936, Kahn left the country for a year to promote the American edition of her book, which was published in September 1936 in New York. The American edition was so successful that it saw a second printing in 1938. Kahn spent most of that time on the East coast, whence she sent regular dispatches to The Palestine Post about America during the Depression, a country trying to forget its day-to-day troubles by entertaining itself with the latest modern mass-media productions.³³

Returning to Palestine in the summer of 1937, Kahn found the happy and prosperous country that she had left a year earlier totally transformed. In April 1936, a violent nationalist Arab revolt had erupted suddenly in reaction to Jewish immigration and the Balfour Declaration. The Arabs demanded a halt to the immigration and sought the declaration of Arab independence in all of Mandatory Palestine. Unlike the 1929 riots, the 1936 insurrection was lengthy, continuing until March 1939. While directed simultaneously against the Jewish civilian population, the British Army, and the Mandate Government, it was also a bloody internal civil war between moderate and radical Arabs. In all, the revolt claimed the lives of 5,000 Arabs, 400 Jews, and 200 British. Most Jews who perished did so as a result of Arab guerrilla attacks on villages and towns or while on the roads.³⁴

During the Arab revolt, Dorothy Kahn left Jerusalem for two years to live in Kibbutz Givat Brenner, near Tel Aviv. Despite the violence, however, she continued to travel all over the country using local bus services and covered the conflict as a field reporter.

One of her most touching articles during this period concerned her own kibbutz, titled ‘How We Buried our Dead—It happened in Givat Brenner.’ It was a typical human experience story, written as a personal testimony. Kahn starts out by telling her readers that she has been sitting at her typewriter in her small room on the kibbutz telling the story of the funeral of two members of the kibbutz, Jacob and Alfred, who were killed by Arabs while driving to a nearby village. Kahn described how the corpses were taken into the settlement: ‘Word spread quickly. Work was stopped, the horror was unspeakable. Dead laborers and policemen and soldiers are commonplace these days. And yet here were Jacob and Alfred whom we had asked to pass the bread at breakfast time. Shot down like rats while on their way to peaceful work […].’ What followed was the retelling, in low intonation, of their last-hour heroism: how Jacob in his little wagon was ambushed and Alfred, clutching his rifle until his dying breath, saved his comrade’s life.

Then came the funeral scene, which took place in the late afternoon. Kahn depicted the lengthy slow procession to the cemetery uphill on the outskirts of the settlement. She described the two wooden coffins at the head of the procession, followed by the widows and hundreds of kibbutz members. Kahn peered into the faces of the people walking beside her, the faces of those who had come with Jacob to plough fields when there were no fields to plough, to tear away rocks, and to plant vineyards. Now she tells her readers what she sees in the faces of these founding fathers of the kibbutz: bitterness, searing grief, resentment, and expressions like bronze masks that she could not read.

Dorothy Kahn creates her own myth of the Zionist hero. As we have seen, she tried to demythologize the image of the Arab hero, Abu Jilda, by using parody. Here, instead, she uses the genre of pathos to build the legend of the Jewish pioneer who sacrifices himself for the revival of the Hebrew nation.

In Dorothy Kahn’s story, however, the real legendary heroes are the Jewish women. After the procession reaches the cemetery and the two coffins are lowered into the newly dug graves, the silence is broken by a steady voice that seems to rise from the pit itself. It is that of Hava, Jacob’s widow. Kahn describes the diminutive woman, dressed simply and eyes dry, standing there in front of the large crowd and speaking to her dead husband:

With simple and eloquent words, she promises him that we will build this land. Hava talks on for a few minutes in her simplicity, in her eloquence. A small figure in her blue blouse and a pair of shorts standing on the rim of that open grave like a symbol. She seems part of the flame of the sun which is dropping behind the plain. Her voice is low; her word as simple as prophecy. Hava, who jested with me across the purple vineyard a few weeks ago, stands now on the rim of this grave, speaking like Deborah on Mt. Tabor […]. ³⁵

Dorothy Kahn, the young cynical hedonistic American journalist who used to publish clever interviews about gangsters and corrupt politicians in Atlantic City during the Roaring Twenties, found herself ten years later, in the late 1930s, in a complete different scene, in a small cemetery on a hilltop in Palestine, gazing in admiration at a kibbutz member who reminded her of an ancient biblical heroine … .

Kahn continued to cover Jewish society during the Arab revolt. In her articles, she describes the Jewish peasants and workers fighting to continue their daily life despite the violence, as in her account the honey-producing kibbutz. and the celebration of the Jewish festival of Hanukkah in another collective settlement under fire.³⁶

In late May 1938, Dorothy Kahn traveled to the northern town of Haifa to cover the trial of three young Jews from Rosh Pinah, a village in the Galilee, who had been accused of throwing a bomb at an Arab bus in an unsuccessful bid to avenge the murder of fellow villagers by Arab neighbors several days earlier. Now facing judgment before a military court in Haifa, they risked the death penalty even though their bomb had not gone off.³⁷ As she wrote the piece in the form of a feature story, Dorothy Kahn realized that she had already met one of the accused several months earlier when she had visited his village, where he proudly showed her its tobacco fields.³⁸ She remembered him explaining how complicated it was to grow tobacco in the Galilee and how much work the whole village had to invest in it. Now it was difficult to grasp that he and his two friends were on trial for their lives before a military tribunal, a proceeding that ended with the death sentence and execution of one of the three, Shlomo Ben Yossef.³⁹ As in the case of Abu Jilda’s trial, Kahn deeply rued the loss of life. Without trying to justify the men’s actions, she emphasized the contrast between the desire for life symbolized by the struggle to cultivate the tobacco and the violent reality of assassinations, vendettas, trials, and executions.

Dorothy Kahn’s articles during the Arab revolt, however, represented more than a heroic struggle in a land covered with blood and agony. From time to time amid the daily massacres, she found time to hand her readers a ‘soft’ piece of information. A case in point is her September 1938 article about the inauguration of a new zoo in Tel Aviv, crowned with a jocular headline: ‘A Zoo Without an Elephant and a Rabbi as the Lion’s Keeper.’⁴⁰ Here she told the incredible story of the Chief Rabbi of Copenhagen (Rabbi Mordecai Schornstein), who resigned his post in Denmark, immigrated to Palestine, opened a pet shop in Tel Aviv, and later spearheaded the opening of the first real zoo in Palestine, now transferred to a new location. The inauguration of the relocated zoo, designed by the German-Jewish architect who was responsible for building the new Dresden Zoo, who did this in the middle of the Arab revolt, is for Dorothy Kahn the real sign of victory for the country’s Jewish society.

Kahn and Post-WWII Palestine: Straddling American and Jewish Journalistic Spheres

On the eve of World War II, Palestine became peaceful again. The Arab revolt was crushed by the British Army in the spring of 1939 and its leader, Amin Al-Husseini, found refuge in Nazi Germany. Paradoxically, Mandatory Palestine enjoyed tranquility and prosperity as long as the war lasted. It was also a happy time for Dorothy Kahn. In late 1938, while on one of her journalistic outings, she met the Orientalist and archeologist Pessah Bar-Adon (1907–1985), a colorful adventurer who had lived among the Bedouin in the Jordan Valley, dressing in traditional Bedouin attire and studying the Arab lifestyle. They married in 1939 and moved to Jerusalem, where their only son, Doron, was born in 1940.⁴¹ In 1943, they relocated to a new address in the Jezreel Valley village of Merhavia, in the north of the country, where they lived until Dorothy’s death in August 1950.

During the 1940s, Dorothy Kahn continued to work extensively for The Palestine Post but also contributed articles to American-Jewish newspapers such as The!, The Jewish Advocate, and The Journal of Jewish Life and Letters. Her submissions described daily life in the Jewish villages and towns but also continued to document the everyday lives of the Arabs and, especially, the Bedouin, now using her husband’s good connections.⁴² From the mid-1940s onward, she wrote at length about the postwar immigration of masses of European Jews and the British authorities’ attempts to arrest and detain them.⁴³ Later on, she wrote about the events that led to the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948⁴⁴ and the Israel-Arab war that erupted that year.⁴⁵ When the war ended and the building of the civil state commenced, she wrote about these developments, too, in The Palestine Post. While covering these national events from her personal point of view, she also continued to report on daily life in the villages and the kibbutzim.⁴⁶ In 1950, Dorothy Kahn contracted a kidney disease that was incurable at the time. She died on August 7, 1950, and was buried in the small cemetery at Merhavia.

* * *

Dorothy Kahn was an outstanding figure in the journalism landscape in Palestine during the 1930 and the 1940. There were other female journalists in Palestine at the time, but they worked mostly for local Hebrew women’s magazines or occupied editing positions. Dorothy Kahn’s case was different. She stood out by the mere fact that she was an active field correspondent for a leading daily newspaper, wrote for the English-speaking general public without distinction, men and women, Jews and non- Jews, living both in Palestine and in the English-speaking world. Her cosmopolitanism went hand in hand with enthusiasm about Palestine being a country where Jews and Arabs could live peacefully together.

Dorothy Kahn spent seventeen years as a field reporter for the Palestine Post, traveling all over Mandatory Palestine. She was very popular among her readers due to the particular journalistic genre that she used, the human-interest feature story. Her articles were memorable for two reasons: the quality of her writing and her ability to put her finger on the nerve centers of the Jewish and the Arab societies. She was graced with the ability to decode the practices, habits, manners, beliefs, fears, and aspirations of both societies in her writing. In her first years in Palestine, she adopted a point of view of a traveler – her own to some extent. By writing in English in a country that spoke and wrote in Hebrew and Arabic, she was able to see reality in a different way, ignore the ‘hard news,’ and perceive reality from a larger perspective that was at once more human and more universal. But after the outbreak of the Arab revolt in 1936, she took side and adopted the Jewish nationalistic point of view about the conflict. She replaced parody and sarcasm by pathos and through her articles in the Palestine Post, she participated in the building of the new Zionist mythology, spreading it to Jewish and non-Jewish readership inside and outside the country. She was not objective; she favored the Zionist side explicitly and participated, using parody and pathos, in building new national mythology. Throughout her years of reporting, however, she somehow remained an outsider, adopting the point of view of a traveler. By writing in English in a country that spoke and wrote in Hebrew and Arabic, she was able to see reality in a different way, ignore the ‘hard news,’ and perceive reality from a larger perspective that was at once more human and more universal.

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Notes on contributors

Ouzi Elyada

Ouzi Elyada, a professor emeritus, University of Haifa, Department of General History and Department of Communication. His research Interests include media history, journalism history and tabloidization. He has published History of the Popular Hebrew Press and Hebrew Popular Publishing, 19th–20th Century, History of the French Popular Press and Popular Cultural French Industry, 18th–20th Century. Recent book publication, Ouzi Elyada, Hebrew Popular Journalism, Birth and Development in Ottoman Palestine, London and N.Y, Routledge, 2019. 318p.

Notes

1 Kahn, Spring Up O Well, 30-65, Carmel-Hakim and Rosenfeld, Writing Palestine, 15–25.

2 Cohen, Year Zero, 12–35. Elyada, “A Nexus of Sensationalism”, 114–33.

3 Kahn, “Resent British Palestine Edict … ,” Atlantic City, November 6, 1930.

4 On the Hebrew Press, see Elyada, “Economic Analysis of an Elite Journal”, 57–84, Naor, Davar, Elyada, “The Confrontation”, 37–48.

5 Zvielli, “The Jerusalem Post”, 37–40.

6 Ibid.

7 Kahn, “What Hitler Had Done to Tel Aviv,” The Palestine Post, August 4, 1933.

8 Idem. “Tower of Babel and a Poste Restante,” The Palestine Post, August 9, 1933.

9 Idem, “By The Water of Tel Aviv—Coming Down to the Sea to Bathe,” The Palestine Post, August 15, 1933.

10 For a description of Tel Aviv society in 1933 by Dorothy Kahn, see Carmel-Hakim, “One year out of a century”, 113–24.

11 Kahn, “Scenes in Nebi Rubin,” The Palestine Post, September 12, 1933.

12 Ibid.

13 Ibid.

14 Kahn, “Behind the Scenes of a Family Tradition, Fatmeh Learns to Carry a Jug,” The Palestine Post, June 2, 1935.

15 Idem, “Nablus Soap is Best, A Conviction of Generation from Master to Gamin,” The Palestine Post, June 5, 1935.

16 Idem, ‘‘Ramallah Pottery and USA Reminiscences,” The Palestine Post, July 25, 1934.

17 Ibid.

18 Kahn, “Bazaar in Damascus,” The Palestine Post, November 20, 1934.

19 Idem, “Old Baghdad and the New,” The Palestine Post, December 14, 1934.

20 Idem, “Umm Tallal, The Emira’s Drawing Room on Her Son’s Wedding Day,” The Palestine Post, November 29, 1934.

21 “Your Money or Your Life, Abu Jilda’s Threat to Wealthy Merchants”, The Palestine Post, January 25, 1934. On the Abu Jilda Affaire, see, Winder, “Abu Jilda”, 308–20.

22 Filastin, January 26, 1934, 1; Filastin, January 28, 1924, 1.

23 Kahn, “Bandits in Manacles, Reporter Admits Defeat,” The Palestine Post, June 28, 1934.

24 Winder, “Abu Jilda”, 313–7.

25 Kahn, “Glorifying the Bandit, Dorothy Kahn Interviews Abu Jilda,” The Palestine Post, February 2, 1934

26 “Abu Jilda Captured,” The Palestine Post, April 15, 1934.

27 Filastin, April 14, 1934.

28 Kahn, “Excursion in Interview Land, Reporter ‘Sees’ Abu Jilda,” The Palestine Post, April 18, 1934.

29 “Abu Jilda and Armeet Sentenced to Death,” The Palestine Post, June 27, 1934.

30 Kahn, “Bandits in Manacles, Reporter Admits Defeat,” The Palestine Post, June 28, 1934.

31 “End of Abu Jilda, Notorious Highwaymen Executed,” The Palestine Post, August 22, 1934.

32 Kahn, Spring Up O Well, London and New York, Henry Holt and Co. 1936, 2nd edition, New York, 1938.

33 Kahn, “Palestine in Radio City,” The Palestine Post, January 14, 1937, “Between Sunday Night Broadcasts—Eddie Cantor: Comedian and Campaigner,” The Palestine Post, January 31, 1937.

34 Hughes, “The Banality of Brutality”, 314–54. Norris, “Repression and Rebellion”, 25–45.

35 Kahn, “How we buried our dead", The Palestine Post, September, 19, 1938.

36 Idem, “Flowing with Honey: How It’s Done in a Jewish Settlement,” The Palestine Post, August 30, 1938, Idem, “Shadows at the Candle Lighting—Hanukka in a Collective in 1938,” Palestine Post, December 22, 1938.

37 “Three Jews on Trial under Emergency Regulations—Rosh Pinah Youths before Haifa Military Court,” The Palestine Post, May 25, 1928; “Prosecution Case Closed in Rosh Pinah Shooting Trail,” Palestine Post, May 29, 1938.

38 Kahn, “Tobacco and Bombs—Military Court Drama,” The Palestine Post, May 29, 1938.

39 Idem, “2 Condemned to Die in Rosh Pinah Trial, Third Accused Sent to Insane Asylum,” The Palestine Post, June 6, 1938; idem, “Death Sentence Confirmed—Other Rosh Pinah Prisoner’s Sentence Commuted,” The Palestine Post, June 26, 1938; idem, “Ben Yossef Doomed—All Appeals for Reprieve Fail—A Community in Grief—Curfew in Jerusalem,” The Palestine Post, June 29, 1938; idem, “Shlomo Ben Yossef Executed in Acre—Burial in Rosh Pinah—First Jew to Be Hanged in Holy Land in Centuries,” The Palestine Post, June 30, 1938.

40 Kahn, “Zoo without an Elephant and a Rabbi as the Lion’s Keeper,” The Palestine Post, September 25, 1938.

41 Bar-Adon fils wrote about his parents in his own autobiography, Bar-Adon, My Parents’ Garments.

42 Kahn, “Bedouin Etiquette,” The Palestine Post, April 21, 1942.

43 Idem, “Alice in Refuge Land,” The Palestine Post, April 23, 1943, “Youth from the Murder Camp—Little Blue Number,” The Palestine Post, October 8, 1945.

44 Idem, “Committee in Upper Galilee—At the Source of the Jordan River,” The Palestine Post, July 2, 1947.

45 Idem, “Emek Works Double Shifts,” The Palestine Post, April 7, 1948.

46 Idem, “Emek Telephone”, The Palestine Post, December 21, 1944, “Shearing ‘Bees,’” May 17, 1945, “The Hule Swampland,” January 16, 1946.