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July 27, 2001/Av 7, 5761, Vol. 53, No.42
Publisher Graham mourned
DEBRA RUBIN
Washington Jewish Week
Three subjects were taboo in Katharine Graham's childhood home: money, sex and her father's Jewishness.
So wrote the legendary Washington Post publisher, who died July 16, in her 1997 memoirs, "Personal History."
Her father, Eugene Meyer, was descended from a Jewish family in Alsace-Lorraine, France, whose numbers included rabbis and civic leaders.
Graham's funeral service was held July 23 at Washington National Cathedral, an Episcopal church. The Post reported she had no religious affiliation, but sometimes attended the Episcopal Christ Church in Georgetown.
Although Judaism played no obvious role in Graham's life, there were times she was keenly aware of her Jewish blood. She wrote, for example, of her family vacation home in Mount Kisco, N.Y., saying she didn't realize until she was older that the family had little or no social life there.
"Only later did I learn that my parents had suffered from local anti-Semitism."
Although her father, who bought The Post in 1933, was never "overtly religious," nor was he a Zionist, Graham wrote, he did support Jewish causes and charities.
One of those was the District of Columbia Jewish Community Center, and in 1939, he and his wife, Agnes, donated a wing to the building.
When the DCJCC began a fund-raising campaign to renovate the building, Graham followed in her father's footsteps. Both she personally and The Washington Post, through its corporate donations and through its foundation, were major contributers to the center.
Meyer Mickelson, DCJCC executive director, said she saw Graham's support stemming from her "identification of (the DCJCC) with her parents, which was important to her, and because The Post is dedicated to the revitalization of the nation's cities."
Graham also contributed to The Jewish Federation of Greater Washington, where she was an annual Major Gifts contributor and achieved Lion of Judah status.
Graham visited Israel several times. "The overriding thing I remember was her absolutely insatiable curiosity about the country, the people and the politics," said Bill Claiborne, who was The Post's Israel bureau chief at the time of her 1980 visit.
That 1980 visit to Israel was around the time some in the pro-Israel community were blasting The Post for what they saw as the paper's bias against Israel a charge that was frequently made against the paper back into the 1970s.
"I was the object of a lot of that criticism because of a series I did on the West Bank," Claiborne said, which detailed Israel's treatment of Palestinians, much of it in a harsh light.
But former Ambassador Zalman Shoval recalled an editorial board meeting in 1990. "I raised the question of why does The Washington Post always refer to the Israeli government as the rightist Shamir government or the extreme rightist government. She began to reflect and she asked (her staff), 'Why do we do this? Maybe the ambassador is right.' "
For a long time after that meeting, Shoval said, "that label was dropped" on the news pages "because she accepted it showed a sort of prejudice."
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