Interviewing a victim of the synagogue hostage crisis in Texas last year helped CNN anchor and chief political correspondent Dana Bash reach a conclusion about how Jews should fight antisemitism.
At The Soul Center’s annual “Wit, Wine & Wisdom” event last night, Bash said she was struck by something Jeff Cohen, president of Colleyville’s Beth Israel, told her for the CNN special, “Rising Hate: Antisemitism in America.”
“He said he never wore a kippah in public before [the standoff], and now he does,” she said. “You can’t hide. You have to normalize Judaism. … We just have to be vigilant and think about safety and what’s around us. In the past, Jews tended to say, ‘Shh! Don’t rock the boat,’ when there was an antisemitic incident. But we have to speak up, be proud and be loud, and I learned that from him.”
The great-granddaughter of Hungarian Jews killed at Auschwitz, Bash was the featured speaker at The Soul Center’s signature event, held at Pikesville’s Beth El Congregation with an audience of approximately 500.
During the Mar. 2 event, Bash, 51, a New York native, and her longtime friend, Beth El’s Rabbi Dana Saroken, founder and spiritual director of The Soul Center, also talked about their careers and personal journeys as Jewish women.
The Soul Center, aka The Alvin & Lois Lapidus Center for Healing & Spirituality, is a spiritual startup and innovation hub that engages Baltimore’s Jewish community and beyond. The center, which opened in November of 2016 and is based on the Beth El campus, runs 500 programs annually, attracting 19,000 visitors.
During their wide-ranging conversation, seated in chairs on a stage and sipping wine, Rabbi Saroken noted that Bash played a major role in her decision to join the clergy.
“You and I were parked outside the Israeli Embassy [in D.C.] in the old station wagon my dad bought for $300, and I said to you, ‘I think I’m going to go to rabbinical school,’” she recalled. “You were the first person I ever told. And you said one word that I needed to hear and start my journey — ‘Duh.’”
After the audience’s laughter and applause subsided, Bash joked, “My high-brow verbal abilities!”
Rabbi Saroken asked Bash, who belongs to Temple Micah in D.C., about how she developed her strong Jewish identity.
“I think it started with my maternal grandfather, who came here from Austria, and my grandmother, who came from Hungary,” she said. “I think my connection to Judaism is through my family, and I learned that we are a religion and a people. As I got older, the spiritual [component] became more clear.”
Bash also said her son, Jonah, played a role in her Jewish identity and spiritual growth. A couple of years ago when he was 10 and asked what he wanted for Chanukah, Jonah requested a Star of David necklace, Bash said. She did not initially think the request was serious until he inquired about the necklace in the middle of the eight-day holiday. Her son explained he was proud to be Jewish and wanted to be like his Christian classmates who wear crosses and crucifixes.
“Out of the mouths of babes,” said Bash. “So we got it for him and he still wears it, and it was a lesson for me. He had that sixth sense that we have to be proud.”
Bash said working on “Rising Hate,” which came out last August, was a career highlight. “I feel so lucky to have able to work on that special,” she said. “The bad news is that we could probably update it every week.”
While working on the hourlong special, Bash said she learned a lot about the origins and nature of antisemitism from Holocaust author Dr. Deborah Lipstadt, who serves as the U.S. special envoy for monitoring and combating antisemitism. In particular, she asked Lipstadt about the myriad conspiracy theories against Jews over the centuries.
“Conspiracy theories are very scary and pervasive and hard to overcome,” Bash said. “What I learned is that when antisemitism is on the rise, it tends to be a canary in a coalmine. It usually indicates that a society is in trouble, and we’re always around [for blame].”
Bash said she receives great pleasure from lighting Shabbat candles with her family every Friday night, as well as from the Jewish principle of l’dor v’dor, from generation to generation.
“I think about that a lot,” she said. “I came to motherhood late in life, and I think about how I have this tradition and it’s been through so much and is still here. I mean, how lucky are we, to keep these traditions going for so long?”
At one point in the program, Bash was asked to name the most interesting individual she has interviewed during her career. Her response was the late Georgia congressman and civil rights activist John Lewis, whom she accompanied in 2018 during a bipartisan tour of civil rights landmarks in the south.
In particular, Bash recalled interviewing Lewis on the Edmund Pettit Bridge in Selma, Alabama, the site of the infamous 1965 civil rights protest organized by Lewis where he was beaten by Alabama State Troopers.
“Talk about spiritual,” Bash said. “I’ll never forget it. To see the kind of forgiveness he had, it was truly in his heart. Kindness and forgiveness. He was such a special man.”
Bash also discussed the emergence of women in the media over the past three decades, noting that at the outset of her career pregnant journalists were not allowed in the newsroom. Currently, she said five of her CNN colleagues in the newsroom are pregnant.
“Of course, things are so much better and easier now than when I started at CNN 30 years ago,” Bash said. “Now, there’s a true sisterhood among women [in media], and I work with so many amazing women. There’s none of that ‘cat fight’ stuff. There is competition, but it’s gender-neutral. We support each other.”
On a related note, Bash said she was thrilled that during the most recent election cycle, the fashion choices of women candidates tended not to be reported by the media. “Isn’t that great?!” she said.
Calling herself as an “old-school” journalist who attempts to understand political perspectives from both sides of the aisle, Bash described the trend of reporters and media organizations abandoning objectivity in their reporting as “disturbing.”
“I believe we [CNN] are right down the middle,” she said. “During the Trump years, we had a president who was saying things that were not true, so we had to call it out. We weren’t against the [Republican] party, we were against lies. … My current mission is to show the country and the world that despite [rampant partisanship], there really is a middle and people are working in the middle who don’t always get seen [by the media and public].”
Bash said she draws a great deal of hope for the future by talking to young people around the country. “They are so empathetic and far ahead of even our own generation,” she said. “They don’t see differences or colors. If one of their friends is gay, so what? To me, that’s pretty remarkable.”
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