Warning of the challenges current journalists face, Robert Siegel, Moment’s special literary contributor and the former NPR cohost of All Things Considered said reporters have to, “once again, do their basic job of sorting out fact from fiction, in a strange age when we have a president, or will soon have one, who really doesn’t care.” Siegel spoke to a crowd of 300 as he accepted the Inspirational Journalism Award at Moment’s 2024 benefit and awards dinner.
“As a Jew, I’m also disconcerted. If you’d asked me when I first came to Moment a few years ago, ‘Would we see a time when acts and words of antisemitism that had been consigned to the fringes of American life and to the shadows would lose their shame?’ They are being avowed publicly in our country and others, and it worries me,” Siegel said.
Robert Siegel and Moment Editor-in-Chief Nadine Epstein.
Siegel suggested a way to fight back is by pointing out that these behaviors mimic some of the worst historic antisemitic actors. “We should not only point out that they’re courting Nazism, but that we are Americans, and we should be vigorous in our affirmation and our defense of the rights that have been achieved which have made our country the envy of the world,” Siegel said. “We should do that with confidence and with love for our fellow Americans who have also fought in their own way for those very freedoms.”
Siegel was introduced by Moment colleagues Amy E. Schwartz, the magazine’s book and opinion editor, and Suzanne Borden, vice president for public affairs and programming and producer of MomentLive!
“After all these introductions, even I’m a little interested in hearing what I have to say,” Siegel joked. “This guy they’ve described is amazing. I can’t say that I fully recognize him.”
Although this year he was an honoree, for the last ten years, Siegel has been the emcee at the annual gala. He says that by working with Moment, he has been given the opportunity to fully be himself. “It drew upon two facets of my identity, I’m a journalist and I’m a Jew,” Siegel said. “And so I entered into Jewish journalism.”
Top image: Robert Siegel accepts the Inspirational Journalism Award (Photos by Betty Adler).