Everyone has an opinion, but few get paid to express it. Jeff Jacoby, the Orthodox Jewish, conservative-minded columnist at the overwhelmingly liberal Boston Globe, is one of the select few. And whether readers love his column or hate it, when it comes to Jacoby, everybody’s got an opinion.
The reason of course that I’d never gotten to ask that question is that Jeff Jacoby is a rarity if not a singularity among op-ed writers on the editorial pages of a big-city daily: He’s a frum Jew. And not just at any newspaper but a famously liberal one the largest in famously liberal Boston and owned by the equally left-leaning New York Times. Jeff is virtually the Globe’s lone conservative voice or as one wag put it he’s its ‘conservative in captivity.’
So why is he a stalwart member (and along with teenage son Caleb a sometimes baal korei) of the Young Israel of Brookline’s early Shabbos morning minyan? His answer is trademark Jeff Jacoby straightforward and Midwest commonsensical: “I’ve been a confirmed hashkamah guy for a long time. I just hate to waste the time. But my wife has a different explanation: She’s says I’m antisocial.”
The title “op-ed columnist” often conjures an image of a hyper-intellectual pontificator. But this Cleveland Ohio native is as down-to-earth as they come. He’s what one might call the “un-columnist.”
To be sure Jacoby whose columns are regularly cited and discussed in right-wing circles — and lambasted in left-wing ones — pulls his intellectual weight as a serious conservative thinker whose work has garnered awards like the Eric Breindel Award for Excellence in Opinion Journalism. His mode of persuasion though is not through displays of cerebral fireworks but by means of reasoned and reasonable thinking well supported by a full array of sources in law history and science. The experience of reading his columns is a bit like inviting an amiable learned and world-wise uncle — button-down sweater and all — into one’s living room for a fireside chat.
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