After an 18-month nationwide search, J. The Jewish News of Northern California has hired Chanan Tigay as its new editor-in-chief.
Tigay, a journalist, author and professor, is “perfectly positioned to navigate J. through the current crises and challenges in the Jewish community, from antisemitism to an increasingly dispersed and unaffiliated Jewish community,” J. CEO Jo Ellen Green Kaiser said Monday.
The editor-in-chief position doesn’t open up at J. often. The nonprofit publication’s previous editor, Sue Fishkoff, retired in mid-2022 after an 11-year tenure.
Managing editor Sue Barnett, who took on the role of interim editor during the search, has returned to her former position. She led the newsroom through the aftermath of the Oct. 7 Hamas massacre, one of the most challenging reporting experiences in J.’s history.
“I’m excited about the ideas and the fresh perspective that Chanan is bringing to the newsroom,” Barnett said. “He comes from a fascinating background that is already expanding the way we think about the Jewish community.”
Tigay, who has worked for Agence France-Presse, the Jerusalem Report and the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, said he sought this job for several reasons. Chief among them was his shock over Oct. 7 and the subsequent surge in antisemitism around the world, including a dramatic spike in the Bay Area.
These subjects have dominated the pages of J. for the past five months.
“After Oct. 7, it became clear to me that this was a moment when Jews more than ever need to be informed about issues specific to them,” said Tigay, who started at J. last month. “Antisemitism has raised its ugly head again, and we can’t skate along without having all possible information at hand.”
Tigay, who moved to the Bay Area in 2006, is an associate professor of creative writing at San Francisco State University. He will continue to hold that job while working for J.
“I love being at S.F. State,” he said. “A large number of our students are the first in their families to attend college. They are really bright and motivated.”
Serving as editor-in-chief of the Bay Area’s Jewish newspaper is a role with the “potential to have a great deal of impact,” he added. “J. has already been doing a great job in getting news out there. So it’s exciting for me to join a publication where my job would not be rescuing it, but rather thinking of ways we can expand the portfolio of what we do and what we offer to our readers.”
It’s extremely important we own the antisemitism story and cover the amazing things Jews in the Bay Area do.
J. reporters won five San Francisco Press Club awards and 11 American Jewish Press Association awards last year, including AJPA’s 2023 award for best newspaper. Tigay said he has long admired the publication’s coverage of hard news, as well as its focus on arts, culture, religious life and Jewish innovation. He wants to expand J.’s work in all of these areas.
“There are so many exciting things being done by Jews in the Bay Area, whether in music, film, literature, politics, academia or tech,” said Tigay, 48. “I don’t want that to be lost in the shadow of antisemitism. It’s extremely important we own the antisemitism story and cover the amazing things Jews in the Bay Area do with an equal amount of passion and fervor. I want to recognize, highlight and celebrate the positive and proactive things going on in our community and the people doing them.”
Tigay’s father is a Bible scholar and professor emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania. His mother, also retired, is former executive director of Philadelphia’s Auerbach Central Agency for Jewish Education. Born in Jerusalem while his father was on sabbatical, Tigay grew up dividing his time between Israel and Philadelphia. He is a dual citizen of Israel and the United States and a fluent Hebrew speaker.
After graduating from Penn with a degree in political science, Tigay tried his hand at acting but was drawn to journalism. He worked first for the Long Island Jewish World, gaining experience interviewing political figures such as Hillary Clinton, John McCain and Joe Lieberman.
Once the second intifada broke out in Israel and the Palestinian territories in 2000, Tigay felt compelled to return to Israel. He was hired by Agence France-Presse to cover the crisis for its English-language service, an experience he described as “almost literally a trial by fire.”
“I did have to cover ugly things,” he said of the intifada, during which Palestinian terror bombings of buses and restaurants became common occurrences. “It was an incredible lesson in journalism.”
From there, Tigay attended Columbia University to earn a master of fine arts degree in creative writing. This opened new doors for him as a freelance writer for outlets such as the New Yorker, the Atlantic, Smithsonian, GQ, Newsweek, the Wall Street Journal, New York magazine, San Francisco Chronicle, the Jerusalem Post and BBC.
Tigay was awarded an investigative reporting fellowship at UC Berkeley in 2011 and a nonfiction fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University in 2019. He taught writing at Stanford University starting in 2008 before joining SFSU’s faculty in 2012.
He wrote “The Lost Book of Moses: The Hunt for the World’s Oldest Bible,” which told the true story of a 19th-century Jerusalem antiquities dealer who claimed to have obtained an ancient copy of the Book of Deuteronomy decades before the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The 2016 book won the Anne & Robert Cowan Writer’s Prize and was a finalist for the Sami Rohr Book Prize.
Tigay lives in San Francisco with his wife, Molly Antopol, who is a novelist and an assistant professor of English at Stanford. They have two children.
As for J.’s future, Tigay already has ideas.
“I’d like to see change in the variety of products we offer,” he said. “I would like us to move into the podcasting business. That’s where a lot of people are getting much of their news and other information. I would like to see J. sponsor live interview series with great writers and thinkers, as a way to both inform and to gather members of the community. I would like us to do more investigative series where we’re taking a deep look at important issues facing our community. And I want to make sure we have a multiplicity of voices reflected in our pages.”