I’m not going to bury the lede: After 22 years as an editor at J., I’ll be retiring on May 1.
I thought I’d be feeling pensive and even relaxed toward the end, but the opposite is true. We’ve got stories to cover! Chop-chop!
“Burying the lede” is a term editors use when writers take too long to get to the point. You don’t want to make readers dig for it.
I’ve been scattering such pearls across the J. newsroom so that one day, someone will use an old-school phrase like “nut graf,” “stet” or “cq,” and no one will remember why, other than that’s what SueB (as I’m known) used to say.
It was 1987 when I was hired as a copyeditor at what was then the Jewish Bulletin. I was 26, living in a $520-a-month studio apartment in the Richmond District and driving a 1967 VW Bug that popped out of second gear. I’d had a conventional Jewish upbringing in San Francisco — Sunday school, BBYO, Camp Ramah, confirmation, Israel trip — but was no longer “involved” in the Jewish community. Suddenly, I was involved again and in an entirely new way.
My first seven years at the newspaper overlapped with some historic events. The first intifada began the same year I did. The Gulf War started in January 1991 while I was in Tel Aviv on a “young journalists” trip. We had to wear gas masks and sit inside “sealed” rooms as Iraq fired Scud missiles at Israel. (That was also the year Clarence Thomas was voted onto the Supreme Court — not a Jewish story on its own, but a bunch of staff members watched the confirmation hearings in disgust on the tiny TV in editor Marc Klein’s office.) In June 1993, I went on a Jewish journalists’ trip to Tunisia organized by its tourism ministry, where our group wrangled an epic interview with Yasser Arafat. That was also the year of the Oslo Accords and the historic Arafat-Rabin handshake on the White House lawn.
Despite all of that excitement, I was ready for something new. In 1994, I went on to work at the San Francisco Chronicle, establish a freelance career, start a school library and raise a family. Then in 2011, a full-time job opened up at J. at a time I really needed one. So began my second act, 17 years after the first one had ended.
I’ve had my share of titles here: copyeditor, copy chief, senior editor, managing editor and, for a spell, interim editor, during which I led the newsroom through Oct. 7, 2023, and its aftermath. By far, it was the most challenging, heartrending period of all.
Over the 22 years, by my calculations, I’ve worked on 900 print issues, copyedited 15,000 stories, crafted many thousands of headlines and written a bunch of columns and Q&As.
I’ve come to know what brings joy to local Jewish communities and to appreciate how we are connected despite our differences. In just the last few weeks, I’ve talked to a 94-year-old who will celebrate her bat mitzvah days from now, helped choose whimsical Purim photos taken by children and edited colorful stories about a Deadhead seder, pumpernickel bagels and a masculine-centered moon ritual.
I haven’t danced under the moon myself. Maybe I should.
I’ve had some beautiful moments at J., but none more profound than receiving an email a few years ago from someone I’d known as a kid. Marcia’s family lived up the hill from mine in the Sunset District, and we’d all carpool to Congregation Beth Sholom on Sunday mornings. She wrote to me at the height of the pandemic, when nothing felt normal, and told me about a book of Raggedy Ann stories she’d purchased for her granddaughter at a used bookstore on Irving Street.
She had it for quite a while before she noticed an inscription inside: “To Sue with love, Mom & Dad, Nov. 17, 1964.” Underneath it was scribbled “Sue B.” with a childish drawing of Batman. “I read the inscription and thought maybe it was your old book from many years ago. Wouldn’t that be the biggest coincidence?” she wrote.
There was no doubt it was my book, my drawing (I loved Batman) and my mom’s message for my 4th birthday. Marcia sent it to me soon after, with a lovely card.
My mom, Miriam, would have been exceedingly proud of my career, but she died when I was 22. It felt like some kind of miracle to hold this book again, a gift from her that, inconceivably, had circulated in my old neighborhood and found its way back to me more than 55 years later. Full circle.
The day I walked into the Jewish Bulletin, I never could have imagined a day nearly 40 years later when I’d be walking out of the same place. I just hope that I’ve left enough pearls behind that my co-workers — my Jewish community — will see them glowing and tell a story.