Peter Kalis

Special to the Post-Gazette

October 26, 2023

In the North­ern Pan­han­dle of West Vir­ginia of my child­hood, there were two ma­jor re­li­gious de­nom­i­na­tions: Roman Cath­o­lic and “Other.” “Other” in­cluded most Prot­es­tant churches, and that’s where the few Greek Ortho­dox kids like my brother and me were sit­u­ated. Not that any of this mat­tered on the bas­ket­ball courts and ball fields. I men­tion it here be­cause I have no rec­ol­lec­tion of any Jew­ish stu­dents in my lit­tle high school.

As a se­nior, I worked as a night man­ager in a McDon­ald’s and re­ported to the day man­ager, an Army vet­eran named Don who dis­pensed wis­dom while ma­neu­ver­ing a chaw of to­bacco around his mouth. One day at the tran­si­tion be­tween shifts, Don asked me whether I had heard about the war that had just be­gun.

Don’t mess with Is­rael

I’m sure I said yes but I’m equally sure I had no aware­ness of any war ex­cept the Vi­et­nam War, to which I sus­pected

Don said Egypt made a big mis­take. “Ev­ery­one knows you don’t mess with Is­rael.” He didn’t say “mess”.

Be­cause I de­liv­ered the Wheel­ing In­tel­li­gencer, I made it a point to fill my in­for­ma­tion void the next morn­ing be­fore school and learned that there was a con­flict be­tween Is­rael and its Arab neigh­bors. I wanted to im­press Don with my knowl­edge, but he beat me to it. “Told ya.” It turns out that what came to be known as the Six Day War had al­ready con­cluded with Is­rael as the vic­tor.

Sev­eral years later I ar­rived in New Haven to study law just as the Munich Olym­pics be­gan. Arab ex­trem­ists launched their deadly as­sault on the Olym­pic Vil­lage and killed Is­raeli ath­letes, took oth­ers hos­tage, and killed them too.

A year later, just as I ar­rived in En­gland for grad­u­ate school, a co­a­li­tion of Arab states led by Egypt and Syria launched a sur­prise at­tack on Is­rael on the Jew­ish holy day of Yom Kip­pur. This one took about three weeks to con­clude with Is­rael once again the vic­tor.

As I pre­pared to de­fend my dis­ser­ta­tion a few years later, the Pal­es­tin­ian-led hi­jack­ing of an Air France flight from Tel Aviv led to a mass hos­tage sit­u­a­tion at En­tebbe Air­port in Uganda. Is­rael res­cued the hos­tages. The older brother of cur­rent Prime Min­is­ter Netan­yahu led the res­cue and lost his life.

The holy sites

I men­tion these mile­stones in my knowl­edge of Is­rael to il­lus­trate how head­line-driven my knowl­edge has been. I knew about the Ho­lo­caust, of course, and the need of the Jew­ish peo­ple to call their his­tor­i­cal home­land as their own na­tion. It was both right and nec­es­sary. But you would think that a guy who had spent 22 years in for­mal ed­u­ca­tion would know a lit­tle more about Is­rael and the Jew­ish tra­di­tion.

In 2018, my fam­ily and I de­cided to spend a few days in Is­rael as stops on an Eastern Medi­ter­ra­nean cruise. Our first Is­raeli dock­ing was to be in Ash­dod, but the ship cap­tain awoke the pas­sen­gers at 5 a.m. to in­form us that there were in­com­ing rock­ets from Gaza. We would need to move north­ward to Haifa. There, we met our Is­raeli guide, a gre­gar­i­ous guy who ac­com­pa­nied us to Jeru­sa­lem and Gal­i­lee. On that visit I ex­pe­ri­enced a spir­i­tual awak­en­ing.

Over the years, I had de­vel­oped the same re­la­tion­ship with church at­ten­dance as I now have with my busi­ness suits – wed­dings and fu­ner­als only. I’m still pretty much that way.

But the Chris­tian in me — the spir­i­tual one my mother hoped for — flick­ered to life in Jeru­sa­lem at the Church of the Holy Sepul­chre, the site of Je­sus’ empty tomb and where he was cru­ci­fied, and in Gal­i­lee, the lo­ca­tion of most of Je­sus’ min­is­try. The mem­ory of my adult chil­dren stand­ing next to the Sea of Gal­i­lee is one of the last­ing im­ages etched in my mem­ory.

Is­rael made it pos­si­ble

Is­rael made this pos­si­ble. Since the Six Day War when it as­sumed con­trol of East Jeru­sa­lem, it has made the ho­li­est sites of the Abra­hamic re­li­gions — Ju­da­ism, Chris­ti­an­ity, and Islam — ac­ces­sible to one and all, an open­ness that had not been en­joyed when Jor­dan con­trolled the lo­ca­tion. The Western Wall, the Church of the Holy Sepul­chre, and the Dome of the Rock have moved tens of mil­lions closer to their faiths.

Now we see Is­rael at­tacked by sa­dis­tic sav­ages. And we see Amer­i­can col­lege stu­dents — shal­low chil­dren who couldn’t find the Mid­dle East on a map — sid­ing with geno­cidal ma­ni­acs. We are surely at an in­flec­tion point for the civ­i­lized world, and those kids aren’t the an­swer. Is­rael is, as it fights for our civ­i­lized fu­ture.

Peter Kalis was be­fore his re­tire­ment chair­man and global man­ag­ing part­ner of K&L Gates LLP.

First Published October 26, 2023, 9:30am

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5786008&forum_id=2],#49345712)

"If'n yew don't know, son," Don paused to spit tobacco juice into a cup and wiped his hand on his made-in-the-USA dunagrees, "Isrull is our closest friend. And yew don't turn yer back on yer friends. Jesus wuz a jew after all."

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5786008&forum_id=2],#49345745)

Peter Kalis

localnews@post-gazette.com

Oct 13, 2025 3:30 AM

In Victorian England, well-to-do people grappled with the emergent question of the day: How to deal with leisure time?

One solution was the growing popularity of parlor games, where family and friends gathered around a sitting room and tried to stump each other. Think of a game of charades.

They thought of themselves as clever. We might not, as we elevate to a higher moral plane by watching vapid shows streamed into our living rooms.

Here’s a suggestion for a modern parlor game. “Name a Famous Swiss.” Name famous people born and raised in Switzerland.

Switzerland and Pittsburgh

Switzerland is a marvelous country with a disproportionate role in the global banking sector and a knack for producing dreamy chocolate. But it hasn’t produced many famous folks, perhaps because it has unfailingly stayed on the sidelines when facing the great cleavages of the day.

One obvious candidate would be Roger Federer. But his mother was born, raised and educated in South Africa. Einstein was born in Germany and later moved to Switzerland, so he wouldn’t count. Carl Jung? He thought alchemy was mystical. Please.

Contrast this with metropolitan Pittsburgh, which has about one-fourth the population of Switzerland. Rachel Carson, Andrew Mellon, Andy Warhol, Fred Rogers, August Wilson, Honus Wagner, Gene Kelly. This is a partial list. Call it Pittsburgh’s Mt. Rushmore.

And if Switzerland gets Einstein, we should get Jonas Salk, George Westinghouse, Roberto Clemente, Herbert Simon and Andrew Carnegie. If Switzerland gets Jung, we should get Mark Cuban, who would invest in alchemy if it would make him a buck.

The tricky thing is to predict the emergence of another Pittsburgh person still in the resume-building phase who will be worthy of eventual inclusion on any such list.

Ms. Weiss is 41 years old and, God willing, has a very long runway ahead of her. Let’s take a look back at what those 41 years have yielded.

She is a native of Squirrel Hill and was a congregant at the Tree of Life synagogue as she was growing up. She graduated from Taylor Alderdice High School and went on to Columbia University where she graduated summa cum laude with a B.A. in English.

After college, she had journalistic gigs at the Wall Street Journal, Tablet and the New York Times where she was an Op-Ed editor and columnist. Although Ms. Weiss described her role at the Times as her dream job, she resigned with an exit so noisy that it reverberates to this day.

Ascending the pinnacle

In her resignation letter to the publisher A.G. Sulzberger, she described the paper’s workplace as highly toxic and as so ideologically rigid that intellectual honesty and diversity were casualties. Moreover, her opposition to woke policies and her pro-Israel views, she maintained, led to online and in-person bullying by colleagues.

Ms. Weiss viewed the paper’s workplace as emblematic of the antisemitism characteristic of progressive media. Colleagues accused her of being a genocide apologist and, with no apparent sense of irony, she was labeled a Nazi.

She recently characterized the Times as “a fancy logo and a motto” — “All the News That’s Fit to Print” — “that many had abandoned in exchange for devotion to a set of narrow, partisan ideas.”

A principled resignation would normally get you only to the base camp of Pittsburgh’s Mt. Rushmore. To climb to the pinnacle, we must continue her saga over the past few years.

After leaving the New York Times, Ms. Weiss (with her wife and sister) founded The Free Press, a subscription-only publication that seeks to restore a pluralistic stream of reporting and ideas to public debate. It now has 1.5 million subscribers at $10 per month.

In the age of the internet, where what passes for reporting and opinion flow as if from a fire hose, think of how audacious it is to start an online publication with no pedigree, no locale, no sports page and no partisan bent, and then expect people to pay for it. And it required a further dose of audacity, I imagine, to attract regular columnists the caliber of Niall Ferguson, Douglas Murray, Coleman Hughes, Jed Rubenfeld, and Batya Ungar-Sargon, among others.

Well done, Ms. Weiss. But it doesn’t stop there. Ms. Weiss has just sold The Free Press to Paramount, which controls CBS, for a reported sum of $150 million. Now, in addition to the positions of CEO and Editor-in-Chief of The Free Press, which will retain its editorial independence, she will also be Editor-in-Chief of CBS News.

This is the CBS News of Edwin R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite. (Post-boomers may need to google those names to see what they have meant to broadcast journalism.)

It is also the CBS News of Sixty Minutes, whose slanted yet influential reports have competed with the New York Times for ideological rigidity. The slant, one suspects, is not long for this world.

A cleansing revolution

We are witnessing a cleansing revolution in print and broadcast journalism — a return to pluralism — thanks to Pittsburgh’s Bari Weiss, a worthy candidate in due time for our Mt. Rushmore.

By the way, her greatest achievement may be tying the marital knot with the brilliant Nellie Bowles, whose regular Friday column “TGIF” makes razor blades seem dull. A bargain in itself at $10 a month.

Peter Kalis was, before his retirement, chairman and global managing partner of K&L Gates. He writes every other Monday. His previous article was “National Unity is overrated, if it's the unity of the graveyard.”

First Published: October 13, 2025, 3:30 a.m.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5786008&forum_id=2],#49345755)

Pro Israel Free Press = 'pluralistic stream of reporting and ideas to public debate'

If you love Isreal you're in the free marketplace of ideas, if you're against it you're some kind of woke retard. Listen up goys, I tells it like it is!

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5786008&forum_id=2],#49345778)