Week in and week out, it can be difficult for a newspaper to find significantly important stories to run on its cover.
The Jewish Exponent issue of April 12, 1974, was not one of those issues.
Two major stories graced the coverage, including an April 8 dispatch from Jerusalem titled, “Golda’s Regime Tottering.” That story led with word that Defense Minister Moshe Dayan, who was under pressure from factions within the Labor Party to resign, had called for the resignation of the entire Cabinet and the formation of a new one. Dayan didn’t say if he would serve in a new government.
The article speculated that Prime Minister Golda Meir was either going to resign herself, which would automatically bring about the resignation of the other ministers, or she would reshuffle the Cabinet and reassign Dayan to a different position.
But Exponent readers got that answer – in the same issue.
On page 86, the Exponent staff managed to get in a bit of breaking news right before press time with a short story titled “Golda Quits.”
“Golda Meir resigned yesterday as prime minister of Israel. The veteran Labor Party leader, who will mark her 76th birthday next month, has been under mounting pressure from all sides as a result of Israeli blunders during the Yom Kippur War,” the story began.
Meir gave up her Knesset seat a month later and never held office again, dying four years later of lymphatic cancer.
Yitzhak Rabin succeeded Meir as prime minister. As for Dayan, the longtime military leader served from 1977 to 1979 as Minister of Foreign Affairs.
As for the Exponent’s other “above the fold” story, there was an advance on the 10th anniversary of the dedication of Nathan Rapoport’s Monument to Six Million Jewish Martyrs. When it was dedicated in 1974, it was the first public monument in North America to memorialize Holocaust victims — and, at the time, was still the only public monument in the United States, according to Benjamin S. Loewenstein, who chaired the Jewish Community Relations Council then.
The monument was a gift to the City of Philadelphia by survivors and local Jewish leaders, including the Association of Jewish New Americans and what was then called the Federation of Jewish Agencies of Greater Philadelphia.
The Exponent also included a story buried on page 87 titled, “Anti-Semitism in U.S. Down, Not Out” that reported on a seminar on “The Anatomy of Hatred.”
Exponent readers sadly know that antisemitism today is neither down nor out.