Jake Tapper: Anchor, Author and Proud Jew

The following is a feature story that I wrote, which appeared in the November 16, 2023, editions of the Washington Jewish Week, Philadelphia Jewish Exponent, and Baltimore Jewish Times, as well as on JNS.org, about CNN anchor Jake Tapper:
 
Jake Tapper: Anchor, Author and Proud Jew
 

In the weeks since the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks in Israel, people around the world have been glued to their televisions, computers and mobile devices as they monitor the news for the latest updates concerning the ongoing crisis. One of the people they regularly see and hear is Jake Tapper.

 
Tapper, the CNN anchor and chief Washington correspondent who is a D.C. resident and a member of Temple Micah, is a familiar face in the media world. Whether it’s through “The Lead with Jake Tapper,” the program he hosts every weekday afternoon, or on “State of the Union,” the Sunday morning show he anchors, Tapper’s reporting on a range of topics, both national and international, often offers insights and information not found elsewhere. Tapper’s reach extends far beyond his CNN programs. For example, he has a strong social media presence, including 3.1 million followers on X, formerly known as Twitter, where he often posts about a wide array of issues.
 
CNN recently sent Tapper on a breaking news assignment to Israel, where he reported on the Oct. 7 attacks and the wider conflict that is taking shape following that fateful day. While in Israel, Tapper had the opportunity to speak with family members whose loved ones were abducted by Hamas and are being held hostage, as well as with survivors of the massacres that took place on Oct. 7. Tapper also reported on the painstaking and difficult process that Israel has undertaken to identify the victims’ remains following the Hamas attacks and he spoke with medics that described the atrocities committed by Hamas against civilians, young and old. Tapper’s on-air reporting from Israel included numerous segments that were brimming with emotion as he had heartfelt and personal interactions with people whose lives have been changed forever.
 
“The whole trip was soul crushing, both because of the pain and death and destruction going on in Gaza, and also because of the pain and death and destruction that happened in Israel on Oct. 7 … The face-to-face conversations I had with survivors of Oct. 7, or people whose loved ones were killed or kidnapped on Oct. 7, were obviously very upsetting,” Tapper said.
 
In trying to describe the magnitude and horror of the Hamas attacks, Tapper noted that he’s “covered a lot of horrible things.” Citing his coverage of wars in Iraq, Ukraine and Afghanistan, as well as natural disasters and mass shootings, Tapper pointed out that “it’s not particularly constructive to compare people’s pains and decide one person’s pain is worse than another person’s pain.” However, he said it was “mind-bogglingly awful to experience and talk to the people that went through what they went through on Oct. 7.”

Photo courtesy of CNN

One of the many difficult aspects of the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks has been the graphic and incredibly disturbing images and video footage that Hamas has circulated. The idea that a group so proudly and brazenly engaged in such barbaric acts, proudly documented their barbarism and then propagated it for the world to see is hard to fathom. And for members of the media, how to report on those unsettling images is an issue that has become very pertinent.
 
Noting that he’s reported on a lot of difficult stories over the years, some of which were heart-wrenching, Tapper likened the Hamas images to the horrific ISIS videos, the beheadings of Wall Street Journal correspondent Daniel Pearl in 2002 and Nicholas Berg in 2004, and some of the individuals who were beheaded in Syria and other parts of the world.
 
Yet, Tapper drew an important distinction between those ghastly acts and Hamas’ actions on Oct. 7.
 
“Those tended to be one-offs. One individual kidnapped, beheaded. The things that happened to families, the things that all happened on one day, Oct. 7, were in aggregate … The willful infliction of torture on civilians and children and women and the elderly, the willful infliction of sexual violence in front of other people, the willful infliction of murder of parents in front of children and murder of children in front of parents, no, I’ve never seen or heard anything like it,” Tapper said.
 
While reporting from Tel Aviv, Tapper spoke with Doctor Chen Kugel from Israel’s National Center of Forensic Medicine about the difficulty of identifying some of the victims’ remains because of what Hamas did to them. Even though many of the remains were unidentifiable, Tapper and CNN blurred the images before showing them on-air. “It was still horribly grotesque … the photographs that I saw that I wish I hadn’t were just horribly haunting and disturbing.
 
Tapper acknowledged that he’s been wrestling with the issue of what to show in the media and how much to describe. In this particular instance, Tapper said one of the reasons he reported on the attacks the way he did was because there are people out there who deny that the atrocities of Oct. 7 took place.
 
“There’s a 10-year-old girl whose head is not part of her body anymore. And forensic scientists are very precise with what they’re saying. They don’t know when and how the head was separated from the body, they’re being very honest and clear. But however you parse it, this is a 10-year-old girl, and her head is not attached to her body anymore. I can’t believe we’re having these discussions even.”
 
With calls for a cease-fire growing, Tapper offered a factual assessment of the situation, without stating a personal opinion.
 
“I think the question is, and I think this is a question that everybody who is calling for a cease-fire who is a world leader needs to answer, what is the solution? Because the Israelis and the Americans say a cease-fire cannot happen because Hamas needs to be destroyed. And if you are saying that we need to have a cease-fire, how do you counter the arguments from the Biden administration and the arguments from the Netanyahu administration that if you do a cease-fire, then all Hamas is going to do is regain strength and then commit more atrocities against Israel? What’s your response to that? They have a point because Hamas says that’s what they’re going to do. And then we’re just continuing in the cycle of then Hamas does that and there’s more Israeli deaths,” Tapper said.
 
“Calling for a cease-fire, while I completely sympathize and I’d love the idea of no more innocent people dying, how do you get to a place that it’s not just, okay, cease-fire. Because what we know is that a cease-fire doesn’t stop – Gaza and Israel were in a cease-fire on Oct. 6. So, we know that that’s not a solution, because then Oct. 7 came, so you have to think beyond Oct. 6,” he added.

Photo courtesy of CNN

Tapper, who has never been shy about confronting the issue of antisemitism, addressed the frightening rise in antisemitism that has become global in nature and offered his impression of the current crisis, pointing to what he described as some sort of a failure in our educational system.
 
“Somewhere along the line, it started being taught that Jews cannot be victims,” he said. “That’s just what I’m picking up from looking at college campuses and looking at the kind of people that are ripping down the signs of the kidnapping victims … I’m looking at these people to a degree as victims too. They have been taught that there is no humanity in Jewish life, that they can look at a poster of a baby or a three-year-old who is Jewish, who has been kidnapped, and they do not see humanity in that face.”
 
Referring to the “kidnapped posters,” Tapper noted they were created by artists, not the Israeli government, do not contain an image of the Israeli flag and were likely intended to be as apolitical as possible, yet they have become a hot topic of conversation as some people have taken to ripping them down in anger.
 
“There are people looking at them and they are seeing politics, and they are seeing a justification for war, and they are seeing Zionism, and they are seeing Netanyahu, and they are seeing a whole bunch of things that the artists, I believe, were trying to avoid. And they are not seeing humanity,” Tapper said. “And the only thing I can interpret is that somehow, somewhere, these people were taught to reject the idea of humanity in these faces.”
 
Tapper cited various examples throughout history of people being taught that there is not humanity in the faces of certain ethnic and religious groups, which he said is absolutely horrible, and suggested that Jews seem to be enduring that same sentiment today.
 
“We are now seeing in a generation that has been instructed to value diversity, somehow, something happened where it appears to me that Jews were kind of left out of the picture and I don’t understand why or how that happened, because it does not seem to be necessarily just about Israel. It does seem to be about Jews,” he said.
 
“It’s one of these things where Jews know that the hate is not just on one side, and sometimes people who are either conservative or progressive pretend that it’s just on the other side, but I think Jews who are honest know that it’s on both sides,” he added.
 
Tapper spoke fondly of his synagogue, Temple Micah, which he called “a very warm and open place, with a lot of Jewish pride.”
 
He noted that his in-laws, who aren’t Jewish (Tapper’s wife converted to Judaism), used to come with his family to the synagogue when they lived in the D.C. area, and they always felt comfortable there.
 
“It’s very progressive in terms of social justice and helping the community, helping victims of domestic violence. It’s really just a wonderful and warm place.”
 
For Tapper, who attended Akiba Hebrew Academy in the Philadelphia area and who proudly wears his Jewish identity on his sleeve, his Jewish upbringing played a prominent role in making him the person and professional he is today.
 
“Judaism gives you a great grounding in the value of debate, because that’s what the Talmud is – it’s rabbis sitting around and debating. It’s a religion that is rooted in discussion and debate. And that’s just very healthy, I think, as an intellectual pursuit and really good for a journalist, because it really causes you to be steeped in the idea of analyzing and poking and prodding issues from all sorts of sides. And that really stuck with me. Because that was a class we took – Mishnah and Talmud,” he said.
 
“It [my Jewish education and upbringing] really gave me respect for faith and not just my faith, but all faiths. And so, I have always been acutely aware of my status as a religious minority and been acutely and keenly respectful, or trying to be at least, of other people’s faiths,” Tapper added.
 
In that vein, Tapper recalled how when Mitt Romney was running for president in 2008 and 2012, he found the attacks on Romney’s faith very offensive. Tapper talked about how mindful he is of the dangers of religious bigotry, pointing out that it’s not just antisemitic religious bigotry, but all types of religious bigotry that should be cause for alarm.

Jake Tapper reporting from Israel in the aftermath of the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks.
Photo courtesy of CNN

Tapper made headlines last year after Doug Mastriano, the Republican gubernatorial nominee in Pennsylvania, took aim at now Governor Josh Shapiro, criticizing him for attending a private/parochial Jewish school, saying Shapiro attended a “privileged, exclusive, elite school.” Tapper took umbrage at Mastriano’s statement, which referred to his alma mater, Akiba Hebrew Academy, the same school that Shapiro attended, and denounced him for attacking the Jewish school in an emotional, on-air segment.
 
“Let’s be very clear. First of all, this is a guy who was allied with a major antisemite, Andrew Torba, who is one of the founders of Gab, which is the number one site for Nazis, where the Tree of Life shooter was hanging out right before he went in and committed the worst act of antisemitic violence and mass murder in the United States, period. Mastriano paid him as a consultant. And that’s who Mastriano hangs out with. That’s his ilk. Mastriano knew exactly what he was doing when he went after Josh Shapiro’s school. And he painted the school in a way that he knew exactly what he was doing, which was to paint the school in a way that was false and in a way that appealed to antisemites, which is to make it sound out of touch and snobby and elite,” Tapper said as he described the incident and made it very clear that Akiba was not “elite” in any sense of the word.
 
“Anybody who had walked through the halls of Akiba Hebrew Academy, to be told that it was going to be described someday in a campaign as ‘elite,’ it would have amused everybody,” he said. “Akiba was like a parochial school, and it was fine. But it was not fancy.”
 
Calling Mastriano the “Gab candidate,” Tapper said he understood what Mastriano was trying to do to Shapiro, who is Jewish, “and I wasn’t going to have it, because that was an issue I knew something about.”
 
“I used to be a lot more quiet about this sort of thing,” Tapper added. “But the antisemites just kept getting louder and louder and louder. And nobody was saying anything. It’s not like other anchors were saying anything. So, I started saying things more. I would love to not talk about this stuff because other anchors were taking up the slack for me, but they’re not, so I’ll say it.”
 
In addition to being a renowned journalist, Tapper also has a second career as a best-selling author. His most recent novel, “All the Demons Are Here,” which is a political thriller and the third book in a series about fictional characters Charlie and Margaret Marder and their family, was released this past summer. Tapper spoke about his love of writing, why he was inspired to write this particular genre and how he finds time to write novels in light of his very busy schedule.
 
“I like [writing] historical fiction and I like thrillers because I read them. That’s just honestly what I read, so that’s what I wanted to try doing. I’m a history buff, so it’s fun to fun to write,” he said. Tapper noted that he tries to grab at least 15 minutes a day to write, often when his wife takes their kids to school in the morning and before he has his first call with his team at CNN, although he acknowledged that it can be a struggle at times to carve out that time. For a person as busy as Tapper, time is definitely at a premium.

‘A Bright, Warm Light’: Remembering Omer Balva

The following is an article that I wrote, which appeared in the October 26, 2023, edition of the Washington Jewish Week, about Omer Balva, a 22-year-old Maryland native and soldier in the Israel Defense Forces who was tragically killed in northern Israel in an anti-tank missile attack on October 20, 2023:
 
‘A Bright, Warm Light’: Remembering Omer Balva
 
With a deep and abiding love of the state of Israel, Omer Balva made the decision to head to Israel and enlist in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) after he graduated from Charles E. Smith Jewish Day School (CESJDS) in Rockville in 2019. And after Hamas unleashed a series of heinous terrorist attacks on Israel on Oct.7, Balva knew what he had to do. After purchasing supplies that he understood his fellow soldiers might need, he got on a plane and flew back to Israel so he could do his part in defending the Jewish state.
 
On Oct. 20, Balva, a 22-year-old Maryland native and a staff sergeant in the 9203rd battalion of the IDF’s Alexandroni Brigade, was tragically killed in northern Israel on the Lebanon border in an anti-tank missile attack. The IDF confirmed Balva’s death, noting in a written statement that it “will not stand by as its soldiers and civilians are attacked” and that it “shares in the family’s grief and will continue to support them.”
 
A spokesperson for the U.S. Department of State confirmed the death of a U.S. citizen in Israel on Oct. 20 in an emailed statement, offered the State Department’s “sincerest condolences to the family on their loss” and noted that it had no further comment out of respect for the family’s privacy during this difficult time.
 
“I don’t think I’ll ever really come to terms with the fact that he’s no longer with us. He had such a bright, warm light, and he just made everybody feel so incredibly loved and important. And there really are no words to explain how much love he had and how pure his soul was,” said Alexa Bennaim of Gaithersburg, a close family friend who noted that Balva was “like a little brother to me,” in a phone interview.
 
Bennaim, who called the Balvas her chosen family and considers Balva’s parents, Sigal and Eyal, her “second parents,” grew up just a few houses down from Balva and spent every morning together with him on their way to school at CESJDS. The two families celebrated holidays together, went to the synagogue together and “did everything together,” she said, noting that her parents and Balva’s parents are best friends. When the Balvas moved back to Israel, it was very difficult for the two families because of the geographic distance that would now be between them.
 
Balva’s decision to forego the traditional college experience at the time and join the IDF after high school was an easy one, according to Bennaim.
 
“That was something that Omer always wanted to do. He had such a strong love of Israel and a passion to defend his country, and that was something that he had talked about since he was young,” she said. “He followed in his older sister Shahar’s footsteps. She was in Oketz [the IDF’s canine unit] when she was in the military in the IDF. And he was so proud of her, and he wanted to do his part to contribute in keeping Israel safe.”
 
Bennaim’s father flew to Israel to be with the Balva family at Omer’s funeral, which was held in Herzliya on Oct. 22, and she has been in touch with Omer’s sister every day since his tragic death.
 
“Shahar always says to make sure that people know what an incredible and pure hero Omer is, was and always will be,” said Bennaim as she fought back tears.
 
Balva recently returned to the U.S. for the wedding of a close family friend in California and was making a trip out of it with his girlfriend, Odelia, who was “the absolute love of his life,” according to Bennaim.
 
The two were in Las Vegas when Balva got news of the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks and he immediately decided that he needed to head back to Israel to fight with his peers. He first traveled to Maryland to spend a few days there before leaving for Israel, during which time he got to visit with his brother, Barak, who lives in Boston and came to see him. Balva and his girlfriend also went to Bennaim’s house for dinner, where they spent time together.
 
“We joked and laughed, and really took in every moment we had with him knowing what he was going into,” Bennaim said. “We spent Omer’s last Shabbat together. He promised us he would come back. I’m just honored that we got to spend that time with him … and really got to enjoy his special presence with all of us.”
 
When Balva was getting to ready to leave at the end of the night, Bennaim gave him a really long hug and said, “don’t go and be a hero.” In response, Balva didn’t say ‘I won’t;’ he said, “don’t worry about me.”
 
“That is something that was very true to Omer’s spirit,” Bennaim said, referring to that final heartfelt exchange with Balva. “He always wanted to make everybody else feel good and feel comfortable and feel safe. It just speaks to the kind and loving nature of his soul.”
 
“We are saddened by the death of Staff sergeant (res.) Omer Balva, a brave commander who served Israel with courage and dedication. We express our heartfelt condolences to his family and friends,” Israel’s Embassy in Washington said in an emailed statement. “Omer Balva was a commander in the 9203 battalion who answered the call to defend Israel after Hamas’s horrific acts and the threats on the Israeli-Lebanese border. He sacrificed his life for the security of Israel and the values of our people. May his memory be a source of inspiration and strength to us all. Our thoughts and prayers are with his family during this difficult time, and may his loved ones find comfort in knowing that Omer was a true hero.”
 
Balva described his strong connection to Israel and his love of the Jewish state in a 2018 Prezi project that he made for school in 2018. Noting that his paternal grandmother was born in Tiberias, Israel, and that her family had been in Tiberias since the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, he outlined how she survived the Tiberias massacre of 1938, in which a band of Arabs went from home to home attacking the Jews who lived there. He also described his grandmother’s heroic efforts to help wounded soldiers coming back from Egypt during the Suez Crisis in 1956, and how she acted as a nurse and brought food to soldiers during the Yom Kippur War in 1973.
 
Balva was the first member of his family to be born in the U.S., with his two older siblings having been born in Tiberias before his parents moved to the U.S. in 1996 and settled in Bethesda.
 
“My passion has always been to protect Israel and suggest what is best for what I believe is the greatest country in the world,” Balva wrote as part of his school project.
 
“He was the kind of kid who walked into the room and had a smile that would lighten up the room. He was really loved by his friends, other students and teachers, and he was involved in a lot of activities at school. He was just a real pleasure … people enjoyed having him in the room as a friend, as a student,” said Rabbi Mitchel Malkus, Ed.D., Head of School at CESJDS, in a phone interview.
 
Malkus described Balva, who began attending CESJDS at the age of seven, as “an unabashed and proud supporter of Israel and the Jewish people,” noting that he went on the school’s 12-week Irene and Daniel Simpkins Senior Capstone Israel Trip after graduation and then enlisted in the IDF. He described the Balva family as being “deeply embedded in this community, but also in Israel,” and spoke about their love of Judaism and Israel.
 
For the CESJDS community and the greater Washington Jewish community, Balva’s loss has hit particularly hard.
 
“There’s been an outpouring of support for his family and people trying to send words of comfort to the school through me. When we heard the news, my wife and I were crying and she said, ‘this isn’t just close to home – this is in our house.’ And that’s how it feels. It’s just devastating,” Malkus said.
 
While noting that the school community is still processing what happened, Malkus said they are going to plan a memorial for Balva “because we need to come together as a community to mourn him.”
 
“He knew inside deeply that he wanted to be in Israel, to defend the state of Israel and to serve in the IDF,” Malkus said. “What I take from all of this, and it is some comfort, is his tremendous passion for Israel. And that’s something that lives in our community currently, but we can be strengthened in what we’re doing, in our resolve, when we know that there are kids like Omer who are willing to put themselves on the line in ways that are unbelievable and that touch us really deeply.”
 
Statements of support in the wake of Balva’s death came from a range of sources, including the Jewish Federation of Greater Washington and Reichman University, where Balva was studying business and economics.
 
When asked about the best way that people could honor Balva’s memory, Bennaim spoke about his incredible sense of kindness for others.
 
“I think the best thing to do is to stand up for Israel, speak out against terrorism, advocate for goodness and find kindness in your heart to show to others. Omer was always so kind to everybody he met, and I know how much he loved making everybody feel so good and so loved. So, if we can all find it in our hearts to show the love that Omer would show to everybody, I know that it would honor his legacy,” she said.