Steve Israel
Steve Israel was born in 1944 in Washington, D.C., where his father umpired baseball games and served as director of education at Washington Hebrew Congregation. His father's parents had immigrated from Russia and Poland in the early 1900s and settled in Waterbury, Connecticut, where his grandfather owned the South End new and used furniture store. On his mother's side, the Newman family was a large family in Jersey City, New Jersey, where his grandfather David Newman was a homebuilder who once presented a housing plan to the president at the White House. When Rabbi Oland heard of his father's reputation, Temple Emanu-El invited his parents to interview, and his father accepted the position as Director of Education.
In September or October of 1951, the family made the long cross-country trip to Dallas in a 1949 Chevrolet with no air conditioning, Steve remembering the hot wind in the back seat alongside his younger sister Donna. Their first home was an apartment on Bandera near Temple Emanu-El, then still located on Harwood Street in South Dallas. He attended Stephen C. Foster Elementary School and Thomas Jefferson High School, describing himself as a quiet, low-key student. He first imagined becoming an architect, but after a calculus course and encouragement from teachers who praised his writing, he switched to journalism, transferring from Iowa State to UT Austin and earning his degree in 1965.
Rather than enter graduate school during the Vietnam era, Steve joined a program called Sherut LaAm and lived for about eleven months on a kibbutz near the Syrian-Lebanese border, an experience he considered his graduate education and which included witnessing a landmine explosion that injured the kibbutz electrician, Ralphie Levy. He later served two years in the U.S. Navy as a journalist at Corpus Christi. His newspaper career included work at the Daily Oklahoman, the Wall Street Journal, and ten years at the Dallas Times Herald, followed by six years as the first staff writer for the Texas Jewish Post. He married Tina, whom he met at a singles event at Temple Emanu-El, and together they raised children Amy and Joel and remained deeply engaged in the Dallas Jewish community.
Full Transcript
Steve 1944 Washington DC but then you moved when you were about seven to Dallas but what do you remember when you were little in Washington oh I remember uh winter weather I don't remember the White House even though I was born a couple of miles away uh I remember the neighborhood kids I remember my dad umpiring baseball games and then I remember hearing that uh my dad got invited to become Director of Education at Temple Emanuel in Dallas and we were going to go to the wild west now how did that come about in Washington DC Rabbi Oland had heard of my dad's reputation as
a director of education at Washington Hebrew Congregation and uh and he was spoken highly enough that he invited Temple Emanuel invited my dad and mom to come interview they came on the train and got the job what was that like it had to be somewh of a culture shock for them it wasn't quite the wild west but neither was it Washington DC they loved Dallas they took to it very well do you remember your grandparents at all my dad's parents and family lived in Waterberry Connecticut which was a far cry from anything else I had experienced and uh they they had come to this country
in the early part of the 1900s uh and and wonderful loving family and it was always a treat to to visit Waterberry and what did your grandfather do he owned the South End new and used furniture store in downtown Waterberry and he raised a family of three kids that way lifting heavy furniture and reselling it and uh visiting that old store was was a strong impression now where did they come from originally they were from Russia and Poland yeah yeah did they ever talk about what it was like to travel here not that I heard of uh my dad probably had those memories what about
on your mom's side they also came from Eastern Europe uh the Newman family and uh a very large family in Jersey City New Jersey on vanwagon and Avenue I remember visiting many times and uh also very fond memories what did your grandfather do uh David Newman was a uh a homebuilder as I recall he once actually visited the White House and presented a plan to the president at the time I think it was Calvin kulage I still have the the type up uh for resolving some of the housing problems across the country David Newman was a very uh uh modest and uh loving fellow yeah
did ever talk to you about that about that meeting of the president um I don't remember him discussing it no but uh it just was an indication just knowing about it that uh he was a problem solver and he wasn't modest about uh broadcasting his ideas now 7 years old you're going to make a trip cross country what do you remember what was that like for you uh it was in 1949 chevolet a black car no air conditioning it was a tough trip I remember the Hot wind hitting me in the face in the back seat of course that was before seat belts and my
sister Donna was uh 3 or four years younger than I was and and uh it was an adventure yeah no air conditioning no seat belts it's a long car ride it was you know do you remember the time of the year that it was it was it was September or October of 1951 okay so the weather wasn't too bad then uh it was warm but not not too bad all right now you're here in Dallas talk to me about life when you were a little boy in Dallas our first home was apartment on Bandera near Temple Emanuel no air conditioning there either I remember uh
people told to put our sheets in the refrigerator in the daytime to make going to bed a little bit more pleasant uh Temple Emanuel was still in South Dallas on Harwood Street um and uh even in 1957 at the time of my bar mitzvah Temple was still being built the sanctuary was under construction so I got to have a bar mitzvah in the White Chapel in Temple on Hillcrest now where did you go to school the grammar school um Steven C Foster Elementary School in Dallas okay and then High School Thomas Jefferson tell me about high school life uh I was a relatively low-key individual
in high school and still am but uh people people from my high school days would be surprised to know that I went on to become a newspaper reporter and a major daily Metropolitan paper here in Dallas now was that a dream of yours when you were in high school did you start thinking about writing um and Reporting I started uh believing I was to be an architect CU I like to build things with wood and then a calculus course got in the way and uh I had always been told by teachers that my writing was good and I was uh always enjoying Meet the Press
and current events so I I I switched from Iowa State University and a major in journalism to UT Austin got the journalism degree and and made my way into journalism now when you were in the college uh when was that is this the Vietnam era going on yet yeah that's right um I graduated in 1965 Vietnam was very hot not too popular among college students and uh I wasn't inclined to go to graduate school at that time and my roommate who was going to go to get a graduate degree in Israel encouraged me to to join him and get into a program called sherut laam
which translates as service to the people so I ended up living on a kabut in Israel right near the Syrian Lebanese border and spent a year there I more or less consider that my graduate degree I was with a group of about 25 American and Canadian college students and graduates and it was a very rigorous experience we went to bed to the sound of uh gunfire across the border from time to time so much that it became kind of routine on one occasion it was more than routine know I was working in the apple orchards and uh we were in a Tin Shed making breakfast
and we heard of an explosion we knew right away it was a landmine uh that had been planted in the apple orchards we were right on the border and another fellow and I went out to see where the explosion came from there was a puff of smoke and we saw one of our tractors blown in half on a ridge there the driver on the tractor was an American who had immigrated from this country as a teenager and he was the electrician on the kibuts so he was lying there lifeless by the tractor one of his legs was missing uh quite a reality check for us
uh but Ralphie Levy the electrician uh survived uh he he was back in the kabot dining hall six weeks later on crutches and uh the Jerusalem Post the next day reported the incident and said uh the Israeli Army which showed up within 10 minutes uh and its dogs had sniffed the trail back to the Assyrian border and they attributed the incident to to terrorists um at the time what were you thinking uh I was thinking I was lucky we were lucky that we hadn't come that down that particular Trail on our tractor an hour earlier come when we came to pick pick you stated there
was no thought of coming back home uh it was we didn't tell our parents about it I'll I'll put it that way we didn't put it in our letters back home uh I mean to us it was certainly scary and uh reason to re re-evaluate our precautions there were underground bunkers on the kibuts so there were uh there the risk was known and uh Whenever there was any indication of ter of problems like that we we would have been told to go underground but that never happened so the the uh security details were increased and uh no other incidents like that happened was this around
the war in ' 67 this was in late 1965 early 1966 so before the actual War of' 67 of 67 I was there until the summer of 66 did they have a feeling that war was imminent because of all these things going on these things were routine to them unfortunately and uh there was no uh strong indication that any kind of war was imminent now when you came home what were your feelings well I had gone to Israel not as a Zionist but as a growing up in the reformed Community uh I mean Israel was a refuge from World War II and served that purpose
well we weren't Zion I wasn't a Zionist in the sense of feeling the Jews belong there but I I went there uh partly because there was an educational component to the program so it served as a continued deferment uh from going to Viet viam ultimately I ended up in the in the Navy for a couple of years US Navy uh but coming back to this country I certainly was uh more attached to Israel more supportive and um there was a culture of shock in getting back to Dallas traffic after living in essentially in a farming Community for 11 months all right well you come back
to Dallas now and did you start work or did you immediately go into the service uh I came back and went to graduate school at East Texas State University in Commerce I went there for a semester during that time I signed up for a naval Reserve program uh that gave me a little more peace of mind than going into the army and uh so in uh within six or eight months of coming back I did go into the Navy as a journalist mhm and where were you stationed I was stationed in the great community of Corpus Christie Texas at the Naval Air Station okay so
Vietnam you did not have to go I didn't have to go there but part of my duty there or part of our community at the Naval Air Station was involved in repairing helicops that came back from Vietnam full of Battle Scars they were shot up in battle in Vietnam and we had a naval hospital there with with the victims of the Vietnam War uh who survived but needed treatment coming to the naval hospital there after your service now what do you do uh I went to work uh in Oklahoma City for 5 months as a copy editor at the Daily Oklahoma and then I got
invited to interview at the Wall Street Journal Dallas uh as a copy editor and I was there for a year and uh so this this was represented a transition from a quiet high school kid to becoming a newspaper reporter at the Dallas Times Herald I interviewed there uh after the work at the at the journal uh became a little bit tedious and so I ended up working at the time Herald for 10 years 7 months and one week but who was counting and uh kids came along I was married to Tina talasi and uh our first our kids came along and uh I had enough
of the night work so I I got a day job with the chain of magazines as an editorial manager the chain of magazines was it called it was called living magazines they were newcomer guides okay and I did that for a year and then I went to work for an affiliate of American Airlines as a curriculum developer uh developed all kinds of training courses and then uh went on to uh the Texas Jewish post as a reporter for about six years the Texas Jewish post was established in 1947 and uh the wish family developed a a strong newspaper and they wanted to make it a
little strong stronger I think so I became their first staff writer and I met all kinds of uh fabulously interesting people in the Jewish Community it's a very rich Community not everybody is wealthy but it's rich in terms of its history and in terms of the contributions to the community the uh the congregations are are fantastic you have a choice of Reform to very Orthodox uh there are many wonderful organizations from the Federation to the Dallas Jewish historical society and uh it was really uh meaningful to to report on the activities of the community what was your uh favorite article you wrote that's a that's
a tough call I interviewed the uh Israeli and Palestinian soccer players who traveled to Dallas among other cities to try to show some impetus toward uh peaceful relationships uh I I interviewed um the young kids in the preschool here where my mother was director in the 1970s talk to the rabbis just so many people who dedicate themselves to the community now you mentioned you Mary Tina and you had raised your family but you didn't tell us where you met her and how you met her I met her in lind's Hall at Temple Emanuel although Tina grew up at teered Israel her mom encouraged her to
go to a live alers evented Temple that was a singles group and I was active in that group and uh we we met very briefly at that live aers event and I called her the following week and um we were engaged within about five months and uh married about five months after that in your lifetime there's been so much advancement in technology and of course in the business you were and there's been so many advancements in the technology was there something that came along in your lifetime that you said wow how did we ever get along without this uh the times herab Newsroom went from
old Underwood typewriters manual typewriters to electronic IBM selectric typewriters and then finally to to early stage computers and that that was really an eye opener I mean it was wonderful to be able to to make mistakes and then fix them on your screen with word processors so that was a big advancement and then computers of all kinds were just fascinating and I've always enjoyed photography and computers opened up the possibility of editing your own pictures you've been very involved obviously in the Jewish Community is there something a project you worked on or something that really hit home with you they say that we stand on
the shoulders of giants we don't take credit for a lot ourselves as I mentioned my dad came to Texas as Director of Education at Temple he ended up serving on the staff at Temple for about 40 years uh the last 10 years or so as director of pastoral Services my mom was a a teacher she was a director of the preschool at The JCC for a number of years in the 1970s and Tina's parents iser and Florence talasi were leaders in the community to faret Israel within the Jewish Comm community and without uh being able to participate in programs like Habitat for Humanity and just
a few weeks ago through teer Israel we we worked on a rant building Pro project it's a CommunityWide effort uh to to to Marshall some of the resources of the Jewish community and the community at large in uh helping those who are uh not as advantaged as we are yeah now in your lifetime you've lived through so many momentous occasions you lived through a turbulent times of the 60s and the Vietnam War era you reported probably on a lot of different things over the years there was the Kennedy assassination here in Dallas something good the moon landing in 6 69 For the First Time The
Tragedy of 911 was there something that happened that you really went wow I know exactly where I was or I reported on it exactly this way well in addition to those things that that most of my generation experienced that you mention that were all eye openers and shocking and very emotional when the uh astronauts had the tragedy the shuttle tragedy including the Israeli astronaut I had a personal experience that not everybody had this was the Columbia shuttle you're you're referring to for a point of reference when was that that was in February of 2003 when there was first word that there was trouble with that
shuttle and it was flying over Texas I went outside in my backyard and I actually saw part parts of the shuttle breaking up high in the atmosphere Over Texas and it turned out that the shuttle parts and the astronauts themselves came came to land in East Texas and uh and subsequently of course that that story shook the nation and to have the personal connection just drove home the tragedy okay Steve you and Tina have two kids two grandkids no great grandkids yet my kids are Amy and Joel uh Joel's wonderful wife Elizabeth their children uh Evan and Lauren our grandkids um and my sister Donna
Ross Israel Ross and her husband Andy uh they've all been an important part of my life along with all of the talasi family the Benders the Box uh my family is is really a a home for me what advice does Granddad have for the Next Generation Um my wife put it well when she had the wonderful opportunity to be interviewed and and she said something to the effect that uh be happy with what you have uh you don't have to constantly strive to add material possessions but beyond that um don't take things too seriously uh try to help those who don't have what you have
make the most of your gifts did a great job today man thanks for doing this thank you