Aaron Brown

© CNN

“THIS WILL COME OUT WRONG, but I’ll say it anyway,” says anchor Aaron Brown, wearing pancake TV makeup, sitting in his office at CNN. “It never occurred to me that I wouldn’t be successful. I never thought about that. Ever. I thought it might take me a little longer than it should, but I knew in the end that I’d sit in this chair, I’d have this job, I’d do this work. I think there was a peculiar sense that we—we Jews—would be successful. Now, did I think that ‘we’ were smarter? No; I didn’t actually think that. I just think that God, for whatever reason, I guess, was going to make us successful and funny—and short. And that being short was okay if you were funny and successful.”

It’s clear that his conviction that things would turn out auspiciously— however haughty it may sound on first hearing—buoyed him along when people doubted him or told him he couldn’t cut it. “I’ve just hung in there,” says Brown, fifty-seven. “I hung in there and hung in there and never stopped believing and never gave up, even when people at ABC News were saying, ‘This will never happen.’ I said, ‘Okay, thank you for your opinion.’ It never occurred to me that it wouldn’t. And I don’t know why I think of that as Jewish. As I say it, it sounds incredibly stupid and I hate sounding incredibly stupid, but for some reason I just believed, from a very young age, that I come from a history of very successful people. But, I mean, my father was a junk dealer; we’re not talking about Einstein here, he was a scrap metal dealer. It’s just that somewhere in me, that lives.”

I ask if Brown has thought much about the fact that he’s the first Jewish network anchor. He shrugs. “Of course, sure. But honestly, I mean, there’s a lot of other things that make me unlikely in this job, too. I’m the first one that’s not classically handsome, I’m the first one that doesn’t have a really deep voice, I’m the first one—well, I’m not the first one that doesn’t have a college education.” (Peter Jennings does not.)

“I don’t think being Jewish was especially helpful along the way. But it wouldn’t be fair or correct to say that the reason I didn’t get this job earlier, at age forty-four or thirty-four, is because I’m Jewish. But you know, being Jewish certainly didn’t help.” I’m trying to get at whether it actually got in the way. “Well, I don’t know: You’d have to ask all those people who didn’t hire me. That’s the point. It’s an unknowable in some respects. They look at you as a sort of package and they say, ‘Okay, what’s the package here?’ And I don’t know that they went, ‘Well the package is five-foot-nine, Jewish, midwestern, nasal voice, kind of smart, a little quirky, funny sense of humor’—I don’t know that they ever broke it down that way. I just assume it was one of those things that was out there and wasn’t determinative, but was part of the equation. My sense is that being Jewish wasn’t helpful, but in the end, my sense is also that for 99.9 percent of viewers, it’s completely irrelevant. Whether those people like me or not depended on a lot of other things before we get to that one.”

For those who are paying attention to his religion, does he take some pride in being a role model for other Jews? “I’m just a little anchor on a cable network; let’s not go nuts here. Maybe someday it will mean a little more when CBS, NBC, or ABC has a Jewish anchor; I don’t know. To the extent that I want to be seen as a role model, I want it to be for the way I’ve lived my life, and the way I’ve done my work. I’ve worked really hard, and I worked against incredible odds and I believed in me and what I do and the way I do it. And the lesson there is ‘Don’t give up.’ There are a million obstacles. And maybe one of them is you’re fat and maybe one of them is you’re Jewish and it doesn’t matter: Deal with it. And the way you deal with it is you outlast them. That’s certainly, professionally, the way I’ve dealt with it.”

His obstinacy was bred in a small town outside of Minneapolis, where he grew up as one of just a handful of non-Christians. “There weren’t Jews there,” Brown says matter-of-factly. “I mean this is the fifties and early sixties, so there was certainly an institutional—I don’t know if I’d call it anti-Semitism—but I would call it aggressive Christianity.

“In the second grade, I had an issue with the teacher who insisted I sing ‘Silent Night, Holy Night,’ which I would not do. I said, ‘This is not my song.’ It really had to do with my maternal grandparents: I just didn’t want to do anything that would dishonor them. It became a big deal, but it shouldn’t have been. And then there were blatant anti-Semitic moments, and you just deal with them.” Do any particular episodes stand out? “You know, they all stand out and they all mean nothing in a way,” Brown replies.

So he never wished he were “one of them”? “No. I wished that I didn’t have confrontations at eight or nine years old with teachers singing ‘Silent Night.’ But it never occurred to me to sing it to get along. But I wasn’t exactly out there with payess either. We were 1950s American Jews. My parents neither tried to assimilate nor avoided assimilation. They were Diaspora Jews and they lived their lives. They had more things to worry about than what people thought of them.”

At the same time that he plays down the impact of childhood ridicule, he concedes that the experience informs him to this day. “I understand better than most people what it means to be the outsider. One of the things that I wondered about as a kid is how different our history would be if, in all of the generations—all the hundreds of years—when we didn’t have a voice, people had heard us. And in the application of my work, I keep that in mind: that there are truly voiceless people out there. And sometimes those voiceless people are Palestinians. And it seems to me that it is in the great and important tradition of my upbringing, religion, and history that we not make the mistake of denying voice to people who have no voice.

“It’s in that same tradition, by the way, that American Jews were hugely important in the American civil rights movement of the sixties. It’s one of the great tragedies of modern history that that relationship has been lost—it’s a great sorrow, I think, for which both sides share some blame. But it came out of that Jewish tradition—an exquisite understanding of what it meant to be denied.”

The young Jewish activists who went down to Mississippi and Alabama had a keen impact on Brown. “I was twelve, thirteen years old, and the fact that there were guys named Goodman and Schwerner who were involved in that struggle made me pay some considerable attention to it. I was proud that people down there had my background. I thought they were doing important and courageous work.”

The capture of Adolf Eichmann, mastermind of Hitler’s “Final Solution,” was the other news event which proved indelible. “I remember vividly the day,” he says. “And how that became the defining question of whether you support or oppose capital punishment.” For Brown, Eichmann’s capture brought home the Holocaust more than any history lesson had. “Here was a real player in all of it—someone who was alive who was responsible.”

When it comes to observance, Brown says unequivocally, “I don’t do organized religion.” Ironically, his wife, Charlotte, does. She converted from being Presbyterian and is now more strictly Jewish than her husband ever was. Why did she decide to convert? “Honestly, you should ask her,” he says. “I just remember that she came home one day and said this was something she wanted to do. I don’t believe we ever talked about it. I didn’t care at all. I did care how we raised our kid; that I did care about. But not for theological reasons. I found that if Gabby, our daughter, was going to experience any of the prejudices of being Jewish, she also ought to be aware of a proud and joyful history. But I just think Charlotte was looking for something she hadn’t found as a Presbyterian. And she found that, and she’s happy with that. It works for me.”

I try to get at why his wife made the considerable commitment to adopt his religion and all its rites—including an adult bat mitzvah—when he is unmoved by its rituals. “That was a major undertaking for her,” I submit. “Yes,” says Brown. “She worked at the conversion, and Friday night dinner is a big deal for her—that it’s done a certain way. And it makes her feel good and that’s terrific.” It’s not awkward that his wife does so much more than he does? “If she said to me, ‘You must go to temple,’ I would say, ‘We have an issue.’ But she doesn’t. She says, ‘This is what I want to do.’ It’s important to her. I mean, she’s not walking three steps behind me in a wig, either,” he adds. “It works fine. For one thing, we’ve loved each other a long time, through different incarnations, I suppose. I mean, I loved her when she was Presbyterian and put up a Christmas tree. She loved me when she was a Presbyterian and put up a Christmas tree.”

But Brown makes it clear that his wife’s passion for observance hasn’t rubbed off on him. “I look at Judaism in two parts,” Brown explains. “There’s a theological component, which I don’t spend a lot of time with. And then I think there is a cultural, historical part which I clearly embrace, which is an important part of my life, my child’s life, my family’s life, my upbringing; all of that. I would argue one can be an atheist and a Jew; they’re not mutually exclusive. I don’t actually see myself that way, but one could be that. So I see it as an act in two parts and I choose the second, not the first.”

His daughter seems somewhat caught in between. Gabby, a teenager, was bat mitzvahed, but there were days where she questioned why she had to go to temple if her dad didn’t. “We told her, ‘You don’t have to go; you made a choice to go,’” Brown recounts. “‘And having made the choice, there is a family rule: Once you commit, then you commit. Browns don’t quit. But after that point, you can do what you want.’ And she’s chosen— again for reasons that are hers—to continue on and be confirmed.”

I ask him what he thinks constitutes being Jewish if Jews drop the rituals. “What matters to me is that I live my life in a way consistent with an extraordinary history of my people. And part of that history—not an unimportant part—is theological. But only a fool would say that it’s the only part of our history, and I think I could make a persuasive argument that it is not the most important part. I think what ought to matter is not whether we light a candle, because the biggest hypocrite on the planet can light a candle. I’m more interested in how they live their lives the other six days and how they treat people and what they care about.

“That’s my issue with organized religion: I don’t think it tells us anything, honestly. It doesn’t tell me anything about the people who are there [in temple or church], other than they are there. They showed up. But it doesn’t tell me the size of their heart, it doesn’t tell me their spirit or generosity, how they see their place in the world, it doesn’t tell me anything that I actually think is important. Now maybe that’s my excuse. But it is the way I view the world. I give you no points for showing up. I give you points for how you live your life, how you treat people.”

Does Brown take the anchor seat on Yom Kippur? “I don’t, actually. I worked this year on Rosh Hashanah, but I won’t next year because I don’t want to answer the mail. There are people who got very upset by that. It’s not worth it. I’ll take the day off. There was a reason why I felt I had to work on Rosh Hashanah. But Yom Kippur, no, I wouldn’t do it, because it would almost be an aggressive action—trying to make a statement—and that’s not how I feel. I’m just trying to live my life by a set of rules that make sense to me and one of them is don’t be a hypocrite if you can avoid it.”

I tell him it’s hard to believe that the hate mail he occasionally receives doesn’t rattle him at all. “No, it doesn’t,” Brown says. “Because I’ve been doing this a while, I know that the people to whom your religion matters—good or bad—know your religion. For example, long ago, I had just gotten out of the service and was working at a little radio station in a little city in western Pennsylvania trying to earn enough money to get a car. And one of the first calls I got was from the Jewish family in town. How did they know?” he says with a smile.

“My whole deal in life is I’m pretty calm about it all, whatever it is. I try not to get too terribly worked up over people who I think of as idiots. I’ve never met a smart anti-Semite.”

How does he approach Israel as a journalist? “I’m pretty careful about how I report the story,” he says. “One of the things I know better than almost anyone on the planet, I think, is that no matter what I do on that story, both sides will find fault with it. We did a program one night, and my normal routine is to come down and take a quick glance at the e-mails that came in that day, and there were back-to-back e-mails—I mean, they literally came in within the same minute: The first one was from someone very upset at our pro-Israeli slant on the story and the next note was from a guy in Colorado who was incredibly nasty, referring to the exact same story on the exact same show, describing me as the modern-day equivalent of the concentration camp kapo who would turn on his own people for money. So it doesn’t matter because fundamentally—and this is harsh, but I believe it—the partisans on both sides really don’t believe the other side has a story. So I’ve just come to accept the fact that I’m not going to make everybody happy; I might as well make me happy. And I’ll report and edit the story the way I think we ought to do it. And some days we do it pretty well and some days we don’t, but we never don’t do it well because we’re Jewish.”

Does he find himself cringing when he reports on wrongdoing by Jews? “It’s funny: When President Kennedy died, the first thing I remember my mother saying was ‘Oh, my God, I hope the assassin wasn’t Jewish.’ And I said, ‘Whoa. Wow.’ No, I think in an odd way it’s kind of nice that we have evolved to a point in our history when we can have, comfortably, Jewish bad guys, Jewish villains. When I was growing up, the big mobster in Minnesota was a Jewish guy: Isadore ‘Kid Cann’ Blumenfeld. I’m pretty sure he was Jewish. So it never occurred to me that we were somehow perfect; nor did I think we had to be. I just thought, if you were going to be a gangster, then you had to be really good at it; I think that’s what God’s always expected of us. So I was a little disappointed that he got caught.”

I’m curious about those who want Brown to be more publicly Jewish than he is—who ask him, for instance, to speak to their Jewish organizations. He usually declines because he’s supposed to maintain a reporter’s distance, but recently made an exception. “I went back to Minnesota a year ago; I’d promised I would do it a long time before and in retrospect, I probably shouldn’t have done it. But I went to talk to a [ Jewish] Federation dinner. It was a big deal. And I didn’t talk about the Middle East until we got to the questions, even though I knew that’s what they wanted me to talk to them about. I couldn’t do that, it would have been highly inappropriate—it was a fund-raiser, for God’s sakes. But one of the things I said to them then and have said before, is that this is a really important distinction I want people to understand: I’m not the Jewish anchor. I’m an anchor who happens to be Jewish.

“If they want me to be the Jewish anchor, then they’re disappointed because I don’t make judgments with that in mind. But I think they get a lot out of my being Jewish, nonetheless, because I bring to my life, my work, to the decisions I make, a sense of who we are; what history has required of us. I think those sensitivities—even when they make people uncomfortable at a given moment—are really important. They’re a huge part of who I am. I embrace them, I rejoice in them. I can’t convey to people in terms more strongly than that, that it’s a source of considerable joy and pride to me. I think I come from a culture of exquisite values and I think I bring those values to what I do. And that ought to be enough.”