About Koteret Rashit

Koteret Rashit

Koteret Rashit, whose name means "Main Headline" in Hebrew, was an Israeli weekly news magazine published in Hebrew between 1982 and 1988. In its six years of life it became one of the most talked-about publications in Israeli journalism, a sharp, literary and openly critical weekly that helped change the language and ambitions of the Hebrew press. It was edited by two of the country's best-known journalists, Nahum Barnea and Tom Segev, and it gave an early platform to a generation of young writers who went on to shape Israeli newspapers for decades. Although it closed for financial reasons in 1988, its reputation only grew with time, and in 2019 the National Library of Israel marked the digitisation of its issues with a public event attended by its former editors and writers.

Founding and ownership

Koteret Rashit was founded in 1982. Its owners were an unusual partnership of three bodies: Davar, the daily newspaper of the Histadrut labour federation; Yedioth Ahronoth, Israel's largest-circulation daily; and the Clal conglomerate. The magazine's managing director was Beni Birger. The founding editor was Nahum Barnea, who had worked at Davar from 1967 to 1982, serving as the paper's Jerusalem affairs correspondent, as its representative in Washington for six years, and as a popular columnist. In 1981, the year before the weekly appeared, Barnea won the Sokolow Prize for journalism. He edited Koteret Rashit together with the historian and journalist Tom Segev. An early report in Davar in December 1982, headlined "There is a headline, there is a story," announced the new publication to readers.

Jerusalem beginnings and the move to Tel Aviv

For its first years the magazine's editorial offices were in Jerusalem, an unusual base for a national weekly at a time when most of Israel's press was concentrated in Tel Aviv. In 1986 the editorial office moved to Tel Aviv, where the magazine spent its final years. The profile recorded for the magazine in this directory places it in Jerusalem, in the Jerusalem District, reflecting the city where it was founded and where it spent the formative part of its life. Issue number 292, one of its last, carried the singer Adam on its cover, an example of the magazine's mixture of hard news and popular culture.

Editorial character

Koteret Rashit was characterised by in-depth political and social writing. It published investigations on economic, social and military subjects alongside serious coverage of culture. The historian Oz Almog, surveying the development of the Israeli press, identified the magazine as an important milestone: its criticism of the government and of society was delivered from a clearly and sharply left-wing point of view, and the journalistic revolution that had begun with Uri Avnery's weekly HaOlam HaZeh and developed in the monthly Monitin became, in Koteret Rashit, wittier, more stinging, more provocative and broader in scope. Its writing style was that of the New Journalism: personal, ironic, opinionated and respectful of no sacred cows. It gave a stage to young writers purely on the basis of talent.

Writers and regular features

The list of contributors to Koteret Rashit reads like a roll call of the next generation of Israeli journalism. Among its writers were Dan Ben-Amotz, Ephraim Sidon, Doron Rosenblum, Gabi Nitzan, Ari Shavit, Menachem Perry, Rami Rosen, Dov Alfon, Ehud Asheri, Neri Livneh, Irit Linur and Shlomo Abramovich, while Avner Avrahamy served as deputy editor and its first designer. Its regular features included a letters page that often carried short pieces by well-known readers, a section of brief items on the stories behind the stories, Barnea's own column, Dov Alfon's short cultural essays under the heading "Direction of the Wind," a book-review section, Gabi Nitzan's humorous weekly diary, Irit Linur's television reviews, classical music coverage by Michael Dek, a sports column edited by Eyal Meged, quizzes and a logic crossword, and a satirical back page written in its early days by Dan Ben-Amotz and later by Ephraim Sidon, Avner Avrahamy and Dudu Geva, who also published a Bible comic strip there.

Reporting on Lebanon and the territories

The weekly appeared in the year of the First Lebanon War and became a platform for the political criticism that developed on the Israeli left in the war's wake. It was the first Israeli publication to cover systematically the wrongs of Israeli rule against the Palestinian population of Judea and Samaria, yet it did not spare the historic Labour movement, wrote openly about ethnic discrimination inside Israel, and did not hesitate to attack the conceptual foundations of Zionist nationalism or the Israel Defense Forces. In 1984 it campaigned against the suppression of Israel's continuing presence in the security zone in southern Lebanon and the de facto prolongation of the war, a stance described as exceptional in the Israeli press of the period.

The Bus 300 affair

After the Bus 300 affair, in which hijackers were killed after capture, Koteret Rashit published, contrary to the instructions of the military censor, that the central suspect in the affair was Yitzhak Mordechai. Barnea later expressed regret over the campaign the weekly conducted against Mordechai. The problem, he wrote, was the momentum that followed: instead of making do with publishing the information in its possession, the magazine adopted Mordechai as guilty rather than as a suspect. It later emerged that the Shin Bet security service had fabricated evidence, framed Mordechai, distorted testimony and misled the commission of inquiry appointed by the defence minister, the police investigators and, indirectly, the magazine itself. Barnea wrote that there was not even half a consolation in the thought that the weekly had contributed to the turmoil at the top of the Shin Bet that eventually brought the truth to light.

The Yellow Time

The magazine's most famous single issue appeared on 29 April 1987, a special issue for Independence Day and the twentieth anniversary of the Six-Day War, gathering field reports by the writer David Grossman from Judea and Samaria. The issue, named "The Yellow Time," caused a sensation, and many regard it as having foreseen the outbreak of the First Intifada half a year later. The collected articles were published as a book close to the time the issue appeared, and publication rights were bought by publishers and magazines around the world. Barnea recalled that while the weekly's regular circulation was 14,000 copies and no more than 20,000, "The Yellow Time" issue reached 40,000 copies, and that the royalties paid by The New Yorker alone for publishing the articles kept the financially struggling Koteret Rashit alive for several more months.

Closure in 1988

Koteret Rashit ceased publication in 1988 for economic reasons. The immediate cause, as recorded in the Hebrew reference literature, was that Davar ran into difficulties and stopped financing its share of the weekly's publication; Yedioth Ahronoth and Clal then also decided to withdraw their funding, and the magazine closed. Barnea, who had edited it for seven years, joined Yedioth Ahronoth in 1989 as a political columnist, publishing his first column there on 28 April 1989. A report in the newspaper Hadashot on 16 December 1988, headlined "The factory is closed," recorded the end of the enterprise.

Legacy in Israeli journalism

The influence of Koteret Rashit long outlasted its balance sheet. Histories of the Hebrew press describe how, when the weekly folded in 1988, followed by Hadashot in 1993 and Monitin in 1994, its writers, among them Barnea, Gabi Nitzan, Doron Rosenblum, Ehud Asheri, Ari Shavit and Dov Alfon, became the senior shapers of Hebrew journalistic language. Tom Segev summed up its editorial philosophy by rejecting the formula that Yedioth Ahronoth's editor Dov Yudkovsky had tried to teach them, of a paper that offends neither the reader in Dimona nor the professor in Jerusalem: "We did not quite accept it. We did not succeed in bringing something for everyone, and perhaps we did not want to from the start." Barnea himself went on to be voted, in a 1998 survey, one of the most influential journalists in Israel's first fifty years, and to receive the Israel Prize for communications in 2007.

Archive and revival of interest

Scanned issues of Koteret Rashit are available through the Historical Jewish Press site of the National Library of Israel. In November 2019 the magazine enjoyed what the newspaper Maariv called a sparkling comeback of interest: Barnea's 1988 farewell article was republished on the National Library's librarians' blog, and on 3 December 2019 the library held an event, "A Headline Returns," marking the digitisation of the weekly and its entry into the Historical Jewish Press archive, with the participation of Nahum Barnea, David Grossman and Tom Segev. For a magazine that lived only from 1982 to 1988, the continuing attention testifies to the place Koteret Rashit holds in the history of Hebrew journalism: a short-lived Jerusalem-founded weekly that set a standard for depth, style and fearlessness against which Israeli news magazines are still measured.