Paul Michaels’ greatly unexpected death on July 23 sent shockwaves through Jewish advocacy groups, their bureaucrats, and the community as a whole. It had the same effect on me.
Paul, who was 72, was the consummate Jewish communal professional, beginning at the Canada-Israel Committee, then the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, and finally, B’nai Brith Canada.
He would call me at home at odd hours but with him, I didn’t mind. That gentle, soulful voice, always genuine, would simply say he’s working on whatever I needed and would respond the next day, which he unfailingly did. “Thanks for asking,” ended each one of his emails in response to some query. He meant it.
Paul was solicitous, caring, warm and wise. He was deeply thoughtful, a philosopher at heart who would bring up some obscure thinker in our conversations, never to patronize. I would always pretend to have heard of them.
You could practically hear him thinking.
He was unsung and underappreciated. He preferred it that way. He didn’t need to see in his name in The CJN.
I first got to know Paul in 1987 when he worked for the now defunct Canada-Israel Committee as a media monitor. It was his job to spot and respond to media bias against Israel and Jews. Obviously, this was before the internet, with its keywords and algorithms. So, Paul read, listened to, and viewed everything. Little got by him.
But he never berated errant journalists. That wasn’t his style. He simply suggested better ways to express an idea or statement. On the other hand, he did manage to squeeze corrections and even the odd apology from legacy media outlets, showing he was no marshmallow either.
After CIJA swallowed the CIC, Paul served as CIJA’s director of media relations for most of his tenure, then transitioned to special research projects in his final years. He was a mentor to many younger staff.
Paul then popped up just last year as B’nai Brith’s new communications director. We chatted a few days before his death about the recent day-long national summit on antisemitism.
But I won’t soon forget one long call we had about Valentina Azarova, the professor at the centre of the University of Toronto’s law school hiring imbroglio—turned away as she may have been by donor pressure because of her views and writings on Israel, which have not been kind.
Paul posed the question that left me staring at a blank wall. What exactly, he wondered, was the fuss really about? Had any journalist, professor or researcher really done a deep dive and actually read what she has written, which is voluminous? What were people basing their antagonism toward Azarova on if they had not analyzed her work, however arcane and abstruse?
It was a refreshing question from an employee of a major Jewish organization. We spoke for about an hour.
In May, the venerable New Yorker’s Masha Gessen made a stab at the issue but generally stuck to the machinations of the mini-scandal. Still something, eh, Paul? Wow, the New Yorker! He hated it. It was the most unbalanced thing he had ever read, he groused, uncharacteristically. I re-read it. He had a point.
This month came the crowning achievement. An academic named Cary Nelson unleashed a torrent in an online journal called Fathom. It was by far the most detailed, rich and amazingly researched piece on the subject to date, analyzing Azarova’s past work to a fine granularity. I immediately sent it to Paul.
“I read it,” he replied early the next morning. “All 13,000 words.” He didn’t elaborate. I’ve been to meaning to ask what he thought of it.
It was always a pleasure to hear from Paul, even it was a complaint. He smoothed the way. A mensch, by any definition.
