Talk:Robert B. Silvers

work style?
any thoughts about having a section on his work style? his long hours are legendary in new york. maybe that section could meld a bit what is so well known about him and what is known of his work style, including as explained in the scorsece doc? i can't imagine there will be objections to this.... Happy  monsoon  day  21:51, 18 December 2015 (UTC)


 * This is already discussed in the Reputation section, and I think it already says all that one needs to say about it. I don't see that it would improve the article to make this into a separate section.  What else would you add about it that isn't already stated? -- 65.78.5.198 (talk) 00:48, 19 December 2015 (UTC)
 * the content will be the same, but it will be organised better by having its own sub-section. right? that makes it easier for the reader to know what is going on. His reputation is indeed in part caused by his work style, but they're not strictly speaking the same thing are they. Happy   monsoon  day  00:11, 21 December 2015 (UTC)
 * please see my minor emendation now. you'll see that what I had in mind is nothing radical. Just a clearer partition between the encomia and the explanations about how he actually goes about what he's famous for. Happy   monsoon  day  00:18, 21 December 2015 (UTC)


 * I took a look at this discussion and the changes made by Monsoon. Dividing the sections was not necessary, in my opinion; nor does it do much damage.  I reorganized it more sensibly and moved one short quote higher, while moving another paragraph down that seems to fit under the new heading.  The new heading "Work style" seems awkward, though.  Any other suggestions on that? -- UWS Guy (talk) 04:49, 22 December 2015 (UTC)


 * How about "Work habits and editorial approach"? -- 65.78.5.198 (talk) 08:13, 22 December 2015 (UTC)
 * i think that works. excuse the pun. The reason for the change was that i'm slightly uncomfortable with a whole section whose only point is to say what people think. that seems a kind of boring way to characterize something. the section about that in the Madonna article could be a thousand pages long. and what's the point?


 * the more interesting way of categorizing seems to me to figure out the kinds of things people are saying and then align what they're saying with that. that's the meaning of my attempt. I prefer "Work habits and editorial approach" however and will update accordingly. Happy   monsoon  day  00:55, 23 December 2015 (UTC)

External links modified
Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just modified one external link on Robert B. Silvers. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20080504132654/http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2007/06.07/03-honorands.html to http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2007/06.07/03-honorands.html

When you have finished reviewing my changes, you may follow the instructions on the template below to fix any issues with the URLs.

Cheers.— InternetArchiveBot  (Report bug) 04:43, 25 May 2017 (UTC)

External links modified
Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just modified one external link on Robert B. Silvers. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20080906234356/http://www.observer.com/2007/what-s-new-i-new-york-review-books-i to http://www.observer.com/2007/what-s-new-i-new-york-review-books-i

When you have finished reviewing my changes, you may follow the instructions on the template below to fix any issues with the URLs.

Cheers.— InternetArchiveBot  (Report bug) 17:24, 15 October 2017 (UTC)

External links modified
Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just modified one external link on Robert B. Silvers. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20140802140656/http://032c.com/2013/we-do-what-we-want/ to http://032c.com/2013/we-do-what-we-want/

When you have finished reviewing my changes, you may follow the instructions on the template below to fix any issues with the URLs.

Cheers.— InternetArchiveBot  (Report bug) 03:42, 17 January 2018 (UTC)

Edward Said
The bio is a long paean to a great editor. I have no reason to doubt the praise showered his way. We read in one quoted at length: "unencumbered by political duties of a confrontational or oppositional nature."

Well, it is known that he did engage in political matters. He wasn't 'confrontational'. He simply told Said privately that he, perhaps the most noted Palestinian-American intellectual of his day, a writer of world-standing, that there was no room for his work on the NYRB. The motive was not based on any of the stringent editorial reasons he was famed for,- sense of style, literary acumen etc., for Said had all of those gifts. It was based simply not allowing the columns of the premier review of literary, social and political books of that time to be disturbed by matter that would upset Singer's brother in Jerusalem. It was indeed very odd, for Said was at the time, despite accusations he was a 'hitman for the PLO', made by a good deal of notable but irresponsible American critics, constantly attempting to find common ground with the Jewish-American intelligentzia, or at least an understanding from them that what had befallen his fellow countryman was not terrorism, but a tragedy requiring, if not empathy, at least comprehension of the other side of the story they subscribed to. It was an appalling lapse in editorial standards, which should not be troubled by personal interests. It is not, definitely not, 'trivial,' but an instance of a moment where his literary judgment failed him. An extended paean, however merited, cannot stop at that, if evidence of poor judgment exists. Nishidani (talk) 20:42, 14 August 2023 (UTC)
 * The above editor keeps adding this: "Silvers informed Edward Said in the 1980s that he would never be allowed to write for the NYRBs as long as Silver's brother lived in Jerusalem" with this citation. This is a misrepresentation of what the source says, which is that Nubar Hovsepian alleges that this is what Edward Said told him. There is no evidence that anyone else ever heard Said express such sentiments. Where is the evidence that Silvers's brother ever lived in Jerusalem? If that can't be provided – and/or independent corroboration that Said said what Hovsepian says he says – the sentence is inappropriate in an encyclopaedia article of the level of integrity Wikipedia aims to offer. I suggest we delete the addition until and unless its inclusion can be justified. What do other editors think?   Tim riley  talk   08:06, 15 August 2023 (UTC)
 * I'd have to agree that it's a bit too far removed from solid enough for inclusion - it's third hand hearsay. If there are other reliable sources that have a different angle on this, I'd be happier with inclusion (if appropriately worded), but at the moment it's being reported as fact, which it isn't quite. - SchroCat (talk) 08:43, 15 August 2023 (UTC)
 * A quick search of the NYRB website shows Said wrote two articles while Silver was editor: "The Cruelty of Memory" (November 2000) and "Leaving Palestine" (September 1999). They also published a letters by him in August 1982, August 1984, May 1979, March 1989 and numerous other dates, as well as reviewing many of his books. - SchroCat (talk) 08:54, 15 August 2023 (UTC)
 * OK. I'll comment the sentence out pending some substantiation.  Tim riley  talk   14:21, 15 August 2023 (UTC) Oh! Too late! An IP from Lincolnshire, it seems, has removed the sentence in question.   Tim riley  talk   14:24, 15 August 2023 (UTC)
 * Thanks SchroCat. I thought of doing the same search myself, but my local whifi network went down yesterday morning and only came back an hour ago. The last one from November still fits the ban, because Silvers' brother died earlier that year. So one has one late exception. That datum comes from a conversation Said had with Silvers and shared with friends in the late 1980s. Letters are one thing, articles another, and book reviews are obligatory. The thing is the NYRB certainly in the last decades has given in depth coverage in review essays, on the scholarship concerning that conflict, because there is so much of it, but this wasn't the case in Said's time. The note is important because it cut out the foremost Palestinian thinker from a debate that engaged the American Jewish intelligentzia, among whom he had many friends, and for whom he represented the most eloquent voice for sanity and dialogue coming out of the Palestinian diaspora.
 * Tim. As to the revert, my own policy is to revert interventions by IPs when the issue is sensitive. No talk page response, but hopping in (usually those IPs are trackers who come across articles because they spend a lot of time pursuing a specific, or targeted, editor they dislike. In any case, I'm in no rush. Cheers Nishidani (talk) 13:42, 16 August 2023 (UTC)
 * I think there's too much OR in your thought process here that isn't backed up by one piece of hearsay reporting. Do we have any third party sources that back this up? DO we have any sources that confirm if Silvers's brother was actually resident in Jerusalem at any point from the 1980s? And regardless of all that, we still have one article and several letters published in the period when it is claimed he was banned. This claim doesn't ring true, given the fact he was published, so I think we'd need to be very careful on what we claim based on something that thin. - SchroCat (talk) 15:13, 16 August 2023 (UTC)
 * WR:OR applies to articles, not to talk pages. I've actually criticized Said in a book I published, and since the 80s have followed the scholarship on him. If an edit is questioned, one mentions the raison d'etre on the talk page, supplying details, directly or otherwise from decades of reading. It is not hearsay, but from a scholar, and it fits perfectly into what the scholarly record relates about his systematic exclusion, and his difficult relationship with Silvers. Silvers in fact had considerable sympathy for, or rather strong feelings about the harshness of Israel's treatment of them. But he was talked around to a less critical view and his brother's aliyah meant that deep personal feelings went into his decision. It's notable that when Bernard Lewis was given space to try and destroy Said's credibility, all the NYRB allowed was an exchange of letters, then no more contributions from Said. Indeed they followed up Lewis's airy if lengthy 'I-know-better-than-you. You're- some-kind-of-Arab,-not-particularly-fluent-in-your-native-tongue,-which-I-have-mastered' dismissal of his scholarship, with a harsh review of his next book, by a scholar specializing in Swift totally out of his depth in contemporary literary theory. Said was only allowed to write something for the NYRB 15 years later, as long as he stuck to literary criticism of Arab writers. It had been well-known at the time that he was engaged in a losing battle with leukemia (he died a little over 2 years after that Nov 2000 piece was published), This is all part of the public record, is very familiar to scholars in this area, and I was just paraphrasing the obvious. Obviously this lapse by Silvers, one of the greatest editors of his time, is noteworthy. Succinct, and there is no reason to think that the fact referred to requires exceptional sources, because everyone knows Said was denied his distinctive voice in the most important magazine of literary review in the world, alongside the TLS, where no such enmity existed, despite his tiff with Ernest Gellner (in which again I would mainly side with Gellner). Nishidani (talk) 20:56, 16 August 2023 (UTC)
 * No, it’s hearsay, and from just one source. You say you’re stating the obvious, but it really, really isn’t obvious at all. I know OR is for articles, but we’re discussing including something in the article, and you seem to be making connections to ‘prove’ something that isn’t justified by the sources. Do you have any others that are better than the hearsay one? I’m trying to find an obituary of Edwin to see if it shows when—or even if—he was ever in Jerusalem: if he wasn’t in Jerusalem at any point in the 1980s, it does rather dent the argument even more than Said’s record of publishing in the Review does. - SchroCat (talk) 21:19, 16 August 2023 (UTC)
 * It's hearsay to you, not to areaspecialists. One example.
 * "Manoeuvering in the media was especially important for Said in the wake of orientalism’s problematic fame. Time magazine’s flattering profile of him in 1978 was now long gone, and he had become a pariah among the pro-Israeli wing of New York publishing after the impact of The Question of Palestine (my note = NYRB (24 June 1982 pp 49–55) had sunk in. Never part of the New York Review of Books writers’ stable, he had only limited access to the magazine throughout the 1980s and 1990s, until he was finally able to place “The Cruelty of Memory,” his long, comprehensive review of the novels of Mahfouz, in 2000. Said’s icy relationship with the review’s co-editor Robert Silvers was the product of long grievances and came to a head when Silvers published what Said called an “incoherent and scurrilous” review of The World, the Text, and the Critic, in 1983 (sic = 19 January 1984 by Irvin Ehrenpreis, a Swift scholar. He promptly wrote to Silvers to say that he ought to have been “embarrassed by so laughable and indecent a performance,” although he realized this was unlikely seeing that both he and Silvers knew the real purpose behind these “Annual attacks on me.” Even at The Nation, a more welcoming and progressive venue, wealthy pro-israel donors objected that he was given too much space in its pages. As for the television news shows, stacked more and more with administration parrots, he soon saw that he was being turned into the token Arab, invited only to be shouted dowsn. So he looked for new platforms. Timothy Brennan, Places of Mind:A Life of Edward Said, Farrar, Straus and Giroux ISBN 978-0-374-14653-5  2021"
 * The irony in this edit disagreement is that, once more Said is being dismissed as irrelevant, 'trivia' to the very page of the editor who excluded him from writing for the NYRB, as though he were irrelevant to the conversation of the world's literary circles. We're repeated the very boycott that lasted until his final years. Nishidani (talk) 21:44, 16 August 2023 (UTC)
 * I’m glad you admit it’s hearsay. What you’ve quoted here is entirely different from the claim made previously. This describes (in what looks like a pro-Said biography) more of a personal problem between the two, rather than the rather odd claim about censoring based on the geographical location of Silvers’ brother. - SchroCat (talk) 22:09, 16 August 2023 (UTC)
 * Don't change the goalposts (the biography is untrustworthy becauwe the biographer is sympathetic to his subject? I guess that means a huge number of award-winning bios are suspect and not usable on wikipedia because the author doesn't disguise his admiration for his subject (most biographers of Einstein for example).
 * (b)Don't distort my words and (c) Don't misuse words like 'hearsay'.
 * (a)Hearsay. Were it hearsay, which it ain’t, given the strong source, it merely would require attribution, not excision. Biographies are written by (a) archives and (b) interviewing people who knew the subject. One doesn’t call what the informants with a direct knowledge of the person report, ‘hearsay’ (unless they are quoting what they heard from third parties, for which the intermediate source in the chain is missing.
 * If an intimate friend and colleague like Nubar Hovsepian reports Said telling him something, it is not ‘hearsay’ but first person testimony. If someone heard from Hovsepian what Said confided to him and then reported it (with no documentary evidence from Hovsepian or Said to corroborate it), that would be ‘hearsay.’ Our source reads:
 * "Many Jewish American critics feared engaging Said intellectually; he told me on several occasions that Robert Silvers, the longtime editor of the New York Review of Books, informed him that he would not be permitted to publish in the NYRB as long as Silvers’s brother lived in Jerusalem. Instead of challenging him on the merits of his arguments, these critics launched ad hominem attacks intended to diminish his reputation.(Nubar Hovsepian, The Embattled Edward Said Jewish Currents 21 September 2022"
 * Note the source, Jewsish Currents. Not hostile.
 * The following remark is another instance of the same. Is this hearsay as well?
 * "It was in 1969, I think, that Bob made a short stop in England on his way to Israel for the first time. Isaiah Berlin was keen to make Bob’s visit to Israel a success. Isaiah liked Bob immensely, but he was afraid that Bob’s attitude to Israel was “complicated” beyond necessity, namely, that it was ambivalent. He arranged for Bob a dress rehearsal in his Albany flat in London, to which he’d summoned three young Israelis who were in Oxford at the time and whom he believed would present Bob with the right mixture of criticism and care. So there we were: Amos Oz, Gabriel Moked, and me. Bob was keenly interested in Israel. Interested but not obsessed. The intensity of his interest I ascribe to two conflicting sources: on the one hand he strongly held the view that Israel was treating the Palestinian Arabs badly. On the other hand, his brother, who spent a significant amount of time in a Northern kibbutz in the early years of Israel, conveyed to him that something interesting and humanly meaningful was emerging there. Bob held his brother’s views in high regard. So it was a combination of moral outrage and the early influence of the brother that, in part, accounts for Bob’s deep involvement, throughout the years, with all things concerning Israel. Avishai Margalit (a frequent NYRB writer: Remembering Bob Silvers 26 April 2017"
 * Silvers later allowed Avishai Margalit, like David Dean Shulman, to write horrified descriptions of Israel's maltreatment of Palestinians for the NYRB. margalit could even get away with describing the occupation as an 'infernal machinery' grinding them down. Said was on record as saying Palestinians were victims of (Holocaust) victims, but that wasn't enough. Criticism was fine, as long as it came from the right people, not from one of the finest scholars of the day, who happened to be Palestinian.Nishidani (talk) 22:52, 16 August 2023 (UTC)

Again this additional source doesn’t say the same thing as the hearsay article does. And the goalposts aren’t being moved at all. I’ve asked if you can find an additional source that makes the claim Silvers stopped Said publishing in the Review while his brother was in Jerusalem, despite the fact he was published.And this still doesn’t get over the question of WP:DUE: there would have been many people who did not appear in the Review for many reasons, so why focus on one based on hearsay? - SchroCat (talk) 02:41, 17 August 2023 (UTC)
 * Repeating one's opinion, without responding at each stage to the evidence given in response to that opinion, is a case of WP:IDIDNOTHEARTHAT. If this page at least must remain an umblemished paean to the man, something exceptional in any life or description of a life, well, I guess that's stiff cheddar to a reader like myself. The evidence is there, and it is not hearsay in any usual sense of the word.Nishidani (talk) 04:26, 17 August 2023 (UTC)
 * Yes, you are just repeating your opinion without proving any additional sources that back up the hearsay you added to the article (see, it works both ways, trashing someone’s position without actually providing what was asked for). There isn’t “evidence”, there is an unsubstantiated claim from one source that is disproved by the facts and you haven’t got past that except by repeating the same point and not backing it up with additional sources.I’m going to see if there is anyone else who is going to chip in here, as this is just a circular conversation. - SchroCat (talk) 04:33, 17 August 2023 (UTC)