“If you told me when I was 20, that I would spend 40 years in Israel, raise four Sabra children, and become managing editor of the biggest English newspaper in Israel, I would have laughed at you,” says David Brinn, who has, in fact, accomplished all three feats.
The calm, self-effacing Brinn, managing editor of The Jerusalem Post, was born in Portland, Maine. Interestingly, Brinn, tall with a friendly smile, has no discernible Maine accent. “I think I intentionally tried to move to a neutral accent,” he says, “especially when I went away to school in Boston.” Brinn grew up with a Conservative Jewish background, attended Hebrew school, and celebrated his bar mitzvah, but had little awareness of Zionism and the State of Israel.
Oddly enough, Myer and Dina Brinn, David’s grandparents, had attempted aliyah twice – first in 1918, when they left Lithuania, before settling in Maine in 1921, and again in 1935. In their second attempt, David’s grandparents, with their three children, among them David’s future father, 18-year-old Julius, moved to Tel Aviv, where Myer opened a printing shop. The Brinn family’s aliyah ended four years later when Julius, about to be drafted into the British army, decided to join the US Army and returned to the United States. Soon after, his grandfather closed the printing shop, and the family returned to Maine.
David, the youngest of three children, grew up in Portland and left Maine in 1977 to attend Boston University, where he studied communications. “I had in mind to be a journalist or go into the music business,” he says. “Music has been my lifelong passion ever since I saw the Beatles on TV in 1964. I was six or seven years old, and it made a huge impact.” Brinn adds that his all-time favorites are Bruce Springsteen and the Grateful Dead.
David met his future wife Shelley in a coed dorm on campus, and he recalls, “When she told me she was the head of the Student Zionist Alliance on campus, I said, in all seriousness, ‘What’s a Zionist?’ I did not have any kind of bandwidth in my mind about Israel or Zionism. Israel was still foreign to me.” Despite his knowledge of his family’s previous attempts at aliyah, Brinn couldn’t connect Shelley’s desire to live in Israel with his own family history.
David and Shelley dated during their college years, and Shelley spent her junior year at Hebrew University. “I came to visit her for ten days over Christmas break,” says David. “It was the winter of 1979 – my first time in Israel, and I had a great time, mostly seeing her.” Shelley returned to the US in the spring, and after graduation, David and Shelley moved in together.
SHELLEY BECAME the assistant to the aliyah shliach (emissary) in Boston, and David joined a music agency, writing, booking, going to shows and scouting talent. He enjoyed the work.
Two years later, Shelley told David that she wanted to return to Israel. She suggested that they quit their jobs and go to Israel for a year before getting married. David dutifully agreed, and in 1983, the couple returned to Israel and participated in a two-month Livnot U’lihabanot (Build and Be Built) program in Safed. “I learned a lot about Judaism,” says David. “It was a combination of Zionism and Judaism together, but I still wasn’t won over.” David and Shelley then joined the Sherut La’am, a work-study program, studying in ulpan before working on volunteer programs in Jerusalem.
When the year ended, David was ready to return to the States. Shelley, however, had other plans, and she told him that she wanted to remain in Israel. David returned to Maine and began writing for a local Portland newspaper. Despite their separation, David kept the lines of communication open with Shelley, penning and mailing innumerable blue aerograms and placing expensive overseas phone calls. Finally, David called her and said, “If it means having to live in Israel with you as opposed to being in America without you, I choose Israel.” Shelley returned to the States and moved to David’s parents’ home. They married on June 9, 1985, in New Jersey, and nine days later, David and Shelley were on their way to Israel – this time permanently.
Upon arrival, the Brinns moved to a rented apartment in East Talpiot that Shelley had sublet during the pre-wedding period. When they got there, the apartment was in shambles. “The first night, I tried to fix a leak,” recalls David, and I said, ‘Can we go back to America?’ It took me five years before I stopped fighting myself and fighting aliyah. I wasn’t resentful, but I thought, ‘I don’t want to be here, and I don’t know the language.’ I did three ulpanim, my Hebrew got better, but I felt like a fish out of water. I didn’t feel comfortable.” Shelley, who got a job in special education, was more fluent in Hebrew and felt at home.
Over the years, David became acclimated to life in Israel, and the turning point for him was the birth of their daughter, Adina, in 1988. David became a technical writer and spent his days writing user manuals. He applied for jobs twice at The Jerusalem Post but was turned down both times. Finally, in March 1990, he learned of an opening at the Post for a layout artist for the In Jerusalem magazine. “They said that graphic experience was needed,” recalls David. “I fibbed and said that I had graphic experience, and I got the job.”
Soon after that, David was drafted and trained for the military police. He spent two months serving in the prisons with his fellow trainees and acted as a liaison between prison administration and the military prisoners. “At night, there was a line of twenty-five people waiting with their asimonim (tokens) for the pay phone to call home,” he remembers. Working with prisoners was stressful, but David and his fellow soldiers, who were in their thirties, were older and calmer than their younger counterparts and succeeded in their tasks. David spent 14 years in the IDF reserves, working in six different military prisons.
Brinn’s Post career blossomed, and he wrote film reviews and numerous features for the paper. He then moved to the editorial side, becoming night editor. His most difficult evening at the Post was November 4, 1995, when prime minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated. “Emotionally, it was very difficult,” says Brinn. “It was a Saturday night, which is usually a quiet night. His death was announced at 11:15 p.m., and we heard the rumors about shots being fired, but we couldn’t do anything from 11:15 until we had to close the paper, which usually happens at midnight. We managed to get them to wait until 1 a.m.” David has vivid recollections of the emotional scene at the Post that evening, as reporters were calling him and asking for guidance, and people were crying as they sat at their desks. Somehow, everyone managed to complete their work and get the paper out the next morning. “Afterwards, you breathe a sigh of relief, and then the next morning it hits you, and you break down,” he says. Today, a reproduction of that famous front page, as well as of the Post edition marking the Entebbe rescue, graces the walls of Brinn’s Jerusalem office.
David and Shelley moved to Ma’aleh Adumim 26 years ago, and they raised their four children there. Shelley worked in special education for many years before becoming Aliyah coordinator in Ma’aleh Adumim. Several years ago, she opened Tour Adumim, a boutique tour company in Ma’aleh Adumim, highlighting the area’s numerous attractions to local and foreign tourists. Since the onset of the pandemic, she has been doing content writing for an online company.
Two of Brinn’s children – Matan and Sarit – are working in the US currently. “Hopefully,” says David, “both will come back. It is a bit bittersweet. They are Sabras, and you raise them here. You try to instill a love of Israel and Zionism, which I think they have, but they saw opportunity elsewhere.” David and Shelley’s oldest daughter is married and lives in Ma’aleh Adumim, together with their granddaughter Yuval, and their youngest son Koby is studying in Tel Aviv.
IN 2002, during the Second Intifada, as covering the news became more stressful, David left the Post and became the founding editor of ISRAEL21c, an English-language NGO and website that touted Israel’s hi-tech accomplishments. “It was the forerunner of the Start-up Nation concept,” he explains. In 2008, David returned to the Post – “I missed journalism” – and became managing editor in 2011.
As managing editor, David fills in with whatever needs to be done at the paper, managing staff, being involved in editorial decision-making and writing whenever he can. “My favorite thing is closing the paper and ‘putting the paper to bed,’ even though you can’t say ‘Stop the presses’ anymore,” he says. “Every day is different.” Brinn suggests that newspapers will continue the trend towards digital, and eventually, he says, most papers will have to charge a small fee for online access. He avers that the Post’s print edition is still vibrant and strong, and he is proud that The Jerusalem Post has invested in keeping the print newspaper going.
Brinn sports a tiny stud earring in his left ear, and how it got there provides an instructive look into his unflappable demeanor. When his eldest daughter was eight, Brinn took her to downtown Jerusalem to get her ears pierced. Before the piercing, she started crying and said that she couldn’t do it. Recalls Brinn, “I said, ‘Calm down, it’s ok. Will it help if I get one, too?’ She said ‘yes,’ and I said ‘ok.’ I got it, she got hers, and I’ve worn it since.”
David has a long-standing Friday morning tradition, playing tennis with other longtime friends, mostly former Post staff, but music remains his true passion. He is the drummer for the NightCallers, a group of current and former journalists who play classic rock from the 60s, 70s, and 80s. “We have a great time and practice weekly in a shed converted into a a great studio in Be’er Ya’acov near Rishon,” Brinn reports. David has a mini-recording studio at home, where he creates and mixes his own songs. “I realize that there is no age limit,” he says. “When you play on stage, you feel that you are ageless.”
David Brinn, the only person in his family to have left the State of Maine (“most people don’t leave Maine because it is so beautiful”), is very happy that he made aliyah 36 years ago. He loves the informality of living here but sometimes finds that same informality troubling when “everybody is in your business, and people are discourteous.”
Recalling his father’s move to Israel in 1935, he says, “It’s ironic that I was the first person in the family almost 50 years later to come back and do the same thing that he did. I think that he and my mother were sad that I was leaving them but I think that secretly he was very proud that someone from the family was continuing something that he had started to do fifty years earlier.
“My wife and I joke that sometimes I feel more gung ho and Israeli and Zionist than she does. She was the impetus to come here,” he adds. Brinn credits his aliyah success to the very lack of idealism that he once harbored. Those who come to Israel with great idealism and think things will be perfect sometimes get disillusioned, he cautions. “I came with low expectations and built it up into a life that I couldn’t have imagined.
“If I didn’t know what Zionism was when I met my future wife in college,” says David Brinn, “I know what it is now, and I feel it pretty much every day.”