Geraldo Rivera Holds Court at the Hampton Synagogue

Veteran reporter and TV personality Geraldo Rivera joined Senior Rabbi Marc Schneier on Sunday at the Hampton Synagogue in Westhampton Beach for a spirited discussion and Q&A session.

The event was part of the synagogue’s Global Breakfast Forum series, which focuses on diplomacy, politics and matters of faith — topics which Rivera and Schneier dug into in detail. The forum also doubled as a birthday celebration for Rivera, who turned 80 on July 4.

Rivera was introduced by his longtime friend and colleague, Victoria Schneps, who pens the Victoria’s Secrets column for this newspaper and also serves as the president and co-publisher of Schneps Media, Dan’s Papers’ parent company.

Rivera was a fixture on the local New York news scene before he became a nationally known network correspondent. His seminal moment as a young journalist came in 1972, when his riveting reporting exposed the inhuman conditions at the Willowbrook State School on Staten Island, which had opened two years earlier as a treatment center for children with special needs.

His documentary on Willowbrook won the prestigious Peabody Award, helped precipitate the closure of the facility and launched his career as an investigative reporter and foreign correspondent.

“Geraldo literally snuck in, climbed a wall, climbed a fence and got the key from a doctor to open the doors,” Schneps recalled, quoting one of the most powerful moments from Rivera’s Willowbrook expose:

“I could show you the people. I could let you hear the sounds,” Rivera reported. “But how do I tell you about the smell?”

In the years that followed his Willowbrook reporting, Rivera had his nose broken by skinheads, opened Al Capone’s vault on live TV and became arguably the first journalist in the nation to break the news that Osama bin Laden had been killed.

While Rivera has been no stranger to controversy during his long career, the showman aspect of his on-air persona has served him well.

“This is the rockstar of news,” an audience member said, gesturing to Rivera. “That name, that hair…”

Spurred by pointed questions from Rabbi Schneier and the audience, Rivera expounded on his multi-ethnic family background, his five decades as an on-air journalist, his thoughts on the political and cultural polarization in the United States —  and his oxblood leather trench coat.

The product of a Puerto Rican Catholic father and a Russian Jewish mother, Rivera said that he has identified as a Jew since his days as a young correspondent covering the Arab-Israeli conflicts of 1973 and 1974, adding that he has a Star of David tattooed on his left fist.

“Growing up very Puerto Rican and very Jewish has been a challenge for me,” he said, noting that when his family moved from Brooklyn to Long Island in 1953, there were virtually no Jews in the family’s new West Babylon neighborhood.

Rivera spent a sizable chunk of the session discussing the lamentable degree of tribalism that infects our national discourse these days.

“When I was a young radical lawyer from 1968 to 1970, we were a very divided country. But this is different. It’s so toxic that there’s barely a conversation,” he said, challenging his audience. “If you saw someone with a MAGA hat right now, you can’t tell me that you wouldn’t be staring at that person and that he or she wouldn’t be glaring back at you. There’s a chasm in this country… we’ve got to make aggressive moderation our position.”

Speaking of political polarization, the generally left-leaning audience at the synagogue appeared to be very interested in Rivera’s choice to spend the last 22 years of his career working for Fox News.

“I went to Fox News because of 9/11,” he said, explaining that after the World Trade Center attacks, he implored his producers at CNBC (where he was working in 2001) to let him cover the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. When CNBC management refused his request, Rivera met with Roger Ailes, who was running Fox’s day-to-day operations at the time.

“I’ll work for half the money if you let me go to war,” Rivera told Ailes, who ultimately agreed to send him overseas as a war correspondent.

Rivera, who parted ways with Fox in June, cited no significant regrets about his time at the network. Nevertheless, he said he was happy to start a new chapter in his life at the age of 80.

“I left [Fox News] with a buoyancy I can hardly describe,” he said. “This is the first time in years that I have the freedom to be whoever I want to be and to say whatever I want to say — to be as pointed or as diplomatic as I care to be.”

One of the final audience questions of the morning came from a congregant who wanted to know what happened to Rivera’s signature leather trench coat. Rivera couldn’t recall precisely what happened to the garment, but he did joke that at least one of the keys to his success as a journalist was, “great leather coats and a lot of hair.”