H eadlines
Elihu Katz, Penn Media Scholar, Dies at 95
OB ITUARY
JARRAD SAFFREN | JE STAFF
ELIHU KATZ, the University
of Pennsylvania professor who
brought television to Israel, died
on Dec. 31.

He was 95.

Born in Brooklyn in 1926
to Jewish parents of Eastern
European descent, Katz became
a sociologist and media scholar
whose insights shaped his field.

According to colleagues, his
biggest one was arguably about
“the social context of commu-
nication,” as Penn professor
Joseph Turow put it.

Katz theorized that “a lot of
information people get from the
media they get from people who
have heard or listened to the
media,” Turow explained.

After communication
issues during the Six-Day War,
“Israeli officials decided in 1967
to expand the nation’s broad-
cast presence beyond radio,”
said an obituary to Katz on
Penn’s website. Katz left two
academic appointments to
head up the effort. Today, Israel
has a wide-ranging television
ecosystem. The professor served in a
variety of academic appoint-
ments before arriving at
Penn’s Annenberg School for
Communication in 1993. He
remained in Philadelphia until
he retired in 2014.

“He was very much respon-
sible for positioning the field of
communication as something
that could be studied in the
university arena,” said Barbie
Zelizer, Penn’s Raymond
Elihu Katz
Courtesy of the Annenberg School
for Communication, University of
Pennsylvania Williams
Professor of
Communication. Before
Katz, Zelizer
explained, “communication
was run by the idea that the
media had large effects.” Katz,
though, argued that those
effects weren’t so large after all.

The popular notion that the
mass media had a pacifying
impact on people was not quite
right. There was an activating
element, too, according to
Zelizer. People consumed the media
and then talked to each other
about it. A person’s social circle
had perhaps as much influence
as the content itself.

“That set in place a new
paradigm for thinking about
how the media works,” Zelizer
said. Katz applied the same
concept to studying physi-
cians and how they chose
their medicines for patients.

And he came to a similar
finding: Doctors’ “peer network
Elihu Katz at a 2018 Penn reception awarding him an honorary degree
Courtesy of the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania
relationships with
their communities” had quite a bit of
influence, said Damon Centola,
Penn’s Elihu Katz Professor in
the Annenberg School.

The scholar also pioneered
other media theories, like one
about how the media created
events, including inaugura-
tions, royal weddings and
Olympic competitions, for
people to partake in from
far-flung locations.

“This is a big legacy,” Turow
said. Katz
graduated from
Midwood High School in 1944
and then served in the Army
for three years. He earned his
B.A. and M.A. from Columbia
University in Manhattan in
1948 and ’50, respectively.

The scholar published
“Personal Influence: The Part
Played by People in the Flow
of Mass Communication,”
about his seminal theory,
five years after that. A decade
later, he established the
to study how social media
networks influence actual social
networks. “Now that we understand
the role of influence, we look
at the patterns of connections,”
Centola said. “How movements
take off and whether they
succeed or fail. How social
networks shape that.”
Katz, though, was more
than just a great scholar. He
was a friend and active listener,
according to colleagues.

His curiosity never waned
through all his decades in
academia. “I just enjoyed talking with
the guy,” Turow said. “We never
worked on the same research.”
Zelizer described Katz as
interested in “whatever you
were doing.” She also said his
curiosity was a big part of his
success. “When you lose your
curiosity, you lose your ability
to reinvent,” Zelizer added.

Katz was conversing with
people right up until the end.

Earlier in his 90s, the scholar
emailed Centola at 2 a.m. with
a series of questions on a paper
that the younger man had
published. “He was completely atten-
tive,” Centola said.

On the morning of Dec. 31,
around 10:30, he sent Zelizer a
concise and lucid email. Then
he died around lunchtime.

Katz is survived by his wife,
Ruth Katz, a musicologist and
professor emerita at Hebrew
University, and two sons. l
Communications Institute
at the Hebrew University of
Jerusalem. He left both that post and a
concurrent one at the University
of Chicago to help introduce
TV in Israel. For three years,
he ran Israel Television, the
Jewish state’s “nascent televi-
sion service,” the Penn obit said.

After his groundbreaking
work, Katz returned to Hebrew
University and later added a post
at the University of Southern
California’s Annenberg School
for Communication, where he
remained until taking the Penn
post in 1993.

Some of his other influen-
tial works included “Medical
Innovation: A Diffusion Study,”
“The Export of Meaning: Cross-
Cultural Readings of Dallas”
and “Media Events: The Live
Broadcasting of History.”
Katz’s research had a partic-
ular influence on Centola,
who uses the foundation that jsaffren@jewishexponent.com;
his predecessor established 215-832-0740
Pathologist Still Challenges Warren Commission
NATIONAL ADAM REINHERZ | JE FEATURE
IN THE 58 YEARS since
President John F. Kennedy’s
assassination, Dr. Cyril Wecht
has grown even more convinced
8 JANUARY 6, 2022
that the Warren Commission,
and its finding that Lee Harvey
Oswald acted alone, is grossly
incorrect. Wecht said his theories have
been reinforced by radiological
studies, pathological exams and
acoustic inspections conducted
by others, as well as his own
research, document reviews and
visits to the National Archives
— where he discovered that
not only was Kennedy’s brain
never examined, but that it was
missing. “More and more evidence
JEWISH EXPONENT
that has been examined by
highly qualified experts shows
clearly that the single-bullet
theory is an absurdity and that
there had to have been two
shooters, and one of the shots
was fired from the front, behind
the picket fence on the grassy
knoll,” Wecht said.

For decades, Wecht, a
forensic pathologist, attorney
and medical legal consultant,
has shared his findings on
national television, within the
pages of The New York Times,
in articles and books, and at
JEWISHEXPONENT.COM



H eadlines
More and more evidence that has been examined by highly qualified
experts shows clearly that the single-bullet theory is an absurdity and
that there had to have been two shooters, and one of the shots was fired
from the front, behind the picket fence on the grassy knoll.”
DR. CYRIL WECHT
“The JFK Assassination
Detected: An Analysis by Forensic
Pathologist Cyril Wecht”
Courtesy of Exposit Books
conferences. Having presented his views
on the JFK assassination almost
1,000 times, and reaching
myriad listeners, Wecht, 90, is
now reiterating his position to a
new audience.

In November, Exposit
Books published “The JFK
Assassination Detected: An
Analysis by Forensic Pathologist
Cyril Wecht.” The 307-page
work, co-authored by Dawna
Kaufmann, describes every-
thing from Kennedy’s autopsy
and the eventual disappear-
ance of the president’s brain
to Wecht’s experiences having
lunch with Marina Oswald (the
late wife of Lee Harvey Oswald)
and consulting on Oliver Stone’s
Oscar-winning 1991 film “JFK.”
Wecht said he spent almost
six years writing the text and
considers the book the most
important work he’s authored,
followed closely by his autobi-
ography, “The Life and Deaths
of Cyril Wecht: Memoirs of
America’s Most Controversial
Forensic Pathologist,” which
was published in September,
also by Exposit Books.

Functioning as both a report
on the president’s assassination
and a catalog of Wecht’s travels
throughout the decades, “The
JFK Assassination Detected”
shares insights into the mind of
one of the United States’ leading
forensic pathologists.

Having received his medical
degree from the University
JEWISHEXPONENT.COM of Pittsburgh and a law
degree from the University
of Maryland, Wecht served
as county commissioner and
Allegheny County coroner
and medical examiner, as well
as president of the American
College of Legal Medicine,
the American Academy of
Forensic Sciences, chairman
of the board of trustees of
the American Board of Legal
Medicine and the American
College of Legal Medicine
Foundation. During almost a half-cen-
tury of work, Wecht performed
more than 21,000 autopsies and
“reviewed, consulted on and
signed off on another 41,000
death cases,” including those
of Martin Luther King Jr.,
Elvis Presley, JonBenét Ramsey
and Kurt Cobain. He has held
academic appointments at
the University of Pittsburgh
Schools of Medicine, Dental
Medicine and Graduate School
of Public Health, and the
Duquesne University School of
Law, School of Pharmacy and
School of Health Sciences.

Wecht said he remains vexed
by those who subscribe to the
Warren Commission findings.

“More and more with each
passing year, my frustration
and my anger grow because of
the fact that the government
continues to get away with this,”
Wecht said.

There was a brief moment of
hope that the government might
change course, Wecht said.

In April 1992, following
the release of Oliver Stone’s
“JFK,” the filmmaker addressed
the House
Government Operations
Subcommittee on Legislation and National
Affairs regarding classified
files relating to JFK’s assassina-
tion. Wecht said Stone’s efforts
were instrumental in Congress
passing the “President John F.

Kennedy Assassination Records
Collection Act of 1992.”
According to the act,
“all Government records
concerning the assassination
of President John F. Kennedy
should carry a presumption of
immediate disclosure, and all
records should be eventually
disclosed to enable the public
to become fully informed about
the history surrounding the
assassination.” Despite the legislation,
however, the government still
has not released all of the
relevant materials, Wecht said.

President Donald Trump
seemed poised to release the
documents when he tweeted on
Oct. 21, 2017: “Subject to the
receipt of further information,
I will be allowing, as President,
the long blocked and classi-
fied JFK FILES to be opened.”
Nevertheless, Trump reversed
course, citing national security
concerns. On Dec. 15, a trove of
almost 1,500 documents
was released by the National
Archives. Researchers, however,
described the materials as
“underwhelming,” according to
CNN. Wecht likewise called the
documents “utterly worthless.”
President Joe Biden said the
more-than-10,000 unreleased
or partially redacted documents
could be declassified as early
as December, but Wecht isn’t
holding his breath.

“They’ll still play the same
game,” he said. “I don’t think
JEWISH EXPONENT
that they’re going to disclose
everything that is there.”
In his quest to refute the
Warren Commission’s findings,
Wecht has been called a
conspiracy theorist
and regarded as a rejecter of govern-
ment truths — in his new book
he includes a related chapter
on debating the late Sen. Arlen
Specter, who, after serving as
assistant counsel for the Warren
Commission, continuously
promoted the “single-bullet
theory.” Wecht doesn’t mind being
described as a conspiracy
theorist. Apart from the scien-
tific evidence supporting his
beliefs about the JFK assassi-
nation, he said that Americans
have come to learn much about
the government’s clandestine
affairs, including those during
World War II, Vietnam and the
Korean War.

It’s no longer inconceivable
that elected representatives are
capable of acting nefariously,
Wecht said. “Government
officials can get away with
things.” “I want people to lose their
naivete, their belief that these
kinds of things can never
happen in America, to be
aware of this,” he said. l
Adam Reinherz is a staff writer for
the Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle, an
affiliated publication of the Jewish
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9