TEL AVIV – Joseph Hochstein, former editor and publisher of the Washington Jewish Week, died June 26 in Tel Aviv.  He was 77.
Hochstein and his father, Phillip, launched The Jewish Week in Washington, D.C. in 1965 as a successor to the National Jewish Ledger.  During his tenure, which spanned two decades, the newspaper won several American Jewish Press Association awards.
Hochstein sold the paper in 1983 to Leonard Kapiloff, who changed its name to the Washington Jewish Week. Soon after, Hochstein made aliyah to Israel.
“I love newspapering, and I have a special love for this paper,” he wrote in a farewell op-ed published on August 11, 1983. “What happens each week at The Jewish Week is achieved with greater difficulty than the work done in the newsrooms of great metropolitan dailies, and it is more profoundly needed. Knowing that I played a central role in making this happen helps offset the regret of leaving, as does the joy of realizing a long-held dream of living in Israel.”
A graduate of Princeton University with a degree in humanities, Hochstein served in the army from 1956 to 1958, where he was assigned to the Armed Forces Press Service unit in New York City. Over the course of his long career in journalism he wrote for a broad range of news organizations, including the Advance News Service and several Newhouse newspapers. He was also an editor of the Congressional Quarterly and served as the information chief of a U.S. government commission on paperwork during the Carter administration.
In 1987, Hochstein co-authored the book “The Jews’ Secret Fleet: The Untold Story of North American Volunteers who Smashed the British Blockade,” with Murray S. Greenfield.
In Israel, Hochstein worked as a freelance editor and writer. Several years ago he began a blog “Israel: Like this, as if,” about his experiences living in Israel.
Hochstein was injured in a suicide bomb attack on Dizengoff Street in Tel Aviv in 1996, that killed 13 people. His son, Marcus, who made aliyah before Hochstein, was killed in 1985 at the age of 20 when his army paratrooper detail was ambushed while clearing a mine from a road near Nabatiya, Lebanon.