It’s Sunday afternoon and the editorial offices of the Boston Globe are nearly deserted a perfect opportunity to lean in and ask Jeff Jacoby the question I’ve always wanted to pose to an opinion columnist for a major newspaper: “Why the hashkamah minyan?”

The reason of course that I’d never gotten to ask that question is that Jeff Jacoby is a rarity if not a singularity among op-ed writers on the editorial pages of a big-city daily: He’s a frum Jew. And not just at any newspaper but a famously liberal one the largest in famously liberal Boston and owned by the equally left-leaning New York Times. Jeff is virtually the Globe’s lone conservative voice or as one wag put it he’s its ‘conservative in captivity.’

So why is he a stalwart member (and along with teenage son Caleb a sometimes baal korei) of the Young Israel of Brookline’s early Shabbos morning minyan? His answer is trademark Jeff Jacoby straightforward and Midwest commonsensical: “I’ve been a confirmed hashkamah guy for a long time. I just hate to waste the time. But my wife has a different explanation: She’s says I’m antisocial.”

The title “op-ed columnist” often conjures an image of a hyper-intellectual pontificator. But this Cleveland Ohio native is as down-to-earth as they come. He’s what one might call the “un-columnist.”

To be sure Jacoby whose columns are regularly cited and discussed in right-wing circles — and lambasted in left-wing ones — pulls his intellectual weight as a serious conservative thinker whose work has garnered awards like the Eric Breindel Award for Excellence in Opinion Journalism. His mode of persuasion though is not through displays of cerebral fireworks but by means of reasoned and reasonable thinking well supported by a full array of sources in law history and science. The experience of reading his columns is a bit like inviting an amiable learned and world-wise uncle — button-down sweater and all — into one’s living room for a fireside chat.

Nor is there even a trace of a writer’s occupational hazard of arrogance. When I ask Jacoby whether he has mentored students interested in journalism he says “When students say to me ‘I want to have a career like yours so what can you advise me?’ I basically respond ‘Wait for the phone to ring because for me that’s how it began. I got a phone call.’ I was never a reporter so I didn’t come up the ladder like a lot of reporters who toil in the journalistic vineyards for many years.” And of teaching others the writing craft he says “a bunch of my colleagues teach writing seminars and journalism classes and I always marvel at how they do it. I’m not very good at distilling things into techniques or rules of thumb.” As for why he’s not quite a regular on the scholar-in-residence circuit he humbly comments “As you know in every case the ‘residence’ part isn’t really true and in my case neither is the ‘scholar’ part.” 

Jacoby doesn’t even write books or blogs or host talk shows as many other writers in his league do. “Part of it” he says “is that I’m a very slow writer — excruciatingly so. I read slowly and I write slowly. Years ago there was a sportswriter for the New York Times named Red Smith and when he was asked what it was like to write his column he said ‘I sit down at the typewriter I open up a vein and I squeeze it out one drop at a time.’ Writing has always been like that for me.

“Now [prolific British historian] Paul Johnson is an example of somebody I wish I could write like; he just sits down and two hours later out comes a column. Or take [the late conservative icon] William F. Buckley. Here’s a guy who at his peak was writing three syndicated columns a week editing the biweekly National Review magazine hosting a television show giving something like 75 speeches a year producing a book every year and a half or so and on top of all that he was being Bill Buckley — you know yachting across the Atlantic skiing at Gstaad etc. — and there I sit for an hour and a half trying to come up with my first paragraph. You get the blessings you get.… Your challenge isn’t to be Rav Moshe Feinstein but to be what Eytan Kobre can be what Jeff Jacoby can be. I sometimes feel like I’m good enough to know how good the greats are but at the same time I know I don’t have a prayer to be as good as them.”