There are two ways to look at the Oct. 7 attacks, and which way you do will determine, to a large degree, whether you want to see Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu survive the next election.

The first view is that Oct. 7 proved the Israeli-Palestinian conflict cannot be solved. The second is that it proved the conflict cannot be allowed to remain unresolved.

These conclusions point in almost opposite directions, yet both begin with something Israelis learned, or thought they learned, from the same horrific day. One says there is no point trying to mollify the Palestinians, because hatred of Israel runs too deep. The other says that leaving millions of Palestinians indefinitely in their current condition will produce catastrophe again and again. The tragedy is that Oct. 7 supplied powerful evidence for both.

The first view is not without foundation. Even to Israelis (and people across the world) who have long sought a peaceful accommodation, it was shocking to see the sheer joy of the Hamas terrorists as they butchered families while filming their own barbarism, calling parents to brag, then dragging innocents into Gaza where crowds wildly cheered.

But the real shock was the support for this in the West Bank and Gaza – polls showed two-thirds to three-quarters of Palestinians approved –  suggesting coexistence is impossible. Rarely have polls been more devastating. As a result, many Israelis lost sympathy for Palestinians and concluded that a cleansing inferno is required. The brutal war that followed certainly reflected that.

The second way to see Oct. 7 is that the Palestinian issue cannot be ignored – that the situation of the Palestinians was so unacceptable that something terrible was bound to happen. Many Israelis have trouble accepting this, because it does not really explain Hamas, which would fight Israel in any case, even if it were led by a far-left government willing to hand over to it every inch of the West Bank and Gaza and divide Jerusalem. But it might explain why so many Palestinians – even ones not in denial about the facts – were prepared to support it.

This view also offers at least one reason why the propaganda war waged by Hamas and its supporters has been so successful. There are others – including antisemitism and an outright denial of Israel’s right to exist . But the fundamentally unacceptable situation of the Palestinians is a big one, to be sure.

The combination of these factors yielded stunning results and contributed to an unfair vilification of the country that continues to frustrate Israeli voters.

By Oct. 9, before Israel had even identified all its dead or invaded Gaza, accusations of “genocide” were already circulating online, then among activists, NGOs, academics and eventually governments. By Oct. 13, protests denouncing “genocide” took place in London. On Oct 17, the Qatar-based Arab Center for Research & Policy Studies held a symposium called “The War on Gaza: Palestinian Defiance and Resistance against Orchestrated Genocide and Expulsion.”

Within weeks, South Africa accused Israel of “genocide” at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, invoking the “crime of crimes,” a term most associated with the Holocaust, the Armenian Genocide and Rwanda. “This libel is powered by a relentless campaign of indictment that engraves a lie into collective memory,” says Adam Fisher, one of Israel’s top venture capitalists, who has researched the propaganda campaign in detail.

When Israel’s military entered Gaza, it faced an enemy that had deliberately embedded weapons caches, command centers and rocket launchers in homes and crowded neighborhoods, including hospitals, schools, mosques and UN sites. Hamas fighters vanished into tunnels beneath civilian areas, turning every dead child, collapsed building and grieving parent into material for a global indictment of Israel on social media. The strategy was clear: maximize civilian suffering, isolate Israel internationally, weaken American Jewish support and ultimately erode U.S. backing.

The implication is that Oct. 7 was a response to Palestinian suffering. The suffering is real, but Hamas was never defending Palestinians. The Iran-backed jihadist group has long sought to destroy Israel rather than establish a Palestinian state, and its campaign of terrorism after the 1993 Oslo Accords helped destroy the peace process by driving Israelis to the right.

Still, none of this makes the pre-Oct. 7 reality acceptable. In the West Bank, three million Palestinians live alongside some 500,000 Jewish settlers without equal rights, largely under military occupation, while extremist settlers have increasingly engaged in violence with the government and military often looking the other way. In Gaza, more than two million Palestinians endured a devastating Israeli-Egyptian blockade because Hamas ruled the Strip. It failed to prevent Hamas from arming itself while making civilian life miserable.

On Al Jazeera recently I was placed opposite a young Gazan named Ahmed Abo Askar, introduced as a humanitarian activist and engineering student. He said he had gone three days without eating, and looked like it. He hoped an aid flotilla might get through and then smuggle out his ailing father.

I tried to put things in perspective, explaining about Hamas and the need to be rid of it. Ahmed answered emotionally: “Israel, not Hamas, they are the ones who killed my sister, killed their children and their entire family on 6 November 2023. Not all of Palestinian people are Hamas. The goods, why it’s not entering? ‘It’s because of Hamas.’ We are not Hamas. We are human in the end.”

Everything I said was true – but he won the argument anyway, because he was a decent person suffering. No history lesson trumps that.

The insane situation has traumatized Palestinians and Israelis in parallel ways. The Palestinians – who are rooted in a conservative society disinclined to compromise – have been made, in large numbers, desperate enough to support a nihilistic movement like Hamas, which is truly genocidal against Jews.

As for Israelis, it has made huge numbers of them stop wanting to think seriously about Palestinians except through the lens of security and punishment. Some openly fantasize about expulsion. Empathy is viewed as naïve. Oct. 7 made Israelis a little crazy too – exactly per the plan of Hamas.

So the Israeli opposition — people deeply hostile to Netanyahu and his extremist coalition — is mostly afraid to touch the Palestinian issue at all in the campaign ahead of the Oct. 27 election, preferring to focus on Netanyahu’s epic domestic failures. Politically, the calculation is correct.

That is where the two interpretations of Oct. 7 attach themselves to the choice Israelis face in this election. Netanyahu has spent much of his career arguing, in practice if not always explicitly, that the Palestinian problem can be managed rather than solved: Contain Gaza, maintain Israeli control of the West Bank, expand settlements, periodically use overwhelming force and resist international pressure for Palestinian statehood.

If the lesson of Oct. 7 is that Palestinian hostility is essentially immutable and territorial compromise merely brings the enemy closer, then Netanyahu’s basic worldview survives despite his catastrophic failure on Oct. 7. The answer is deterrence and permanent Israeli security control — not another attempt at political reconciliation.

Gadi Eisenkot, the main challenger on the center-left, is more complicated. He is hardly offering Israelis a new Oslo: He has explicitly rejected a Palestinian state in the near- or medium-term and says the old two-state formula is unrealistic after Oct. 7. But he has also opposed more West Bank settlements and other measures that would make eventual territorial separation impossible.And he has long warned against Israel sliding into a binational state.

The implication is less a peace plan than a direction: Preserve the possibility of separating Israelis and Palestinians, change the conditions that perpetuate the conflict, and leave open a political horizon even if nobody can presently say exactly when it nears and how it ends. In that sense, the choice is not between Netanyahu and a dove. It is between continuing to manage an apparently permanent conflict and a government that might at least begin trying to move toward a possible peace.

But if Israelis conclude that Palestinians only understand force – which, by the way, Hamas clearly doesn’t – we’re guaranteeing a death spiral. Such a problem left to fester, without any attempt to change the dynamic, will blow up again and again. So after the election, if Netanyahu and his destructive right wing coalition are mercifully gone, this will need to be addressed in new and creative ways.

Both views of Oct. 7 rest on a foundation of facts. The invasion and massacre – and the widespread support for it among Palestinians – simultaneously dismantled both the Israeli left’s confidence in Palestinian intentions, and the Israeli right’s belief that the Palestinian problem could be indefinitely managed.

But it also proved that distrust is not a policy. Israel can build fences, destroy armies, assassinate commanders and punish those who attack it. What it cannot do is make millions of Palestinians disappear. If there is no political answer to that reality, eventually there will be another violent one.

The post The two ways to see Oct. 7 – and how they’ll influence the Israeli election appeared first on The Forward.

(JTA) — Britain’s Green Party on Sunday adopted a policy equating Zionism with racism, a move that immediately drew condemnation from the Israeli government and sparked concerns among some Jewish party members and the broader Jewish community.

The motion has also caused divisions within the party itself, with leader Zack Polanski, who is Jewish, skipping the vote and the party’s five sitting members of parliament issuing a statement on the policy.

Passing with 1,022 votes to 813 votes at the left-wing party’s annual conference, the motion argues that Zionism as an ideology is racist as it promotes “ethnonationalism,” and “privileges one ethnic group on the basis of the subjugation of others.”

It also declares the Greens to be an “anti-Zionist party” and that Zionism, the movement to develop and protect a Jewish state in Israel, will be “treated as any other form of racism.”

The motion also supports the establishment of a “single democratic Palestinian State in all of historic Palestine with Jerusalem as its capital.”

Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a press statement, “Today, the Green Party in Britain ceased to act as a political party and became a body that gives legitimacy to terrorism. The Greens have adopted not only the green of Hamas, but also its ideology: the elimination of the State of Israel through armed struggle.”

“The shocking resolution adopted today legitimizes armed struggle, calls for a Palestinian state ‘from the river to the sea’ – meaning the destruction of the State of Israel – and labels as ‘racist’ the aspiration of the Jewish people for self-determination,” the ministry statement said, adding that it “goes far beyond the boundaries of legitimate political debate.”

The ministry called on other political parties in Britain, particularly the ruling Labour Party, to reject the resolution.

In a letter to Polanski ahead of the vote, the Board of Deputies of British Jewry, Jewish Leadership Council and Community Security Trust said they had “acute concerns” about the motion and called on the party leaders to oppose it. They wrote that urgent action was needed to address growing antisemitism within the Green Party. Such a motion, they wrote, “fuels hatred of Jews.”

The five representatives of the Greens who sit in Parliament – MPs Ellie Chowns, Adrian Ramsay, Siân Berry, Carla Denyer and Hannah Spencer – issued a joint statement condemning the actions of the current Israeli government led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu but emphasizing, “We know there is no conflict between supporting the rights of Palestinians and the rights of Jewish people.”

A clause was proposed to protect Jewish Greens by clarifying that the motion should not be used to “pressure, proscribe or discipline” those affiliated with synagogues or other Jewish groups that describe themselves as Zionist. The clause was voted down.

This article originally appeared on JTA.org.

The post Britain’s Green Party adopts ‘Zionism is racism’ motion appeared first on The Forward.

(JTA) — For generations of American Jews, The New York Times has been more than a newspaper.

It has been the hometown paper of the largest Jewish community outside Israel, a daily guide to the city that became the cultural center of American Jewish life and, more broadly, a reflection of the aspirations of Jews who saw themselves as educated, cosmopolitan, culturally engaged and interested in the wider world.

And in the 175 years since the paper’s founding on Sept. 18, 1851, no issue has inflamed its Jewish readers like its coverage of Israel. This month, as the Times celebrities its 175th birthday with a series of special features, that argument has gotten new fuel.

On Sept. 23, the Florida state pension fund and a conservative think tank that includes shareholders in the Times sued the company, seeking internal records that they say could show whether its board has adequately overseen the newspaper’s coverage of Israel. The plaintiffs allege that repeated errors and other evidence point to a failure to enforce the paper’s own journalistic standards and reflect an anti-Israel bias in its coverage.

The Times called the suit meritless and politically motivated, saying it amounted to an attempt to pressure an independent news organization.

The lawsuit came days after the publication of a study by Edieal Pinker, a professor at Yale’s School of Management, which is also cited in the lawsuit. Pinker’s study attempts to put numbers behind a complaint made by supporters of Israel: that the Times’ coverage of the war that began with Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attacks has minimized Israeli suffering and Hamas’ role in the conflict.

Pinker examined 1,559 Times articles published between Oct. 7, 2023, and June 7, 2024. He found what he described as a dominant narrative in which Israel was assigned “near-exclusive agency and responsibility” after the Hamas attack. Meanwhile, Israeli casualties after Oct. 7, Hamas fighter casualties and Palestinian violence received much less attention, he asserted. Personal accounts of Palestinian suffering, he assessed, appeared far more frequently than comparable accounts of Israeli trauma.

Pinker told me that he understands the enormous disparity in the number of Palestinians and Israelis killed in the war. But that, he argues, does not absolve the newspaper for a framing of the war that focuses on Palestinian suffering and downplays Israeli motivations for carrying on the fight.

The Times has rejected Pinker’s conclusions. In response to the study, a spokesperson said the newspaper had covered the war “with more rigor than virtually any other U.S. news organization” and that editors make “careful and deliberate choices” about language, framing, prominence and tone in pursuit of independent journalism.

The discourse around Pinker’s study and the lawsuit reflects the American Jewish community’s longtime obsession with the Times’ Israel coverage, as well as splits within American Jewry itself. A cottage industry of media watchdog groups, including CAMERA and HonestReporting, seeks to expose errors in Israel coverage by the Times and other outlets. They focus on stories or headlines that show Israel in a bad light — press criticism mixed with pro-Israel advocacy.

Left-leaning academics and journalists often accuse the critics of having their own biases and dismiss their methodology, suggesting they seek to hold Israel above scrutiny and fail to understand the role of an independent press.

Eric Alterman, an author and historian who has written extensively about the American media, wrote in his 2022 history of American Jews and Israel, “We Are Not One,” that if anything, the Times has taken a “consistent, if sometimes, subtle, pro-Israel slant.”

He cited frequent protests by pro-Palestinian media critics, who think the Times is biased toward Israel, as well as a series of Jewish editors and Jerusalem bureau chiefs who, while often critical of Israel, used terminology and framing that reflect Israel’s perspective. (The word “nakba,” the Palestinian term for Israel’s creation meaning “catastrophe,” did not appear in the paper until 1998.)

But Alterman makes a larger point that is about the audience as much as the newspaper. He believes many American Jews have grown up on the “myth” of Israeli infallibility and see criticism or bad news about Israel as inherently suspect and evidence of hostility toward Israel or Jews.

“People who grow up on this myth and who define their Jewish identities by their fealty to this myth … find it very painful, very hard to deal with negative coverage of Israel,” Alterman, a professor of English and journalism at Brooklyn College, said in an interview. “And so, as I report in my book, attacking the media for its coverage of Israel became a manifestation of many a Jewish identity.”

For the petitioners in the recent lawsuit —  the National Center for Public Policy Research think tank and the State Board of Administration of Florida, who as Times shareholders say they are entitled to inspect company books and records —  the question isn’t the Jewish identity of the critics, but what they see as the Times’ board’s failure to enforce the newspaper’s own journalistic standards.

The suit includes numerous examples. They point to the Times’ initial coverage of the October 2023 explosion at Gaza’s Al-Ahli Hospital, which attributed the blast to an Israeli airstrike before the paper acknowledged that it had relied too heavily on claims by Hamas. The suit also cites an October 2023 account of a Hamas attack on the Israeli city of Ofakim in which, according to the plaintiffs, editors twice changed references to the attackers from “terrorists” to “men,” which they say reflected a reluctance to use language that cast Hamas negatively.

And in one of the highest-profile accusations of media bias during the war, the plaintiffs point to a July 2025 story about a severely malnourished Palestinian boy. While the paper said the subject was “born a healthy child,” the suit argues that Times staff had access before publication to information indicating that the boy had a pre-existing medical condition. (The Times later issued a correction.)

“In the absence of any Board-level oversight,” according to the filing, “journalistic standards have been weaponized within the Company to serve the personal agendas of unchecked editors.”

At the center of this debate is not only what may be the most important single news source in the world, but one with complicated Jewish roots. Adolph Ochs, a Jewish newspaper publisher from Tennessee who was born to German immigrants, bought the struggling paper in 1896. His descendants have controlled it ever since. Och’s father-in-law was Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise, a founder of Reform Judaism in America, and for decades the newspaper’s editorial line reflected Reform’s vocal anti-Zionism.

Ochs’ son-in-law, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, would become the paper’s publisher from 1935 to 1961. Any discussion of the Times’ relationship with the Jewish community is haunted by the paper’s failure, under Sulzberger’s watch, to rigorously cover the Holocaust as it happened.

When the paper did publish reports on the annihilation of the Jews, former Executive Editor Max Frankel wrote in an extraordinary, overdue mea culpa on the Times’ 150th anniversary, “they were mostly buried inside its gray and stolid pages, never featured, analyzed or rendered truly comprehensible.”

While Alterman describes Sulzberger as “an antisemite in his hiring practices and an anti-Zionist in his politics,” Laurel Leff, who wrote about the Times’ Holocaust history in her 2005 book “Buried by the Times,” is slightly more measured.

While the Times reported extensively on Nazi persecution and mass murder, it often failed to make clear that Jews were the principal targets of the Nazi genocide. Leff, professor emeritus of journalism at Northeastern University, believes Sulzberger was worried about accusations that the Times would engage in special pleading on behalf of the Jews.

“He had a particular sensitivity about the Jewish issue because of his background,” Leff said in an interview. “Because he so much wanted the Times to not be viewed as a Jewish newspaper, and his editors and reporters knew that.”

That sensitivity didn’t only manifest in what stories were and weren’t put on the front page. When Abraham Rosenthal joined the paper as a cub reporter in 1941, his bosses assigned him the byline “A.M. Rosenthal” because the paper’s management felt his first name sounded too Jewish.

Still, whether chastened by the extent of the Holocaust or just swept up by the prevailing narrative of the day, the Times for many years treated the new state of Israel “as a struggling nation trying to thrive while surrounded by implacably hostile Arab Neighbors,” as former Times reporter Neil A. Lewis wrote in a 2012 paper for the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy.

“But, over various points beginning in the late 1960’s through the next dozen years, the narrative began to change to a second, more equivocal phase,” Lewis continues. “The template of the small nation as a David battling a Goliath composed of its enemies no longer fit after Israel prevailed handily in the 1967 War. And gradually, the situation of the Palestinian refugees began to emerge.”

After Rosenthal rose to executive editor in 1977, the first of five Jews to hold the post over the next four decades, he aligned the paper more closely with the majority of its Jewish readers: still secular, although more open to Jewish stories and Jewish hires. Rosenthal himself, after his mandatory retirement in 1986, transitioned to the opinion pages and wrote pugnacious columns defending Israel’s right-wing Likud Party leaders.

“Rosenthal had done more than any one individual to reconcile the Times to its Jewish identity,” Times alum Samuel Freedman wrote in an appreciation when Rosenthal died in 2006. Among other things, Rosenthal ended an “unspoken” policy blocking Jews from reporting on Israel.

Not that that shielded the Times from criticism: Thomas L. Friedman, who served as Jerusalem bureau chief from 1984 to 1988, would earn three Pulitzer Prizes for his Mideast coverage but still remained (and remains) a lightning rod for criticism of the paper’s coverage of Israel. (In 1989, a panel discussion featuring Friedman at the 92nd Street Y was interrupted by pro-Israel hecklers who scuffled with security guards. “I spent five years in Beirut. Who thought I’d meet my end at the 92nd Street Y?” Friedman, now a columnist, said from the stage.)

Coverage of the controversial first Lebanon War, by Friedman and others, kickstarted efforts by pro-Israel groups to monitor and criticize the media’s coverage of the region. CAMERA, the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis, was founded in 1982 by Winifred Meyer in response to what she and other founders perceived as highly distorted, anti-Israel reporting on Israel’s military incursion. In his 1989 book, “From Beirut to Jerusalem,” Friedman himself criticized the foreign press corps in Lebanon for treating the Palestine Liberation Organization more charitably than it did Israel, the United States or their Lebanese allies.

At the same time, the newspaper increasingly came to embody another kind of American Jewish identity: intellectual, urbane, secular-minded, prosperous and engaged with the broader American and international culture. And as the rise of the internet took its toll on other daily newspapers, the Times’ influence only grew.

Daniel Okrent, who refereed readers’ complaints as the Times’ public editor from December 2003 to May 2005, said coverage of Israel and the Palestinians is perhaps the most scrutinized topic in the newspaper, with both sides convinced the Times favors the other side. He and his colleagues would brace for a flood of letters after every mention of Israel, however benign.

“I think that the feelings on that issue are so intense that people can’t see beyond their own feelings,” Okrent said in an interview.

Ari Goldman, a religion reporter who spent 20 years at The New York Times starting in 1975, often bore the brunt of those feelings. An observant Jew, he said he was frequently approached in synagogue by someone asking, “How can you work for that antisemitic newspaper?”

“They’d come to shul and wave a piece of paper in my face, and I’d say, ‘where’s the rest of the paper?’” Goldman, a professor emeritus at the Columbia Journalism School, said in an interview. “If you look at the coverage in general, yes, you’ll find mistakes, and stories that seem like they have a negative bent. But there are many stories that balance that, and many stories that are favorable toward Israel and tell the story more sympathetically.”

Goldman insists that Times journalists work hard to get a story right, and that the paper will offer corrections when they don’t. He also sees the recent hire of Yair Rosenberg to a new religion beat focused on Jewish American life as a sign that management recognized a “gap in their coverage.”

Critics and defenders agree that the Times often sets the agenda for other news outlets — and for its readers. In her 2005 book “Stars of David,” journalist Abigail Pogrebin asked the Broadway composer Stephen Sondheim about his feelings for Israel. “My attitude toward Israel is the New York Times’ attitude toward Israel,” he replied. “Whatever they tell me is what I believe.”

It is this sort of influence that motivates the Times’ critics. While Pinker does not accuse the Times of bias, his study does raise the specter of an “agenda” on the paper’s part to sway public opinion. “I document several imbalances in the reporting of the war that could plausibly influence the opinions of a reader in a direction that is at odds with reality,” he writes in the study.

In an interview, Pinker said he sought to move the argument away from individual headlines and toward patterns.

“What I find is that there is very little coverage of what you might call suffering or the cost of war on the Israeli side, whereas there is an enormous amount of coverage of that on the Palestinian side,” he said.

Those newsroom choices, he said, diminish Hamas’ responsibility for the extent and continuation of the war. Although he didn’t compare the Times’ coverage of the war to that of other news outlets, he did suggest what an alternative “framing” of the conflict might be: “Oct. 7 demonstrated to the Israelis that they have an unacceptable threat in Gaza, and they cannot rest until they’ve eliminated this threat.”

Alterman rejects Pinker’s analysis as “almost comical,” saying it didn’t take into account the disparity between the 1,200 Israelis killed on Oct. 7 and the tens of thousands Palestinians killed in Gaza in the subsequent war. No news outlet, he said, is obliged to note the persistent trauma and anger felt by Israelis amid the near daily bombardment of Gaza and critical food shortages seen during the height of a war.

“There’s been an enormous amount of reporting on the emotional cost to Israelis and the financial cost to Israelis of the reaction to Oct. 7, but it’s just ridiculous to say that there should be as much reporting on the incident of one day as there have been” of daily military operations during a war that lasted for two years, said Alterman.

Alterman also said that the newspaper’s critics fail to account for the separation between the Times’ news departments and its opinion pages.

On the opinion side, regular critics of Israel far outnumber its consistent defenders. The former include Friedman, Ezra Klein and Michelle Goldberg, whose criticism often appears to be written from a place of sympathy with a former, more liberal Israel, and contributing opinion writers M. Gessen and Peter Beinart, who have both accused Israel of genocide. All five are Jews.

Meanwhile, Bret Stephens follows in a tradition of right-leaning columnists, also Jewish, who consistently defended Israel, including Rosenthal, William Safire and David Brooks. David French and Russ Douthat, two conservative columnists, also tend to defend Israel when they write about the conflict. 

Earlier this year, when Nicholas Kristof wrote a column alleging sexual abuse of Palestinian detainees by Israeli security forces, critics suggested it hadn’t been put to the same journalistic scrutiny as a news story. Nonetheless, the Times defended the reporting, saying that details were fact-checked and corroborated where possible with witnesses and confidants.

Stephens, who rarely criticizes his employer in public, didn’t respond to Kristof’s column. But just nine days later, in a column cataloguing 25 years of what he described as inflammatory or unverified media narratives targeting Israel, he wrote what could be a manifesto for American Jewish critics of Israel coverage.

“The common thread in these and many other stories is that they all involve strenuous, if ultimately embarrassed, efforts to prove that Israelis deliberately seek to kill the innocent and maim the vulnerable, apparently for no other reason than gratuitous cruelty,” wrote Stephens. “This isn’t a matter of reporters’ impartially trying to expose wrongdoing wherever they find it — if that were the case, the errors wouldn’t invariably lean in the same ideological direction. It isn’t speaking truth to power. It’s feeding narratives to the credulous.”

For some Jews, the Times’ coverage of Israel, negative or not, is evidence of the newspaper doing precisely what a great journalism outlet ought to do: scrutinizing the powerful, including a government supported by the United States and deeply connected to American Jewish life.

For others, the same coverage is evidence that the paper has once again failed to understand the Jewish historical experience — particularly the experience of Jews who see Israel’s security as inseparable from their own.

What both sides share is a relationship with The New York Times that can feel both familial and obsessive.

“I think it’s a sense of ownership,” said Goldman, imagining the perception of so many of its Jewish readers: ”’I’m a New York Jew. This is my newspaper, and it should reflect me and my ideas.’”

This article originally appeared on JTA.org.

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