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A scholar sees a common root for antisemitism and racism: ‘Christian supremacy’
(JTA) — Magda Teter’s new book, “Christian Supremacy,” begins in Charlottesville, Virginia, on Aug. 11, 2017. Hundreds of white nationalist neo-Nazis who ostensibly gathered to protest the removal of a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee from a local park broke into a chant: “Jews will not replace us.”
Other writers and scholars would note how antisemitism shaped white nationalism. But Teter, professor of history and the Shvidler Chair of Judaic Studies at Fordham University, saw something else: how centuries of Christian thought and practice fed the twin evils of antisemitism and racism.
“The ideology espoused by white supremacists in the US and in Europe is rooted in Christian ideas of social and religious hierarchy,” she writes. “These ideas developed, gradually, first in the Mediterranean and Europe in respect to Jews and then in respect to people of color in European colonies and in the US, before returning transformed back to Europe.”
In the book, subtitled “Reckoning with the Roots of Antisemitism and Racism,” she traces this idea from the writings of the early church fathers like Paul the Apostle, though centuries of Catholic and Protestant debates over the status of Jews in Europe, to the hardening of racist attitudes with the rise of the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
Antisemitic laws and theology, she argues, developed within Christianity a “mental habit” of exclusion and dominance that would eventually be applied to people of color up to and including modern times.
Teter is careful to acknowledge the different forms antisemitism and racism have taken, distinguishing between the Jews’ experience of social and legal exclusion and near annihilation, and the enslavement, displacement and ongoing persecution of Black people. And yet, she writes, “that story began with Christianity’s theological relation with Jews and Judaism.”
Teter is previously the author of “Blood Libel: On The Trail of an Antisemitic Myth,” winner of the 2020 National Jewish Book Award. At Fordham, the Catholic university in the Bronx, she is helping assemble what may be the largest repository of artifacts and literature dedicated to the Jewish history of the borough.
We spoke Thursday about how groups like the Proud Boys embrace centuries-old notions of Christian superiority, how “whiteness” became a thing and how she, as a non-Jew raised in Poland, became a Jewish studies scholar.
Our conversation was edited for length and clarity.
Your book was conceived and written during the COVID lockdown. Where did the idea for the book come from?
It’s an accidental project. I’ve been teaching the history of antisemitism for years, and I live in Harlem so questions of race and racism are very stark in my daily life. And since I grew up in Poland, and American history was not something we were taught or studied, I’ve never been satisfied with the various explanations for the strength of antisemitism and history of racism. And as I mentioned in my prologue, I watched the Raoul Peck documentary, “I Am Not Your Negro,” which has a clip with James Baldwin saying that white people have to figure out why they invented the idea of the N-word and must “embrace this stranger that they have maligned so long.” You could also say that the European Christians created the idea of “the Jew” and that sort of caricature had absolutely nothing to do with flesh and blood Jews. I kept noticing these parallels, as an outsider, reading American and African-American history.
I was also thinking about this idea of servitude that was attached to Jews in Christian theology, and then in law.
You write in your book that “Over time, white European Christians branded both Jews and people of color with ‘badges of servitude’ and inferiority.” What do you mean by servitude in this context?
In Christian theology, from the earliest Christian texts, the idea of servitude and slavery is attached to the concept of Jews and Judaism. Paul does it in his Epistles. He uses this quote from the book of Genesis that “the elder shall serve the younger,” which becomes really embedded in Christian theology. It is the Jews, the elder people, who should serve the Christians, the younger people. Later on in medieval theology and canon law, Jews are in a servile position, consigned for their sin of rejecting Jesus to perpetual servitude. So even though Jews were free people and could live mostly where they wanted to live, marry whoever they wanted to marry — nobody was sold and some even had slaves — that idea of Jews as confined to perpetual servitude to Christians created a habit of thinking of Jews as having an inferior social status.
That language became secularized in modern times, and we see the development of the [antisemitic] trope of Jewish power: that they are in places where they shouldn’t be. I worked on fleshing out the parallels between the idea and then legal status of Jewish servitude and the conceptual perception of Black people in servile and inferior positions.
Magda Teter’s new book explores how “white European Christians branded both Jews and people of color with ‘badges of servitude’ and inferiority.” (Chuck Fishman)
What other kinds of parallels did you find between racism and antisemitism?
In the Christian theology, Black people, like Jews, will be seen as cursed by God. Jews were [portrayed as] lazy because they didn’t work physically — they made money and exploited Christians. Black people were [portrayed as] lazy because they were trying to avoid physical labor at the expense of white men. Both people were seen as carnal, both as sexually dangerous, and so on.
I was struck by the fact that the racist turn of Christian supremacy — justifying the enslavement of Black people on theological grounds — is a fairly late development, taking hold in the early modern period when Europeans established slaveholding empires.
That’s right. In the summer of 2020, the summer of George Floyd and Black Lives Matter, we were all thinking about these issues of race and racism and America. And as I was in the middle of writing the article that became the book, I felt that there was a deeper history that needed to be told, and that slavery is not bound by color until the enslavement of Black Africans by Europeans during the colonial expansion of Europe.
After the French Revolution, when Jews were offered “emancipation” in much of Europe, there were deep debates about whether they could be citizens and be entitled to the same rights and protections as Christian citizens of France and England and other countries. How was that debate informed by Christianity?
In pre-modern Europe, there was obviously both a religious and legal framework under which Jews existed. They had their place in a social hierarchy. After the French Revolution, people are creating a new political reality. The idea of equality obviously challenged the social hierarchies that existed, including the idea that Christians were the superior religion. And that begins to play a role on two levels. One is the level of, well, “how can you be equal and be our judges and make decisions about us?” It’s fear of power — political power and political equality. That challenges the habit of thinking that sees Jews as inferior, in servitude and otherwise insolent and arrogant.
The other level comes from Enlightenment scholars who begin to place Jews in the Middle East and in the Holy Land, in Palestine. Jews are no longer seen as European. They are seen as “Oriental,” and they are compared to the non-European religions and practices that these Enlightenment scholars have been studying. Their differences are now also racialized. “They are not like us, they can’t assimilate. They can never be Frenchmen, they can never be Germans.”
And I guess it’s a short step from that to regarding people with dark skin as inferior and subordinate.
That’s right. Enlightenment scholars are also trying to to understand why it is justified to enslave Black Africans and they do it through “scientific” and other means. They classify Africans as inferior intellectually and they create this idea of race.
I began to think about these European politicians and intellectuals in terms of creating their identities, and what I ended up arguing is what we saw in Charlottesville, what we’re seeing in Europe. It’s not necessarily just about hate, but it’s about exclusion and rejection of Jews and people of color from equality, from citizenship.
And the common thread here is that whiteness and Christianity become inseparable. You write that “freedom and liberty now came to be linked not only to Christianity, but to whiteness, and servitude and enslavement to blackness.”
That’s right. White Christian “liberty” becomes embedded and embodied in law.
Did you see any pitfalls in drawing parallels between the Black and Jewish experiences? I am thinking of those in either community who might say, “How dare you compare our suffering to theirs!”
Yes, I was tempered. I think what some call “comparative victimhood” has paralyzed conversations about this subject, and I kept it in my mind all the time. What I hope comes through is that there’s incredible value in a comparative approach. Coming from Jewish studies as my primary field, the comparison with the Black experience gave me clarity on the nature of antisemitism as well as on the nature of the Jewish experience, and vice versa: The Jewish experience can also give clarity to some of the aspects of anti-Black racism.
What’s an example?
So, for instance, questions like, “Are Jews white? Are they not white? When did they become white?” That’s a whole genre of scholarship. And when you look at it through the lens of law and ideology, you begin to see that from a legal perspective, Jews were considered white in the United States because they could immigrate and they could be naturalized according to law. They did not have to go to court to become American. Their rights to vote were not challenged. There was discrimination, they couldn’t stay in hotels and in some places they couldn’t find employment, but by law, they were considered citizens. The debate about the whiteness of Jews is creating a fog of misunderstanding.
Black Americans were targeted by specific legal statutes from the very beginning in the Constitution and then in naturalization law and so on. And then there was the backlash even after the Civil War to the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments [aimed at establishing political equality for Americans of all races].
Statues at the Strasbourg Cathedral depict Ecclesia and Synagoga, representing the triumph of the church, at left, and the servitude of Judaism, which is represented by a blindfolded figure, drooping and carrying a broken lance. (Edelseider/Wikimedia Commons)
How much do modern-day white supremacists, like the Oath Keepers or the Proud Boys, see themselves as Christian? Or is this a kind of white supremacy that doesn’t name itself Christian but doesn’t even realize how many of its ideas are based in theology?
I think they might not be conscious of this legacy, but neo-Nazis take from the legacy of the Nazis who themselves were not thinking of themselves as Christian necessarily. But what I argue in the book is that white Christian supremacy becomes white supremacy. It never discards the Christian sense of domination and superiority that emerges from its early relationship with Jews and Judaism.
In the United States, Black people serve as contrast figures to whiteness, in the law and in the culture. You cannot have whiteness without Blackness. For Christians, Jews serve as that contrast figure. Consciously or unconsciously, the Proud Boys are embracing that. They talk of “God-given” freedoms for white people. That is the Christian legacy.
You said that the Nazis didn’t necessarily see themselves as a Christian movement. But I must ask, even though it is not the scope of your book, was the Holocaust a culmination of white Christian supremacy? Because I think many Christian theologians would want to say that Nazism was godless, and a perversion of the true faith.
I’ll say that when exclusionary ideology is coupled with the power of the state, that’s where it can lead.
In the years since the Holocaust especially, there have been many efforts by Christian leaders to address the ideological failings of the past. You write about Nostra Aetate, the 1965 declaration by the Catholic Church absolving Jews of collective guilt in the death of Jesus and some Protestant documents of contrition. But I got the feeling you were disappointed that many denominations haven’t gone far enough in reckoning with the past.
There was a sort of a moral sense that something needs to be addressed after the Holocaust. But then it is not fully addressed. I don’t think anybody has addressed the issue of power — the roots of hate, yes, but not the dynamics of power. We’ll see where the book goes, but maybe theologians will begin to grapple with this legacy of superiority and domination, and the way hierarchical habits of thinking have been developed through theology and through religious culture.
What other impact do you hope the book may have?
White supremacy is very much in the air. We need to speak up against it, and make connections and allyships. I hope that maybe because the book deals with law and power, it may create bridges among people who care about “We the People” as a vision of people who are diverse, respectful and equal, and not the exclusionary vision offered by white and Christian supremacy.
A cross burns at a Ku Klux Klan rally on Aug. 8, 1925. (National Photo Company Collection)
I’d love to talk about your background. You’re not Jewish but you are chair of Jewish Studies at Fordham, a Catholic university. What drew you to the study of Judaism and the Jews?
I grew up in Poland with a father who from the time I was a little girl would point out to me that there had been Jews in Poland. We would drive through the countryside, and he’d say, “This used to be a Jewish town and there used to be a synagogue and there was the Jewish cemetery.” I grew up being very conscious of the past’s presence and this kind of stark absence of Jews in Poland, where in the 1970s when I grew up Jewish history was taboo.
As soon as Jewish books on Jewish subjects began to be published, including those that dealt with antisemitism, we would read it together. We would talk about it. He wouldn’t just shift the destruction and murder of Jews in Poland on to the Nazis.
There was no Jewish studies program in Poland when I was applying to universities, so I studied Hebrew in Israel, and then studied Yiddish in New York at YIVO. I came to Columbia University to get my PhD in Jewish history and my career went in the direction it did. I was a professor of history and director of the Jewish and Israel studies program at Wesleyan University. I came to Fordham eight years ago and created a program in Jewish studies.
Your previous book was about the blood libel, the historic canard that Jews murdered Christian children to use their blood. This one’s about antisemitism. I don’t want to presume, but is your interest in these subjects in any way an act of contrition?
I grew up in a very secular household. I did not grow up Catholic. But I think growing up in Poland made me very, very aware of antisemitism and the history of antisemitism. I got my PhD from Columbia University in Jewish history, which did not emphasize Jewish suffering, but Jewish life, and I have studied Jewish life and teach about Jewish life — not just about Jewish suffering.
However, in the last few years, antisemitism has certainly been on the minds of many of us. I also am committed to the idea of shared history, and therefore all my scholarship, as much as it is about Jews, it is also about the church and Poland and the law. Jews are an integral part of that history and culture. And, as such, I’m committed to that, to teaching about the vibrancy of Jewish life as much as the dynamics of what made that life difficult over the centuries.
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As The New York Times turns 175, the fight over its Israel coverage heats up again
(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.
The post As The New York Times turns 175, the fight over its Israel coverage heats up again appeared first on The Forward.
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Texas wins case forcing Galveston school district to display Ten Commandments posters in classrooms
(JTA) — A Texas judge has ordered a Gulf Coast school district to display posters of the Ten Commandments in all classrooms, marking a victory for the state in a protracted series of legal battles over religious freedom in public education systems.
District Judge Jeth Jones ruled on Thursday that the Galveston Independent School District must comply within 10 days, while also scheduling a non-jury trial to resolve the case next June.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican, had sued the school district last November after the school board voted against exhibiting the Protestant version of the Ten Commandments. Paxton’s petition argued that the board violated a June 2025 state law, SB10, which required the “conspicuous” display of Ten Commandment posters in all public school classrooms.
That law is at the heart of multiple lawsuits across the state, including one effort led by two rabbis who are seeking to bring a case to the U.S. Supreme Court. Along with non-Jewish clergy and parents, they are arguing that the mandatory inclusion of these texts in classrooms is unconstitutional and infringes upon religious freedom. Their case is separate from the Galveston case.
“These are religious documents,” Mara Nathan, the lead petitioner and senior rabbi at Temple Beth-El in San Antonio, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
“They do not belong in a secular public school space,” she continued. “If people want to be in a school space where religious instruction is part of that, then they can choose to send their kids to parochial school.”
In their case, Nathan and more than two dozen parties are asking the U.S. Supreme Court to weigh in on the controversial Ten Commandments law. Their petition, filed in August, asks the court to protect the religious freedom of students by ensuring that families, rather than politicians, are able to determine what role religion plays in their children’s lives.
Joining Nathan in the case is Joshua Fixler, associate rabbi at Congregation Emanu El in Houston, as well as Jewish, Christian, Hindu, Baha’i, Unitarian Universalist and nonreligious families statewide. The defendants include a long list of school districts, such as the Alamo Heights Independent School District and the Houston Independent School District, where Nathan and Fixler send their children, respectively.
Their decision to petition the Supreme Court is the culmination of a lengthy legal process that began after Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, signed the SB10 bill into law in June 2025.
“When I heard about this law, I was really uncomfortable and outraged,” Nathan said. “When I found out there was an opportunity to speak up and be part of litigation to oppose it, I was like, ‘Please sign me up.’”
Fixler echoed these sentiments, with hopes of protecting children from “seeing this Protestant Christian text every day in every classroom, and having it shape their understanding of what religious freedom should look like in America.”
The Jewish and Protestant versions of the commandments differ in wording, order and emphasis, with the Jewish commandments beginning with God’s declaration that he brought the Israelites out of Egypt.
Nathan, Fixler and the other plaintiffs filed a federal lawsuit in July 2025 seeking to block the display at their children’s schools. The next month, they secured a brief victory in district court, when they won a preliminary injunction to block the displays.
Last October, Paxton issued a formal legal advisory to all Texas school districts, reiterating their obligation to exhibit the display. He warned that Texas would vigorously enforce the law, while acknowledging temporary exceptions for 11 school districts that were party to the litigation at the time.
The attorney general described the commandments as “a cornerstone of America’s moral and legal heritage,” stressing a need for “these timeless principles” in schools “now more than ever.”
The pendulum swung in Paxton’s favor in April 2026, when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th District reversed the district court’s ruling. The judges, who sit on one of the most conservative federal appellate courts nationwide, determined that the law does not violate the First Amendment’s free exercise clause, which prohibits government from regulating religious beliefs.
They maintained that the SB 10 law “looks nothing like a historical religious establishment,” a bar that the judges said was set in a 2022 lawsuit. The Texas legislation, they wrote in the ruling, doesn’t “tell churches or synagogues or mosques what to believe or how to worship or whom to employ as priests, rabbis, or imams.”
“It punishes no one who rejects the Ten Commandments, no matter the reason,” they added.
Unwilling to concede defeat, Nathan and her colleagues in August asked the high court to review the case. Whether the Supreme Court will decide to take on the case is still uncertain, as four of its nine justices must agree to do so.
Fixler noted that the law requires posters of the commandments to be big enough to be read anywhere in the classroom and contain no other texts or context.
“I’m hearing from parents all over the state that their kids know that the state is elevating literally one religious tradition over all others,” he said, relating that although he prepared his kids for the displays, they “expressed a lot of anxiety” about needing “to see these words posted on the wall of their classroom.”
Fixler also expressed concern that the prominence of these posters could lead kids to ask “questions that some teachers aren’t going to want to answer,” such as, “What is adultery, and what does it mean to covet your neighbor’s wife?”
The families are represented by the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas, the national ACLU, Americans United for Separation of Church and State and the Freedom From Religion Foundation, with pro bono counsel from the Simpson Thacher & Bartlett law firm.
In their Supreme Court petition, the families accused the appeals court of defying a 1980 Supreme Court decision, Stone v. Graham, which they said “struck down a nearly identical Kentucky statute almost 50 years ago.” While the Texas appellate court had claimed that precedents set in a later case had superseded the Stone ruling, the families argued that the core principles of the Stone judgment were untouched by that later suit.
The forced display of the Protestant Ten Commandments in public school classrooms is not unique to Texas, although the Lone Star State case has emerged as one of the most prominent battlefields for the issue in recent months.
Other states that have required public schools to exhibit the Ten Commandments include Arkansas, Louisiana and Alabama, while Tennessee and North Dakota allow optional displays.
A group of complainants in Arkansas, including one Jewish family, is urging the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit to block school districts from implementing a state law on the subject. Meanwhile, in Tennessee, the ACLU and other groups have sent letters seeking records relating to school district plans to begin displaying the Ten Commandments.
In Galveston, the school board president told local media on Thursday that the school district would comply with the order, as demanded in the November lawsuit. Alongside the filing, Paxton had declared that “there is no valid legal basis” to prevent schools from complying with the law, claiming that their refusal was rooted in “the misconception that a ‘separation of church and state’ phrase appears in the Constitution.”
“It does not,” Paxton stated.
While Galveston is not party to Fixler and Nathan’s Supreme Court petition, the plaintiffs cited the year-long saga as evidence. The situation in Galveston, the petition argues, demonstrates that “injuries” to families who oppose the Ten Commandments displays “are actual or imminent,” a requirement to hear a case in federal courts.
The attorney general accused Galveston’s school board of voting “to flout SB 10” in its refusal “to display the Ten Commandments in accordance with State law.” At the time, he alleged that Galveston decided to “blatantly ignore the legislature,” while emphasizing that “America is a Christian nation.”
Notably, Fixler and Nathan’s Supreme Court petition flags the Galveston case in its appendix, even though the district is not party to the case. The situation in Galveston, the petition argues, shows that “injuries” to families “are actual or imminent.”
“I hope that the Supreme Court will take our case and rule in our favor,” Nathan said, affirming that any decision made here could set a precedent for similar cases nationwide.
“It would be really exciting to be written into history in a positive way, as part of a movement to really protect our religious freedom and separation between public school spaces and the private religious lives of people,” she added.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Texas wins case forcing Galveston school district to display Ten Commandments posters in classrooms appeared first on The Forward.
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David Ellison appoints Israeli to lead merged Paramount-Warner studios
(JTA) — Jewish entertainment mogul David Ellison has appointed an Israeli businessman to help lead operations at the new company being created by his controversial merger of Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery. The move came days after a settlement cleared the way for the combined mega-studio’s formation.
Ynon Kreiz, the Israeli-American former CEO of Mattel, is joining the company as Ellison’s co-CEO. The merged entity will be known simply as Skydance – the name of Ellison’s production company – which previously merged with Paramount, Ellison announced Friday.
“We have big goals for Skydance, and we intend to pursue them with passion, imagination and a willingness to take smart risks,” Ellison announced Friday in his inaugural post on the social network X.
The mogul’s entertainment and media ambitions have attracted considerable negative attention over the last few years — attention that, in some instances, has been directed at his pro-Israel beliefs and connections as the entertainment industry writ large has also weathered growing accusations of anti-Jewish bias.
Most recently, the actor Mark Ruffalo has drawn accusations of antisemitism – and some support – for suggesting that Ellison’s planned $110 billion merger would be a boon to Israel’s “apartheid system of oppression” via Oracle, the tech surveillance company owned by Ellison’s father Larry that does business in Israel.
Paramount under Ellison’s leadership has long shown signs of pro-Israel leanings. Last year the company was the only major American studio to issue a public rebuke of a petition to boycott Israeli film institutions, circulated by many big-name actors, while distributing multiple documentaries about Israelis in the shadow of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks. Ellison also attracted scrutiny for appointing Bari Weiss, the Jewish and pro-Israel media innovator and pundit, as editor in chief of CBS News.
Weiss’s tenure at CBS has been marked by controversy, with mass walkouts of top talent and a ratings nosedive. Initial industry speculation that Ellison would ask her to also take the reins at Warner-owned CNN has been tamped down in recent days, with the Wall Street Journal and other outlets now reporting that Ellison has asked the news network’s CEO Mark Thompson to stay put for at least the next year.
Kreiz, the former Mattel CEO behind the smash-hit “Barbie” movie, has been known to support pro-Israel causes as well. In 2023, he attended a screening of footage of the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks organized by Israeli actress Gal Gadot at Los Angeles’s Museum of Tolerance. Outside, brawls broke out between pro- and anti-Israel demonstrators.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post David Ellison appoints Israeli to lead merged Paramount-Warner studios appeared first on The Forward.
