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‘Israel Is Not Jewish People,’ New York Times ‘Daily’ Guest Really Wants You to Know
Anti-Israel protesters outside Columbia University in Manhattan, New York City, April 22, 2024. Photo: USA TODAY NETWORK via Reuters Connect
When producers from the New York Times podcast “The Daily” posted on social media looking for “Jewish students who represent a range of feelings and experiences, from being enthusiastically pro Palestinian to enthusiastically pro Israel, and everything in between,” I replied, “This is a trap! They’ll use the ‘pro-Palestinian’ (the polite term they use for the ones who want to wipe Israel off the map) ones to make it sound like the Jewish community is divided and give listeners the illusion that the anti-Israel protests aren’t antisemitic.”
Sure enough, the Times podcast episode that finally aired, headlined, “The Campus Protesters Explain Themselves,” included three students.
Mustafa Yowell, of Irving, Texas, said his mother was from “Nablus, Palestine” and described himself as a Palestinian Arab. He’s a student at the University of Texas, Austin who complained to the Times that “two IDF [Israel Defense Forces] soldiers had infiltrated the campus.” By “IDF soldiers” he meant Israeli students at the university who had, like many Israelis, served in the army before college.
The second student interviewed, Elisha Baker, a student at Columbia University, described himself as a proud Zionist and a graduate of Jewish day school.
And the third student, Jasmine Jolly, a student at Cal Poly Humboldt, described herself as the daughter of a Catholic father and “of Ashkenazi descent on my mom’s side.” Jolly showed up at protests with a sign that said “in honor of my Jewish ancestors, I stand with Palestine.” Jolly also chanted “there is only one solution, intifada revolution.”
“There’s nothing that has come across to me as antisemitic if you are able to pause and remember that Israel is not Jewish people and Zionism is not Jewish people,” Jolly explained to the Times audience.
Jolly read an email from her Jewish grandfather claiming, “Israel is an increasingly apartheid state.”
This is just such a misleading view of reality on campus and in American Jewish life. Even polls like Pew that use an expansive definition of who is Jewish find overwhelming Jewish support for Israel and negligible support for Hamas, including among younger Jews 18 to 34.
In reality, a lot of the anti-Israel protesters aren’t even Palestinians; they are European or Asian students or white or black Americans who either have been brainwashed by their professors or who have underlying, pre-existing antisemitic attitudes. Few of them have been to the Middle East and many of them are ignorant about basic facts about it — remember the Wall Street Journal piece, “From Which River to Which Sea?”
“The Daily” episode made it crisply concrete, with the Times representing Jews as being split 50-50, with one normative Jew and one Jew chanting “there is only one solution, intifada revolution.” That’s ridiculous, yet a similar approach contaminates other Times coverage of the Jewish community, misleadlingly portraying American Jewry as deeply divided rather than unified around the goals of getting the hostages back, eliminating the threat of Hamas, and making American college campuses safe for Jewish students.
The Times was at this game well before Oct. 7, 2023, proclaiming “the unraveling of American Zionism” and trotting out old chestnuts such as the Reform movement’s Pittsburgh Platform of 1885 and the New York Times‘ favorite Jew, Peter Beinart.
I find myself rolling my eyes at such depictions, but there is clearly some audience for them among the Times readership and top editorial ranks. The Times executive editor, Joe Kahn, told Semafor’s Ben Smith in a May interview, “I’m not an active Jew.” Maybe the New York Times can sell sweatshirts: “Inactive Jew.” Who, exactly, is supposed to find that distinction between “active” and “inactive” Jews reassuring? Maybe they can put it on top of the front page in place of “All the News That’s Fit to Print”: “Edited by someone who wants the public to know he’s not an active Jew.”
Of all the moments to choose to distance oneself publicly from the Jewish people, this is sure quite one to choose.
This “Daily” episode seems calculated to appeal to the inactive Jews, and to others who want justification to believe it’s not antisemitic to set up on Passover and falsely accuse Israel of genocide. It’s nice for the Times to include a Zionist voice on the program, but he wound up sandwiched in between a Palestinian and an “only one solution, intifada revolution” person. It’s fairly typical for the New York Times these days, but it isn’t pretty.
Ira Stoll was managing editor of The Forward and North American editor of The Jerusalem Post. His media critique, a regular Algemeiner feature, can be found here. He also writes at TheEditors.com.
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Vancouver police raid a home linked to the director of Samidoun—which is now a terrorist entity in Canada
Vancouver police arrested and released one person at the home of Charlotte Kates, director of the terror group Samidoun, in a dramatic raid on Nov. 14. The raid was conducted […]
The post Vancouver police raid a home linked to the director of Samidoun—which is now a terrorist entity in Canada appeared first on The Canadian Jewish News.
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Trump Won A Majority of Votes In Heavily-Jewish New York City Precincts, Election Data Claims
Republican presidential candidate and former US President Donald Trump speaks during a campaign rally at the Forum River Center in Rome, Georgia, US, March 9, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Alyssa Pointer
President-elect Donald Trump won an overwhelming majority of the votes in New York City (NYC) precincts that were at least a quarter Jewish, according to a data analysis by the Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC), a prominent Washington DC-based political group.
RJC presented data on Friday affirming the notion that Trump won a higher proportion of the NYC Jewish vote than in previous elections, potentially signaling an ideological shift in the traditionally-liberal voting bloc. According to RJC data, Trump received the “overwhelming” majority of votes in precincts with a Jewish population of at least 25%.
Trump’s 2024 performance among Jews in NYC seems to mark a substantial improvement over the 2020 and 2016 elections, contests in which the president-elect struggled to make inroads among Jewish voters.
Voting data from the 2024 election also indicate that there was a significant shift among Jewish voters in Pennsylvania. President-elect Trump also enjoyed greater success in heavily-Jewish enclaves of deep-blue cities such as Chicago and Los Angeles, according to data compiled by the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners and the Los Angeles Times, respectively.
Trump’s increased success among Jewish voters in the Big Apple comes amid simmering anger over surging antisemitism across the country.
In the year following the Hamas slaughter of roughly 1200 people throughout southern Israel, college campuses have become embroiled in an unrelenting onslaught of protests opposing the Jewish state. Moreover, many Jews have expressed dissatisfaction with the Biden administration’s handling of the Israel-Hamas war, suggesting that the president has not been a firm ally of the Jewish state.
Over the past year, NYC has been ravaged with raucous, often-violent anti-Israel demonstrations and an unrelenting spate of antisemitic hate crimes.
Columbia University, one of the most prestigious higher education institutions in the world, became a poster-child for the anti-Israel campus movement, erecting encampments and holding protests calling for the destruction of the Jewish state. Many NYC public schools came embroiled in scandal after teachers presented students with lesson plans that accused Israel of committing “apartheid” and “genocide” against the Palestinians.
Though most national Democrats continue to express support for Israel’s right to defend itself from Hamas terrorists, some figures in the party have, over the past year, adopted a more adversarial posture toward the Jewish state, often citing the humanitarian situation in Gaza as a key reason.
High-profile Democrats such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren (MA) have suggested that Israel has perpetrated a “genocide” against Palestinians in Hamas-ruled Gaza, where Israel has been waging a military campaign targeting terrorists since the Oct. 7 atrocities. Earlier this year, a group of dozens of Democratic lawmakers, including former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), sent a letter to US President Joe Biden, urging him to “reconsider” approving offensive arms shipments to Israel.
Over the course of his campaign, Trump repeatedly touted his support for the Jewish state during his singular term in office. While courting Jewish voters, Trump has boasted about his administration’s work in fostering the Abraham Accords, promising to resume efforts to strengthen them once he retains office in January.
Trump also recognized Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights, a strategic region on Israel’s northern border previously controlled by Syria, and also moved the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, recognizing the city as the Jewish state’s capital.
The post Trump Won A Majority of Votes In Heavily-Jewish New York City Precincts, Election Data Claims first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Attempted Robbery of Jewish Man in Brooklyn Puts Orthodox Community on Edge
Screenshot of masked men who attempted to rob Jewish man in Crown Heights, Brooklyn on Thursday. Photo: Screenshot
The Jewish community in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, New York was the target of another attack on Thursday evening, as three men attempted to rob a Hasidic man after stalking him through the neighborhood.
Footage of the incident was shared on X/Twitter by Yaacov Behrman, liaison of Chabad Headquarters and founder of the Jewish Future Alliance (JFA) nonprofit. It shows the men, whose faces were concealed by hoods and ski masks, chasing the man into the street and through the neighborhood after attempting to accost him.
No arrests have been made.
“He doesn’t give in easily, and I don’t think they got anything,” Behrman tweeted. “The Jewish Future Alliance is deeply concerned not only about the increase in crime but also the fact that, once again, the perpetrators were wearing masks. We need to reinstate mask laws.”
The explosion of an antisemitic hate crime spree in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn has set the Orthodox Jewish community on edge in recent weeks.
Last Tuesday, two men beat a middle-aged Hasidic man after he refused to surrender his cell phone in compliance with what appears to have been an attempted robbery. According to multiple accounts, the assailants were two Black teenagers.
That incident was the third time in eight days that an Orthodox resident of Crown Heights was targeted for violence and humiliation. Before then, an African American male smacked a 13-year-old Jewish boy who was commuting to school on his bike in the heavily neighborhood, which is heavily Jewish, and less than a week earlier, an assailant slashed a visibly Jewish man in the face.
Most recently, a masked man was caught on video approaching a visibly Jewish father walking with his two sons and grabbing one of the children in broad daylight. He was unable to secure possession of the child, whose father fought back immediately and did not let go of his son. Police later identified the man as Stephan Stowe, 28 — a suspect gang member with an extensive criminal history which includes 33 prior arrests — and charged arrested him attempted kidnapping and endangering the welfare of a child.
In each case, the suspect was allegedly a Black male, a pattern of conduct which continues to strain Black-Jewish relations across the Five Boroughs.
Black-on-Jewish crime is a social issue which has been studied before. In 2022, a report published by Americans Against Antisemitism (AAA) showed that Orthodox Jews were the minority group most victimized by hate crimes in New York City and that 69 percent of their assailants were African American. Seventy-seven percent of the incidents took place taking in predominantly Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods in Brooklyn. Of all assaults that prompted criminal proceedings, just two resulted in convictions.
“We’ve never seen anything like this,” AAA founder and former New York State Assemblyman Dov Hikind (D) told The Algemeiner. “Shouldn’t there be a plan for how we’re going to deal with it? What’s the answer? Education? We’ve been educating everybody forever for God’s sake, and things are just getting worse.”
The problem has become acute in recent years. In July 2023, for example, a 22-year-old Israeli Yeshiva student, who was identifiably Orthodox and visiting New York City for the summer holiday, was stabbed with a screwdriver by one of two men who attacked him after asking whether he was Jewish and had any money. The other punched him in the face. Earlier that year, 10- and 12-year-olds were attacked on Albany Avenue by four African American teens.
According to a report issued in August by New York state comptroller Thomas DiNapoli, antisemitic incidents accounted for a striking 65 percent of all felony hate crimes in New York City last year. The report added that throughout the state, nearly 44 percent of all recorded hate crime incidents and 88 percent of religious-based hate crimes targeted Jewish victims.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
The post Attempted Robbery of Jewish Man in Brooklyn Puts Orthodox Community on Edge first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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