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Jewish Newspaper Editor Cancels His New York Times Subscription, Calling Israel Coverage ‘Dangerous’
A taxi passes by in front of The New York Times head office, Feb. 7, 2013. Photo: Reuters / Carlo Allegri / File.
A longtime New York newspaper editor has publicly canceled his New York Times subscription after 60 years, citing “consistent misrepresentations” about Israel that are “dangerous” and “debilitating toward the quest for truth.”
The veteran journalist, Ed Weintrob, was previously the editor of the Brooklyn Paper and is now the editor and publisher of The Jewish Star newspaper on Long Island. Weintrob is hardly a knee-jerk critic of the New York Times — in fact, when much of the Jewish community was up in arms against the Times for its investigative criticism of Jewish schools, Weintrob fronted a defense of the Times coverage by Jonathan Tobin, headlining it, “Tobin: Even lying Times got this right.”
In a May 3 social media post, Weintrob posted a screenshot of the cancellation form on the New York Times website, with the box ticked that listed as a reason, “I have concerns about the New York Times‘ coverage.”
In the explanation field on the form, Weintrob wrote, “A lifelong subscriber (and a journalist for nearly 50 years) I’ve approached the cancel button many times but never hit the trigger. The NYT, while not perfect, could usually be relied on to seemingly attempt honest coverage of key issues.”
The editor went on to tell the Times: “Your consistent misrepresentations toward Israel are at best cartoonish, at worst dangerous, and in all events debilitating to the quest for truth.”
To his social media audience, Weintrob explained, “Pushing that ‘cancel’ button was hard, but doing it was long overdue … It’s a cold-turkey break to a 60 year addiction (yes, I’ve been reading the NY Times print edition that long.”
Weintrob has plenty of company in deciding he no longer wants the print New York Times in his home. On May 8, the New York Times Company announced that print subscription revenues had declined, notwithstanding price increases, and that the number of print subscribers had dropped to 640,000 in the first quarter of 2024 from 710,000 in the first quarter of 2023, a nearly ten percent decline in a single year.
The paper has seen some digital growth, but news-only digital subscriptions have also dropped off, leaving it unclear whether the company’s customers are paying for New York Times news and opinion or for the wordgames, cooking recipe library, and “Athletic” sports publication.
Remaining Times readers looking for evidence of Weintrob’s claims of a departure from the truth will have no problem finding it in the Times. For example, a Times article about a clash between anti-Israel (the Times insists on describing them as “pro-Palestinian,” as if allowing Hamas to remain in power in Gaza would be good for Palestinians) and pro-Israel demonstrators in Los Angeles concludes with this passage, relying on “Fernando Guerra, director of the Center for the Study of Los Angeles at Loyola Marymount University”:
The views of many of the young people demonstrating this week were shaped, he said, by knowing only Benjamin Netanyahu, the right-wing prime minister of Israel.
“All these students have seen is Netanyahu and a government there that to them seems autocratic, out of touch and not protecting democratic ideals,” Mr. Guerra said.
That’s a falsehood. In fact, Ehud Olmert was prime minister from 2006 to 2009, Naftali Bennett from 2021 to 2022, and Yair Lapid for six months in 2022. And the young people are being supported by professors, professional activists, grantmakers, and older graduate students who also have lived through other Israeli leaders.
As for “not protecting democratic ideals,” Israel has had five national elections since 2019. In contrast, the president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, was elected in 2005 to a four-year term as president of the Palestinian Authority. Abbas is in the 19th year of a four-year presidential term, and the anti-Israel protesters think Netanyahu is the autocrat?
Likewise, a Times magazine piece about Issa Amro, who the Times describes as a nonviolent Palestinian activist, reports, “In 2010, the year Amro received a Human Rights Defender of the Year award from the United Nations, a civilian flotilla carrying humanitarian aid approached a beach on the Gaza Strip and was met by Israeli commandos who boarded its flagship and killed nine of its crew. In this conflict, nonviolence would be no shield from violence.” The phrase “civilian flotilla carrying humanitarian aid” is just an outrageously misleading description of a convoy of terrorist-sympathizers carrying camouflage netting and aspiring for martyrdom.
I’d probably join Weintrob and cancel too, if I didn’t need to read the darn thing for this press criticism column.
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.
The post Jewish Newspaper Editor Cancels His New York Times Subscription, Calling Israel Coverage ‘Dangerous’ first appeared on Algemeiner.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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