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Indiana University removed its Jewish studies director. His replacement has ignited a firestorm over Israel.
You won’t find professor Mark Roseman on the frontlines of any campus protests or posting his unfiltered political thoughts on social media. His current project, a four-volume history of the Holocaust published by Cambridge University, is unlikely to generate controversy.
Which is why many of his colleagues were baffled when Indiana University’s chancellor broke precedent this summer to remove Roseman as director of the school’s prestigious Jewish studies program and replace him with a junior colleague known as one of Israel’s fiercest defenders on campus.
“If I could have designed a person to be in charge of Jewish studies in a moment like this — it’s fraught, Jews are divided on Israel and antisemitism, everyone has a lot of deeply held feelings — I could barely imagine a better person than Mark,” said Sarah Imhoff, chair of Indiana’s religious studies department.
Roseman’s removal has taken on special significance at a time when universities are under intense pressure to appease both conservative politicians worried about liberal bias and Jewish groups enraged over mounting hostility toward Israel on campus with academics who study Jews and Judaism often caught in the crosshairs.
“Jewish studies is at the precipice of a cliff in America,” said Shaul Magid, a professor of Jewish studies at Harvard. “It’s being hijacked by a particular political agenda and somebody has to get ahold of the wheel.”
Indiana replaced Roseman with Günther Jikeli, associate director of the school’s small but influential Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism, and a voice in the growing field of antisemitism studies. That new field has become a magnet for donors concerned that existing Jewish and Israel studies programs have not done enough to counter campus antisemitism.
New York University announced a “seven-figure donation” to create a center to study and combat antisemitism shortly after the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks two years ago, and other schools including the University of Michigan and Brandeis University have since launched similar programs.
“The goal is to keep institutions and departments like his free of harmful ideology.”
Allon FriedmanPresident of the Jewish American Affairs Committee of Indiana
At Indiana, both supporters and detractors of Jikeli, a German academic whose work has focused on Muslim antisemitism in Europe, believe he is acting as an enforcer of what should legitimately be considered as “Jewish studies.”
After becoming interim director of the Jewish studies program in August, he stripped travel funding from an anti-Zionist graduate student in the program and barred her from using a Zoom avatar that said “Free Palestine,” prompting outcry from some student leaders. That concern only intensified after Jikeli, who is not Jewish, declined to say whether he would allow the department to support any research that was critical of Zionism.
“It’s not a question of academic freedom,” Jikeli told student leaders in a meeting with the humanities dean, according to an audio recording obtained by the Forward. “The question is about what is Jewish studies sponsoring?”
The university itself has remained silent on both Roseman’s removal and Jikeli’s installation as departmental head, and did not respond to multiple questions about why the change was made or to requests for interviews with the officials responsible.
Faculty input is usually weighted heavily when selecting department chairs and program directors. Rick Van Kooten, the humanities dean, acknowledged during a faculty meeting that Imhoff, the chair of the religious studies department, had received more nominations to replace Roseman than Jikeli. Imhoff said Van Kooten claimed that she could not serve as interim director because she was already chair of the religious studies department. Van Kooten did not respond to a request for comment but Imhoff said this is not a university policy.
(Jewish studies is a “program” at IU, meaning its faculty report to home departments like religious studies or English.)
The leadership transition rankled many faculty members, who speculated that it had been sparked by donors who believed that the program was too tolerant of research hostile toward Israel, or was the result of pressure from political leaders — both federal and state — to address campus antisemitism related to protests against Israel.
If outside pressure did cause Jikeli’s installation, that isn’t necessarily a bad thing, argued Allon Friedman, a professor of medicine at Indiana University’s Indianapolis campus and the leader of a Jewish advocacy group in the state.
“The goal is to keep institutions and departments like his free of harmful ideology,” Friedman said, speaking in his capacity as president of the Jewish American Affairs Committee of Indiana. “He’s trying to make his department serious again.”
The contested rise of antisemitism studies
Jikeli’s emergence from the small field of antisemitism studies to lead one of the country’s most prominent Jewish studies programs tracks a larger trend in higher education. In the aftermath of the Second Intifada, amid concerns over the climate around Israel on college campuses, Jewish donors turned from a focus on Jewish studies — which has historically had an extremely broad mandate — to create the discipline of Israel studies. But funding for that field has been imperiled by the gap between what many of these philanthropists hoped to create — faculty who could serve as a bulwark against anti-Zionism — and the critical analysis of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that they often delivered.
Centers devoted to antisemitism studies, a relatively new discipline often focused on contemporary issues related to anti-Zionism, began to fill that gap with a more concrete mandate to thwart Israel’s critics, who many Jews, though certainly not all, believe are fostering an antisemitic environment on campus and beyond.
Alvin Rosenfeld (no relation), who founded the Jewish studies program at Indiana in 1972, helped pioneer this new response to Israel’s critics. He created the Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism in 2009 with a focus on radical Islam and left-wing hostility toward Israel; Jikeli came to the school in 2019 to serve as associate director of the institute.
“The hostility that calls itself anti-Zionism is not a dispassionate affair at all, and since Oct. 7 it has become really very fiercely, fiercely antisemitic,” Rosenfeld said in an interview. “We’re doing our best to root out its manifestations.”
Other schools have adopted similar approaches since Oct. 7, some of which appear more focused on advocacy than traditional academic study. At Emory University, Deborah Lipstadt, the Holocaust scholar and former State Department antisemitism envoy, is preparing to launch an institute that she said “will be focused on policy.” It will continue her efforts to promote the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism, which classifies most anti-Zionism as a form of discrimination.
At the University of Washington, a new “faculty initiative” called Bridges for Change is meant to fight antisemitism. It is being run by Janet Baseman, a public health professor at the school who previously chaired its antisemitism task force. The only Jewish studies professor on that committee had stepped down before it issued its final report out of frustration that its conclusions seemed preordained.
Brandeis University, which was the first college to arrest student protesters following Oct. 7 after its then-president labeled them Hamas supporters, launched a President’s Initiative on Antisemitism, while New York University and the University of Michigan have both created more traditional academic centers to study antisemitism.
Rosenfeld has been a fundraising powerhouse at Indiana, first for the Jewish studies program and then for his antisemitism institute. Some faculty members said they believed that donors including Betsy Borns, whose father endowed the Borns Jewish Studies Program at IU, had expressed displeasure with research in the program that was critical of Israel in the months before Roseman was replaced. Borns did not respond to a request for comment.
Roseman, who ran the Jewish studies program at Indiana for eight of the last 12 years before he was forced to step down, said he could not discuss specific conversations with donors but had observed that overall pressure on what professors researched and taught had increased.
“Donors are becoming more demanding of advocacy,” he said. “There used to be a kind of trust in academic freedom and the integrity of academic work, and that’s disappearing.”
Should Jewish studies defend Jews?
After Jikeli’s early actions as interim director — removing Sabina Ali, the graduate student, from a Zoom meeting and revoking her grant funding — sparked questions from faculty and student leaders, two of Jikeli’s European colleagues responded by sending letters of support to Indiana’s administration arguing that anti-Zionist research had no place in Jewish studies.
Olaf Glöckner, a professor at the University of Potsdam, argued that Jewish studies was not “a neutral platform for any and all political positions about Jews.”
Lars Rensmann, who teaches at the University of Passau, wrote that the paper Ali had received the grant to present, which referred to Israel as a “settler-colonial nation-state,” was itself antisemitic because it denied “the citizenship rights of Israeli Jews by defaming them, without any historical foundation, as ‘settler colonialists.’”
“No university can be obliged to fund such propaganda,” wrote Rensmann.
“There are Jews and Jews.”
Alvin RosenfeldDirector of the Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism at Indiana University
Notably, even Jikeli’s strongest defenders at Indiana have shied away from making similar arguments. Rosenfeld signed a petition defending Jikeli’s leadership as interim director. But he rejected the notion that anti-Zionist scholarship, which has a long tradition among Jewish thinkers, was inherently outside the bounds of Jewish studies.
“Anything and everything that touches on the Jewish experience in a serious way is deserving of study,” Rosenfeld said in an interview. “There’s nothing that is off bounds, nothing that we shouldn’t study.” Instead, he argued, the quality of Ali’s research was flawed and therefore undeserving of funding.
Rosenfeld wasn’t concerned that Jikeli, Glöcker and Rensmann — none of whom are Jewish — were seeking to limit what Ali should be allowed to research. Though Ali’s family is both Jewish and Muslim, and she identifies as part of both communities, Rosenfeld doesn’t believe that gives her any more authority than Jikeli to ascertain what belongs in a Jewish studies department.
“I don’t know what ‘identifies as Jewish,’ means,” said Rosenfeld. “You’re a Jew, we’re Jews — we share even the same last name — but there are Jews and Jews.”
On one side of this dividing line are Jews like Rosenfeld himself, he explained, who are, like him, “absolutely convinced” that there was no “Jewish future worthy of the name without the State of Israel.”
And on the other side, Rosenfeld said, are the sizable share of Jews that had supported New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani and all that he seemed to represent — anti-Zionism, or at a minimum the belief that nonsectarian concerns should be prioritized over Jewish solidarity.
Questions over who counts as Jewish
As the government has sought to crack down on antisemitism since Oct. 7, the question of which Jews represent the community — and which deserve protection — has intensified. Well before the tempest began within Jewish studies, this was a live debate at Indiana University, which has the sixth-highest number of undergraduate Jewish students in the country.
Doug Carter, superintendent of the state police, said his officers broke up a tent encampment on campus last year because of speech that was “encouraging the death of the Jewish people globally.”
He dismissed a public radio reporter who told him that Jewish students had been active in the protests, including holding a Passover Seder at the encampment, and that they had not heard antisemitic comments. “That’s not correct,” Carter said. “Go on to the next question because I saw it with my own two eyes.”
And after a student accused him of bias against Israel, Ben Robinson, a history professor who is Jewish, became one of the first faculty members disciplined under a new Indiana law that mandates “intellectual diversity” at state universities. Robinson said the university has opened a new investigation into him based on allegations that he engaged in antisemitism during a lecture about genocide claims against Israel.
“If you’re an anti-Zionist Jew,” Robinson said, “you’re not sufficiently Jewish for the people who are making these decisions.”
None of the 20 people I spoke with for this story understood why Roseman had been removed as director, and I did not hear any criticism of his leadership. But these disciplinary incidents and crackdowns had created a simmering tension by the time Roseman said Jikeli called him to announce that he’d lost the confidence of Indiana’s top leadership and that Jikeli himself had been offered Roseman’s job.
Jikeli said in an email that did not say he would be replacing Roseman. “To be absolutely clear: there was no pre-arrangement, and I was appointed following faculty consultation,” he said.
In addition to his scholarship on antisemitism, Jikeli has made a name as a prominent academic defender of Israel and its supporters on campus. He organized a “Rally Against Hamas Propaganda” at IU last year during the pro-Palestinian encampment, and in an interview a few weeks before he took over the Jewish studies program Jikeli lamented that, “Jewish students are often outnumbered and lack the institutional or financial backing their adversaries enjoy.”
(While Jewish services like Hillel and pro-Israel advocacy organizations have significantly more funding than pro-Palestinian groups, some of Israel’s supporters believe that universities themselves are systematically biased against Jews, and that Iran or Qatar are secretly funding campus demonstrations agaisnt Israel.)
“Many administrators are reluctant to confront faculty or radical groups for fear of backlash,” Jikeli said in the interview. The solution could come “in the form of public scrutiny, funding consequences, or legal obligations.”
Jikeli’s power to address campus antisemitism along these lines is limited as interim director of the Jewish studies program, but he was quick to assert it.
A Zoom expulsion and a grant revoked
Sabina Ali, a fifth-year doctoral student doing a minor in Jewish studies, said in an interview with the Forward that she first crossed paths with Jikeli while participating in the encampment. Ali said she was standing in a protective circle around a group of Muslim students while they prayed when Jikeli approached the group and started photographing them.
“I just asked him, ‘What are you doing?’ and he just started rambling about how Islam is such a sexist religion and why are these men praying without women,” Ali recalled.
Jikeli said in an interview that he often passed the encampment on his way home but did not recall the incident Ali described. “I recall that there were some prayers,” he said. “I don’t think I said that Islam is a sexist religion.”
In a follow-up email, he said: “I did not, and would not, describe Islam as a sexist religion. Islamism, as an ideological movement advocating the application of sharia law, does contain misogynistic elements — but that is a distinct discussion.”
Jikeli first raised concerns last fall that Ali’s profile picture on Zoom — the image that is displayed when a user turns off their camera — was creating a hostile learning environment. The image is a mashup of three distinct items: the Palestinian flag, a drawing of a woman wearing a keffiyeh around her head and the words “free Palestine.”
Roseman, who was director at the time, said he brought Jikeli’s complaint to the university’s student conduct office, which determined it qualified as free speech. “I was simply following guidance from the college,” Roseman said. “Whether some people didn’t like it or not, I didn’t feel like I had much choice.”
Jikeli disagreed. When Ali showed up virtually to a hybrid September workshop this fall to celebrate the release of a new book by Imhoff, the religious studies chair, Jikeli announced to the room that her profile image was creating an unsafe environment.
“A Jewish studies graduate student sitting next to me pointed out that Jikeli might be the only one who was bothered,” Constance Furey, a religious studies professor, wrote in an email to university administrators. “Without further comment or explanation, JIkeli then announced that he had removed the student.”
Twenty of the 24 people present for the workshop then left and reconvened in a new room, where Ali was allowed to participate. But Jikeli defended himself to everyone in the program later that day in an email describing the avatar as “an image of a Palestinian terrorist.”
“Political slogans or provocative images of any kind have no place in our academic settings,” Jikeli wrote.
He followed up directly with Ali, proposing that they meet with a mediator to “clear the air.” She instead asked for a public apology and Jikeli’s resignation as interim director.
A few days later, Jikeli wrote to Ali again, this time to say that he was unilaterally rejecting a travel grant approved by the Jewish studies funding committee for her to present at a national religious studies conference.
Jikeli’s email to Ali did not provide a reason for the unusual move but he told the Forward that it “did not meet our academic standards and falls outside the scope of Jewish Studies.” Those who rushed to his defense focused on the subject of Ali’s research: “Weaponizing Indigeneity: Zionist Public Discourses on Possessing Palestine.”
Blending politics and scholarship
Though Jikeli said in an email that he does not engage in advocacy, he blended political stances with his academic work before becoming interim program director, writing op-eds and giving interviews about opposition to Israel on college campuses.
Bryce Greene, a PhD student at Indiana who was a leader of the protests against the war in Gaza, tried to sign up last year for an undergraduate course Jikeli taught on Israel and social media. But, he said, the professor suggested that the two instead meet for weekly independent study sessions.
Jikeli proposed that Greene would receive credit for the meetings, but they disagreed on how much the independent study would be worth and eventually decided to proceed on an informal basis.
Greene described cordial meetings where they would debate the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and send each other readings. But the relationship eventually broke down when Greene accused Jikeli of “Holocaust denial” for rejecting the claim that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza.
Still, Greene was taken aback a few months later when a friend sent him a flyer for a lecture Jikeli was delivering to the Virginia Psychoanalytic Society called “In the Mind of a Pro-Hamas Student,” which the description said was based on “a semester-long dialogue with a pro-Hamas campus activist.”
“It was pretty obvious that he was trying to talk about me,” Greene said. After complaining to the chairs of Jewish studies and German studies, where Jikeli is based, Greene said he believed the talk switched to focus on public social media posts from other college students.
Jikeli told Greene in an email following the event that it was based on discussions with “some other people” during the encampments and shared his presentation slides from the event with the Forward. They do not focus on individual students.
What many people don’t understand is that the use of #Hamas slogans, such as #FromTheRiverToTheSea, #Palestine will be free” is an endorsement of the ongoing #terrorism against all #Israelis and #Jews – as demonstrated by the horrific #massacre of #civilians on #10/7.
— Gunther Jikeli (@GJikeli) October 27, 2023
Jikeli’s willingness to mix his political beliefs about Israel and antisemitism with his academic responsibilities came up again during an October meeting with Rick Van Kooten, the humanities dean, and a group of Jewish studies graduate students concerned about Jikeli’s actions as interim director.
As part of his defense for removing Ali from the Zoom meeting, Jikeli told the group that he had printed out a copy of her Zoom avatar and used it for an assignment in one of his undergraduate courses. He had asked students to respond to a series of questions about the image, including: “Imagine this image displayed constantly on Zoom during hybrid workshops with students and professors. How would its persistent presence affect your focus, comfort, and sense of belonging in that educational space?”
The responses demonstrated that “students feel very uncomfortable in that scenario,” Jikeli said during the meeting, and so he was justified in banning such imagery. He said in an emailed statement that “this was a pedagogical exercise about classroom environment” and “not a personal attack on any individual student.”
When Van Kooten said that he was required to uphold an Indiana state law that mandated freedom of expression for college students, Jikeli warned that individuals he had spoken with around the country might file a federal civil rights complaint against the university if Ali was allowed to display the image.
“I want you to hear this now,” Jikeli told Van Kooten, according to an audio recording of the meeting. “People will consider it a Title VI violation if this is going on — I will not tolerate this.”
Lamentations over a divided program
Van Kooten ultimately ruled that if Jikeli wanted to create a policy about Zoom images for the program he should get it approved by the faculty, and that he would need to provide a specific justification for revoking grants that had been approved by the funding committee.
(Ali’s travel to the religious conference is now being paid for with other university grants.)
But despite the modest stabilizing effect of Van Kooten’s intervention, Daniel Reischer, a leader of the Jewish Studies Graduate Student Association, said that the rapid series of controversies had taken a toll on the program. Some students who had been considering studying at Indiana are reconsidering, he said. After Jikeli declined to say whether he would allow funding for any scholarship that was critical of Zionism, graduate students from around the country are wondering whether their research will be welcome at the annual Jewish studies conference that the association sponsors.
“There’s just a lot of uncertainty and a lot of fear,” Reischer said in an interview.
Jikeli said in an email that he was “firmly committed to free, open, and respectful dialogue.”
“Criticism — including of Zionism — is part of legitimate academic inquiry,” Jikeli wrote. “Defamation and unsubstantiated claims are not.”
“We could have embraced a program that says, ‘You can do your best scholarship here no matter what your politics are’ — but we haven’t been able to do that.”
Sarah ImhoffChair of the Religious Studies Department at Indiana University
Not everyone is critical of Jikeli’s leadership. Joanna Martin, another officer of the graduate student group, said she’s had positive interactions with Jikeli and that he supported bringing a prominent scholar of Nigerian Jewry — the subject of Martin’s doctoral thesis — to campus after becoming program director.
“He’s definitely making some waves,” Martin said. “But I don’t think he’s going to start overruling anything and everything.”
Another graduate student, who did not want to be named mounting a more forceful defense of Jikeli, said that the Jewish studies program has been divided over Israel for years, and many people were determined to oppose Jikeli’s leadership before he had done anything as interim director.
“Gunther came in believing that people were already against him,” the student said, noting that several members of the program had boycotted his welcome dinner.
Jikeli, who told me the school had asked him not to discuss his leadership of the program, has seemed ready to consolidate power and aggressively defend his leadership. In addition to the letters from Nelson, the former AAUP president, and his European colleagues, Jikeli shared a petition with the Forward signed by several dozen Jewish studies professors from the U.S., Europe and Israel defending how he handled the situation with Ali.
Imhoff, the religious studies chair, said that shortly after becoming interim director Jikeli removed her without explanation from serving on the Jewish studies program’s graduate affairs committee and from another committee helping to revise the undergraduate curriculum.
“We did not need to do this to ourselves,” Imhoff said. “We could have embraced a program that says, ‘You can do your best scholarship here no matter what your politics are’ — but we haven’t been able to do that.”
Jikeli said he had not removed Imhoff from any committees but rather that committee membership expires at the end semester.
Rosenfeld, the program’s 87-year-old founder, seemed conflicted when we spoke. He had helped build Indiana into a powerhouse of Jewish studies, helping to launch the careers of scholars across the political spectrum.
He rejected the claim by Friedman, the medical school professor and Jewish activist, that the Jewish studies program had fallen into crisis under previous leadership. He also doesn’t believe that Jikeli was brought in to serve as the “hatchet man” for school officials interested in more overt support for Israel.
But he also understands that the program he created as a junior professor 53 years ago is under duress.
“I would like to see us recover from the bad spell that we’re in right now and reassert ourselves as a leading Jewish studies program with a lot of integrity,” Rosenfeld said.
Jikeli’s term as interim head of Jewish studies is expected to last about a year, at which point the administration will either make him the program’s permanent leader or name a new director.
But regardless of what happens in Bloomington, the growing divide between funders and Jewish scholars — and between scholars and some of their students — is intersecting with unprecedented political pressure on universities in a manner that seems certain to permanently transform the academy.
The post Indiana University removed its Jewish studies director. His replacement has ignited a firestorm over Israel. appeared first on The Forward.
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Britain’s Green Party adopts ‘Zionism is racism’ motion
(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.
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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.
Uncategorized
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.
