Global Courant 2023-05-07 17:00:58
An Orthodox Jewish advocacy organization is urging the Pulitzer Board ahead of their annual May 8 awards to think twice before rewarding the New York Times for what they described as biased reporting on the Jewish community and Jewish yeshiva in particular -schools.
“Between September 11, 2022, and March 2, 2023, the New York Times ran a relentless campaign of overwhelmingly negative portrayals of Orthodox and Hasidic Jews, their educational institutions, and their lives.” reads the open letter released last month by KnowUs.org.
Agudath Israel, an umbrella group founded in 1922 representing various Orthodox Jewish communities, launched its KnowUs campaign in January in response to New York Times coverage of several Orthodox and Hasidic Jewish schools.
The campaign includes billboards placed all over Manhattan — including one next to The New York Times Building — and a website featuring information disputing the paper’s coverage.
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Beginning in September, The Times began running a series of investigative stories about Orthodox boys’ schools—also known as yeshivas—and paid particular attention to the Hasidic Jewish community, a branch of Orthodox Judaism.
The articles claimed that some yeshivas received poor scores on standardized tests and provided little secular education while receiving significant government funding, the paper claiming graduates are “unprepared to navigate the outside world” and prone to “become addicted to drugs and alcohol”.
Agudath Israel leaders have maintained that the Times’ coverage was unbalanced by focusing too much on the individual negative experiences at some yeshiva schools, while failing to give the Orthodox Jewish community ample opportunity to appreciate their potential benefits. to show.
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KnowUs.org billboard outside New York Times headquarters. (Photo by Fox News Digital)
“Any constructive, legitimate issues these articles might have tried to raise were buried by misleading statistics; an unethical lack of transparency from the Times’ sources; lack of balance; omission of critical context; questionable credits for later events; and repeated involvement in the fallacy of negative association,” the organization’s letter to the Pulitzer Board read.
The letter goes on to note how anti-Semitic attacks – especially against Orthodox Jews – have risen to unprecedented levels in the US. The number of anti-Semitic hate crimes has doubled between 2020 and 2022 and is more common than hate crimes against all other minority groups in the city, according to the New York Police Department.
Attached to the letter is an extensive appendix with examples of “numerous, serious violations of journalistic ethics” allegedly committed during the Times’ coverage of the community.
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A photo of students at a Hasidic school in Borough Park, Brooklyn, provided to Fox News. (Photo provided to Fox News)
“Sometimes the media gets things wrong. It happens. But this was blatant,” KnowUs executive director Avrohom Weinstock said in a statement to Fox News Digital.
The New York Times unrelentingly targeted the entire Orthodox Jewish community for months on the basis of arguably misleading statistics; an unethical lack of source transparency; recycled anti-Semitic tropes; a utter imbalance; questionable credit; and other journalistic infractions,” he continued.
The New York Times and Washington Post shared the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for their coverage of alleged Russian interference in the 2016 election. (REUTERS/Lucas Jackson)
“All this at a time when Hasidic and Orthodox Jews are being beaten into the streets in record numbers. This crusade by the Times had to be called out forcefully.”
Weinstock added that it would be “unreasonable” for the Pulitzer Board to reward the Times for their reporting, “Then if the Pulitzer Board decides to reward the Times for its biased reporting despite the facts exposed, that says more about the Pulitzer Board than it does about anything else.”
Neither the New York Times nor the Pulitzer Board have responded to Fox News Digital’s request for comment.
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Click here to learn more about the Orthodox community’s response to the New York Times investigation.
Fox News Digital’s Kassy Dillon contributed to this report.
Jon Brown is a writer for Fox News Digital. Story tips can be sent to [email protected].
