Read the full article from FAIR
By Ari Paul
A New York Times article headlined “Shaken and Grieving, Jewish New Yorkers Put Aside Differences” (10/14/23) appeared at the center of the front page in the print edition one day after it was posted online. Headlined online “For Jewish New Yorkers, Shared Grief Puts Divisions on Hold” (10/13/23), the piece hardly reflected the reality among New York City’s Jews, many of whom have been vocal and in the streets against Israeli policies toward the Palestinians long before this new war unfolded.
Readers who picked up their Saturday Times and saw the piece, below the lead photo of fleeing Gazans and a lead story on Israel’s impending ground invasion, would get the impression that a monolithic Jewish community in the United States’ most Jewish city sat in self-imposed collective silence about Israel’s far-right government, the intelligence failures before the Hamas surprise attack, and the brutality of the Israeli response.
What did not show up on the front page, nor updated on the online version, was that on Friday night, hundreds of Jewish activists and their allies protested outside Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer’s Brooklyn home, demanding an end to US support for Israeli militarism (Business Insider, 10/14/23).
Newsweek (10/14/23) reported that “approximately 80 Jewish protesters were arrested Friday as they demanded officials in five major US cities,” including New York City, “to stop Israel aggression toward Palestinians with fears of a ‘genocide’ breaking out in Gaza.”
‘Put aside divisions’
The Times piece—by John Leland, a Times veteran and prolific music and culture writer—relied on a handful of voices, like Eric Goldstein, chief executive of United Jewish Appeal–Federation of New York, as well as progressive rabbis Amichai Lau-Lavie and David Ingber. It quoted Stuart Himmelfarb, who “runs a small Jewish nonprofit agency,” and Betsey Nevins-Saunders, “who runs a criminal defense clinic at Hofstra University’s law school.”
Himmelfarb said he put aside his critiques of the Israeli government, saying his new focus was, “How in the world can the hostages be saved?” According to the Times, “the scale and scope of the attacks” inspired Nevins-Saunders to hold her fire against Israeli policies. Ingber said the crisis “has laid bare for many in the liberal community the dangers of anti-Israeli and anti-Zionist ideologies.”
The closest thing to a dissenting view in the piece was Nevins-Saunders, who “said she was not willing to put aside her criticisms of Israel,” but then proceeded to do just that:
Right now we do not have to say, “Yeah, but—”; “Sorry for the pain in Israel, but—”…. Sometimes we’re so quick to go to the “but” part that we negate that opportunity to grieve.
Lau-Lavie, saying “it was time to put aside divisions and focus on shared grief,” told the Times:
Our political position now makes no difference. Left, right, pro-occupation, anti-occupation, don’t know about it—we’re hurting and we’re shocked and we’re horrified and we want Israel to get through this.
I first encountered Lau-Lavie in 2006 when I covered religion for the Stamford Advocate, and I can say he’s generally someone with thoughtful ideas on both religion and the conflict in the Middle East; he was a big part of the protests against the far-right Israeli government’s judicial power grab this year (Vox, 7/24/23). The perspectives in the Times piece are valid, but they don’t represent any kind of complete picture of Jewish opinion in the unfolding of the new Israel/Palestine war.
‘Dismayed’ by ‘massive escalation’
The fact is that the actual mood among New York City’s Jews is that the phrase “two Jews, three opinions,” still applies. And if the opinions quoted in this piece matter enough for the Times, then so should other Jewish voices.
It should include someone like Audrey Sasson, executive director of the New York–based Jews for Racial and Economic Justice (JFREJ). In a statement (10/7/23) issued days before the Times piece, she said that while she grieved for the Israeli dead and feared for the hostages, her group was “fearful about what’s to come,” and were “angry that leaders continually choose extremism, violence and occupation, and dismayed that official Israeli and US statements are calling for massive escalation.”
...In an interview with FAIR, JFREJ’s Sasson noted that in contrast to the tone of the Times article, her group’s members were able to simultaneously grapple with their grief in response to the Hamas attacks, their worry about the hostages and their ability to speak out against Israeli policies. “We can hold many truths,” she said, speaking about how many of her members were experiencing many emotions at the same time. Sasson added:
A lot of our members are mobilizing to participate in actions that are calling for a ceasefire, and are trying to simultaneously hold their grief and say, “Don’t use my grief, don’t weaponize my grief.”
Did the Times piece weaponize Jewish grief? By marginalizing opposition among New York’s Jews to Israel’s brutal campaign against Gaza, it certainly made it easier for the bloodshed to continue.