Category Archives: Journalism

Recent Ami Articles

For the past month and a bit, my weekly columns have been appearing in Ami Magazine. My agreement with the periodical allows me to share links to the pieces on its website, but not to share them in their entirety in other ways.

So I’ll be posting links to the pieces, and their first sentences, in the future here, in addition to articles that may have been published elsewhere.

Recent offerings are at https://www.amimagazine.org/2020/07/29/cut-the-curls-youre-out-of-the-band/ and https://www.amimagazine.org/2020/08/05/dont-kick-the-donkey-2/

The Gray Lady Swoons

James Bennet, who served as the editorial page editor of the New York Times for the past five years, was recently walked to the journalistic guillotine by the powers-that-be at that once-venerable institution. His sin? A controversial idea appeared on the paper’s opinion page on his watch.

Mr. Bennet’s figurative head rolled out of the Times’ glass doors onto 8th Avenue because of two sets of riots — those on the streets of many American cities and a more genteel but no less disconcerting one in the paper’s newsroom. 

The latter unrest followed the Times’ publication of the op-ed at issue, by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), who made a case for the deployment of military forces and even, if necessary, the invocation of the Insurrection Act, to control attacks on police and looting of businesses that attended some of the recent public protests.

Mr. Cotton was, of course, echoing President Trump in that proposal. In his remarks at the White House before embarking on his trek across the street to pose with a Bible in front of a church, Mr. Trump called the street violence “domestic acts of terror” and pledged that “If a city or state refuses to take the actions necessary to defend the life and property of their residents, then I will deploy the United States military and quickly solve the problem for them.”

One can find that threat, for its incendiary nature, entirely objectionable. One can find the very idea of using the military domestically entirely objectionable. One can find even the president himself entirely objectionable.

But no less objectionable should be the barring of a citizen, much less a sitting Senator, from expressing his feelings otherwise. And just as objectionable is wailing a post facto mea culpa for not having prevented the expression of that opinion.

But with a considerable number of the Times’ black staff expressing their feeling that publishing Mr. Cotton’s piece had endangered their lives — who knew that Times employees rampage and loot in their spare time? — and other staffers concurring that the op-ed was an odious and perilous thing, the swooning Gray Lady had to pop a pill, and her gentlemen-in-waiting dutifully beat their breasts in remorse.

Although Mr. Bennet and the paper’s publisher Arthur Sulzberger had initially, and sanely, defended the op-ed’s publication on the grounds that it was the paper’s duty to present views at odds with its own opinions, the swell of anger in the newsroom (and, reportedly, a number of cancelled subscriptions) quickly convinced them that Mr. Cotton’s words constituted a veritable call to fascism. Mr. Bennet admitted, or at least claimed, that he hadn’t read the piece before its publication, which an assistant had green-lighted, and thus he became the plumpest sheep to offer the angry snowflake gods. He quickly offered his resignation.

Leave aside whether the idea of calling on the military to quell domestic crimes is a good one. It is not. And leave aside whether threatening to do so was a good idea. It was not. Focus only on the right of someone to feel otherwise.

It’s always been an essential part of liberal philosophy to allow people to profess, and others to consider, their opinions. To be sure, an op-ed advocating armed insurrection or the shooting of protesters on sight would arguably be worthy of rejection by a responsible medium. A business is entitled to its standards, indeed obligated to have some.

But is the very idea of invoking an established federal law, in this case the Insurrection Act, which dates to 1807 but was amended as recently as 2007, that empowers a president to deploy military and National Guard troops domestically in limited circumstances, so beyond the pale?

Even conceding — though it deserves no concession — that such deployment here to stop violence on the streets would somehow endanger innocents, would an op-ed advocating, say, the deployment of the military in a hostile foreign country to protect Americans — an act that could much more easily result in casualties — be equally unworthy of publication and discussion?

Someone should introduce the Times’ editorial board to the Talmud, where the concept of presenting a misguided view of a law’s implications for a situation is essential to the ferreting out of the true approach. Putting forth something illogical or unreasonable isn’t merely a stylistic diversion, it is a vital part of the process of getting to truth.

And so, the paper could have best served the public by simply soliciting an op-ed countering Mr. Cotton’s point of view. (Hey, I was available.)

The irony here, for those, presumably including members of the Times’ editorial board, who consider the president himself a danger to American society, is that the paper’s action handed Mr. Trump a golden opportunity on a silver platter to reiterate his contempt for the “lamestream” media. Look, he could say (and did), the “fake media” are afraid to countenance any point of view that differs from their own.

And, at least this time, at least one medium could have no reasonable rejoinder.

© 2020 Rabbi Avi Shafran

Criminality in the Streets and in the Cloud

As sad as it is ironic, those who have seized the opportunity during protests over the killing of George Floyd to vandalize police vehicles and attack officers, deface buildings and loot stores are perpetuating racism.

Because, by their actions, they effectively reinforce the prejudices of people who view people of color as unbridled and lawless. Instead of images of black or brown scientists, doctors, lawyers, teachers or social workers, what the face of a nonwhite person conjures in their minds is a threat.

That’s what was perceived by the white woman who was firmly perched at the precipice of the news cycle until the killing of Mr. Floyd pushed her off. A black man who was bird-watching in New York’s Central Park politely asked her to restrain her unleashed dog and she responded by calling police, claiming that an “African-American” was threatening her. His words “Look, if you’re going to do what you want, I’m going to do what I want, but you’re not going to like it” probably wouldn’t have struck her as threatening had the bird watcher been Caucasian.

But he wasn’t and so they did.

And the looters of late have only empowered such prejudice. Of, course, thugs don’t give a first, much less second, thought to the impact of their actions on others. Their only concern is about what good stuff they might grab from violated stores. How unfortunate, though, that the national conversations about racial injustice and police misconduct have again been marred by mindless marauders.

As it happens, it wasn’t only on American streets that roguery reigned. As always these days, when chaos and stupidity blossom, the noxious pollen of Jew-hatred is released across the internet, particularly on social media.

And so it is that we have, on Twitter, a man (whose identifying graphic is a Hebrew declaration of fealty to Christianity) proclaiming that “Jewish whites were the most prolific slave owners in history. They practically created slavery in America,” and concluding that shuls are “free game” for vandalism.

Aside from his hogwash “history,” his conclusion is, to put it delicately, illogical. It takes a twisted mind to invoke something that didn’t happen in order to vilify distant descendants of those who didn’t do it.

There was further lunatic logic, too, from another Twitter twit, who explained that “Jewish Americans hold all the power in the country, thus you cannot be racist or anti-Semitic towards them.”

So, you see, since many Jews have been successful in their professions, in the public sphere and in public service, hatred and harm can be directed against them.

Interestingly, falsehoods propagated by social media became a recent major news item, too, right alongside the killing of George Floyd and its aftermath.

Twitter took the unprecedented step of placing a fact-check notice on a tweet by President Trump in which he asserted that mail-in ballots lead to voter fraud. The notice directed followers of the president’s tweets to a site offering facts showing otherwise.

And then, a day later, the social media company put a warning label on what it regarded as the president’s threat against protestors in Minneapolis, his tweet that “when the looting starts, the shooting starts” — a sentence that has been used by racists in the past and that, Twitter said, “violates our policies regarding the glorification of violence [because of the sentence’s]… historical context… its connection to violence, and the risk it could inspire similar actions today.”

In response, Mr. Trump accused Twitter of bias against him, and issued an executive order aimed at removing Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a move could change the status of social media giants from “platforms,” which absolves them of responsibility for things posted on them, to the equivalent of newspapers, leaving them open to lawsuits over anyone’s postings.

Although it’s safe to say that it wasn’t Mr. Trump’s intent, removing Section 230 would likely force the social media giants to disallow him to post on them — entailing a loss of eyeballs they will be anguished to suffer — and open the door for decentralized, under-the-radar alternatives to take their place. Some of those alternatives will be more than happy to host the president.

And they will be happy, too, to host people seeking to destabilize society. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that Facebook hid a study it undertook that found that its algorithms exacerbate polarization — that 64% of all extremist group ‘joins’ produced by the platform “are due to our recommendation tools.”

And so, if Twitter’s attempts to correct misinformation is effectively undermined, we can expect a slew of new “post what you will” platforms that will become newly popular and eagerly employed by the always-ready-to-pounce anti-Semites on the extremes of the political spectrum.

Such actors will be itching to spread canards about Jews and to encourage violence against them. As itching as amoral rioters are to steal sneakers and luxury goods.

© 2020 Rabbi Avi Shafran

Abhorrent Action at a Distance

Direct physical attacks on Jews have, and for good reason, unfortunately, dominated the news in recent weeks. But there have been other kinds of attacks on innocent people who are perceived to be Jewish. Like the one committed against Kurt Eichenwald.

Mr. Eichenwald is an award-winning journalist who has written for the New York Times, Newsweek and other major media, and is the author as well of several books. He is also an epileptic, something he has compellingly addressed in some of his writings. And he has been critical of President Trump. Those last two facts dovetailed, regrettably, in a bad way.

After writing in 2016 about what he considered looming improper conflicts of interest in the then-president elect’s international business affairs, the Dallas-based Mr. Eichenwald experienced a flood of online vitriol and threats from people who felt that his criticism of Mr. Trump merited such reaction. It wasn’t the first time he had experienced such internet “trolling.” But spleen venting, while always ugly, is usually harmless.

It wasn’t, though, on the evening of December 15, 2016. One of Mr. Eichenwald’s less constrained critics, using “@jew goldstein” as a moniker and aware of Mr. Eichenwald’s medical condition, sent the writer an electronic graphics interchange format file (or GIF), an animated image. GIFs are usually intended to amuse, but this one, which loaded automatically, had a less benign objective.

The GIF, whose sender added his judgment that Mr. Eichenwald “deserved a seizure,” consisted of a series of bright flashes in quick succession, something that is known to trigger epileptic attacks in those, like Mr. Eichenwald, who are vulnerable to them.

The alleged culprit is one John Rayne Rivello, a Marine Corps veteran from Salisbury, Maryland. A search warrant turned up an internet account he maintained that featured, among other things, a screenshot of a Wikipedia page for his alleged victim, which had been altered to show a fake obituary with the date of Mr. Eichenwald’s death listed as Dec. 16, 2016.

Investigators also found that Mr. Rivello had sent a message to likeminded friends, outlining his plans and stating “I hope this sends him into a seizure” and “let’s see if he dies.”

Mr. Eichenwald didn’t die that day, but the previous evening, when he received the GIF, “he slumped over in his chair,” according to his attorney, Steven Lieberman. “He was unresponsive, and he probably would have died but for the fact that his wife heard a noise – she’s a physician – and she pulled him away from the screen and got him onto the floor.”

Mrs. Eichenwald called 911, took a picture of the strobing light on her husband’s computer and called the police.

Mr. Rivello was originally charged in Maryland for “assault with a deadly weapon” and, briefly, by the Northern District of Texas, under a federal cyberstalking statute.

First Amendment concerns were raised about the possibility that Mr. Rivello was being improperly targeted just for being a bigoted dimwit, which isn’t itself illegal. So the cyberstalking charge was dropped and he was re-indicted in Texas on lesser assault charges.

Mr. Rivello and his lawyer are reportedly still planning on mounting a defense on First Amendment grounds.

That claim is, or should be, easily rejected. The fact that the harm he inflicted was an expression of a political position is no more a defense of the assault than it would be had he punched Mr. Eichenwald in the face. The punch may communicate a message, but it isn’t protected by the First Amendment.

The larger, and novel, question is: Can an “assault” be committed at a distance?

From a Torah perspective, it most certainly can. It isn’t mere rhetoric or poetic license when Chazal refer to things like lashon hara or publicly embarrassing someone as damaging, even killing. Assault needn’t leave any physical trace at all. Such non-contact assaults aren’t halachically actionable, but they are considered criminal all the same.

Damage inflicted on a person by fire, though, even when the fire resulted from negligence – all the more so when set maliciously – is indeed actionable (see Mishneh Torah, Hilchos Nizkei Mammon 14:15). I don’t profess to be a posek, but it certainly seems at the very least arguable that sending an electronic signal may constitute something analogous.

In any event, Mr. Rivello’s case will of course be adjudicated by American, not Jewish, law.

It has been clear for some time now that contemporary secular law needs to evolve to meet challenges posed by new technologies like the internet.

Mr. Rivello’s next hearing is scheduled for January 31. Unless he decides to just plead guilty, his case might prove a good opportunity to rein in some cyberspace miscreancy.

© 2020 Hamodia (in an edited form)

Tweets and Transparency

Hoisted by its own petard, The New York Times cried foul. Please forgive the clichés, but they’re really most apt.

Let’s start with the paper of record’s wail of indignation. It came last week in the form of a lengthy front-page article reporting that “A loose network of conservative operatives allied with the White House is pursuing what they say will be an aggressive operation to discredit news organizations deemed hostile to President Trump by publicizing damaging information about journalists.”

The “operation,” the paper continues, is “the latest step in a long-running effort by President Trump and his allies to undercut the influence of legitimate news reporting.”

I have no dog in the president-media fight (okay, okay, I’ll curb the clichés). But the Old Gray Lady’s umbrage over revelations that some of her valued servants harbor some skeletons in their closets (really, I’m trying) is a bit amusing. After all, the Times has made a major industry of discrediting people hired by Mr. Trump, most recently, newly appointed White House press secretary and communications director Stephanie Grisham, who, The Times dutifully reported, has “professional scrapes [and] ethical blunders” in her history.

Now, though, the revered medium sees something disgraceful in the unearthing of some bones in its own, and other major media’s, possession, in the form of social media posts by members of their staffs.

Like the Times’ own now-former politics desk editor, Tom Wright-Piersanti, whose years-old anti-Semitic and racist tweets, when recently revealed by right-wing website Breitbart News, resulted in his reported demotion.

Or the paper’s likewise demoted erstwhile deputy Washington editor Jonathan Weisman, who was punished for posting messages on social media about race and politics that showed what the paper called “serious lapses in judgment.”

Undemoted, though – in fact, invited to join the Times’ editorial board – is Sarah Jeong, who had tweeted, among other things, “oh man it’s kind of sick how much joy i get out of being cruel to old white men.” The paper defended its hire with the explanation that the tech editor’s “journalism and the fact that she is a young Asian woman have made her a subject of frequent online harassment. For a period of time she responded to that harassment by imitating the rhetoric of her harassers.”

Oh.

Then there was CNN’s Mohammed Elshamy, who was forced to resign in July from his position as the news organization’s photo editor and writer when GOP operative Arthur Schwartz discovered and disclosed that Mr. Elshamy had praised the murder of “More than four jewish pigs [sic – and sick, too],” in a 2011 terrorist attack in Yerushalayim.

Both the CNN and NYT erstwhile bad boys apologized profusely, and two of them attributed their undignified behavior to the vagaries of their youths. (Mr. Wright-Piersanti was in college at the time of his terrible tweets; Mr. Elshami, in his teens). But, of course, the ultimate issue is whether such people should be trusted to be objective reporters. The child, after all, as the poet William Wordsworth put it, “is father of the man.” Is there reason to assume that youthful hatreds or biases simply disappeared over a few years?

Nonetheless, Times publisher A. G. Sulzberger rose up in righteous defensiveness, ironically presenting a mirror image of Mr. Trump’s recent turgid tweet that journalism is “nothing more than an evil propaganda machine for the Democrat Party.” Mr. Sulzberger, for his part, decried the exposure of reporters’ biases as a campaign “to intimidate journalists from doing their job, which includes serving as a check on power and exposing wrongdoing when it occurs.”

Curiously, there seems to be no comprehension in that declaration of the difference between being intimidated and being responsible; nor any hint that the power of media may need – no, surely needs – checks too.

With similar umbrage, a CNN spokesman characterized the disclosure of ugliness in its reporters’ pasts as “a means of suppression” and “a clear abandonment of democracy.”

Applesauce. It’s a means of transparency, and an expression of democracy. It makes the Fourth Estate answerable, as it should be, to the citizenry.

The president and those in his orbit should not be immune to criticism, and their foibles should not be out of bounds for journalistic inspection and revelation. But the very same is true for reporters and editors. If Americans are to be properly served by their public servants – and it should never be forgotten that such servitude is the essential charge of elected office – and by the organizations that mediate between happenings and citizens, transparency is paramount.

Both government and media, in other words, need to do their due diligence when recruiting employees.

After all, what’s good for the goose is – oh, sorry.

© 2019 Hamodia

Media HIQ

Grass is green.

Gettysburg is where a major Civil War battle took place.

The Har HaBayis is where the Batei Mikdash stood.

Astoundingly, some news organizations seem ignorant of that last truism.

Last week, Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi complained to E.U. ambassadors about “Israeli transgressions in the holy city,” more accurately described as Israeli police’s dispersion of rioting Muslim worshippers on Har HaBayis this past Tisha B’Av. Reporting on Mr. Safadi’s expression of righteous indignation, the Chinese news agency Xinhua referred to the holiest Jewish site on earth only as the “Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in Jerusalem.”

The report had Safadi going on to warn against what he sees as Israel’s attempt to “change the historical and legal status of Jerusalem” – ludicrously oblivious to, or shamelessly obscuring, the site’s actual history.

Of course, one doesn’t expect the People’s Republic of China to care a great deal about truth. Nor should one expect any important context from Al-Jazeera. That network’s report of the clash noted that it occurred on “the Jewish holiday [sic] of Tisha B’Av,” without any explanation of the doleful day’s significance to Jews. And Saudi Arabia’s Arab News, in its reportage, omits any mention of a Jewish connection to the Har HaBayis.

Yahoo News took a baby step further, noting that Jews “refer to [the place] as the Temple Mount” and adding that Jews “believe it was the site of the two biblical-era Jewish temples.”

Yes. We also believe that the Normandy coast was the site of the World War II-era D-Day invasion of France.

Kudos, though, to NBC News for its above-average HIQ (history intelligence quotient). It reported that the “the 37-acre esplanade [that] is home to Al-Aqsa Mosque” is Judaism’s holiest place because of “its history as the site of First and Second Temples.”

And even Reuters, which has something of a history of its own when it comes to Israel reportage, laudably identifies the location as “revered by Jews as Temple Mount, the site of two biblical Jewish temples.”

The Associated Press also gets a high HIQ score, for explaining that the Har HaBayis, while “currently the home of the iconic gold Dome of the Rock and the al-Aqsa Mosque,” was “the site of two Jewish temples in antiquity” and for explaining that “the Ninth of Av [is] a day of fasting and mourning for the destruction of the two biblical temples that, in antiquity, stood at the site.”

UPI, too, earns special mention for its story on the clashes, for referring to the site simply as the “Temple Mount.”

The truthfulness tide turned, I think, in 2015.

On October 8 of that year, The New York Times published a news article about Muslims’ and Jews’ relationship to the Har HaBayis, contending that the question of “the precise location of two ancient Jewish temples, one built on the remains of the other, and both long since gone,” has “never [been] definitively answered.”

A deluge of incredulity followed– including a letter from this writer, who somewhat snootily observed that, “despite Palestinian insistence to the contrary… the central Jewish Temple stood on the Temple Mount nearly 1,500 years before Islam’s founder’s grandparents were born.”

More measured, and authoritative, was a missive from one of the experts whose view had been muddled in the article.  

University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill Professor Jodi Magness explained that “literary sources leave little doubt that there were two successive ancient temples in Jerusalem dedicated to the G-d of Israel… These sources and archaeological remains indicate that both temples stood somewhere on the Temple Mount. The only real question is the precise location of the temple(s) on the Temple Mount.”

The Times article was amended the following day, and a correction, echoing Professor Magness’ explanation, was duly published in the newspaper.

We who have been entrusted with preserving the Jewish mesorah – who face the Har HaBayis daily in tefillah, who beseech Hashem to rebuild Yerushalayim in our every tefillah and birchas hamazon, and who bemoan the churbanos in our tefillos Mussaf – have no need for scholarly or archaeological evidence for the historicity of the Batei Mikdash.

But a sweet note arrived just before our most recent observance of Tisha B’Av, when it was reported that archaeologists had just uncovered, in the words of CNN, “evidence of the Babylonian conquest of the city, appearing to confirm a Biblical account of its destruction.”

“The combination of an ashy layer full of artifacts, mixed with arrowheads, and a very special ornament indicates some kind of devastation and destruction,” explained University of North Carolina at Charlotte’s Shimon Gibson.

It’s not likely that historical Jewish provenance of Yerushalayim and the Har HaBayis will be acknowledged any time soon by Xinhua or Al-Jazeera. But the fact that at least some major media have allowed themselves to become better educated on the subject is heartening.

May it be a harbinger that the fulfillment of our entreaty “chadesh yameinu k’kedem” – “renew our days as of old” – is quickly approaching.

© 2019 Hamodia