The New York Times’s Silence on Anti-Semitism

On October 17, 2020, in recognition of the 25^th anniversary of Louis Farrakhan’s Million Man March on Washington, Dr. Natalie Hopkinson of Howard University published an op-ed in the New York Times about the women who worked behind the scenes. D.C. Mayor Marion Barry’s fourth wife, Cora Masters Barry, who was interviewed for the piece, was instrumental in the success of the event.

The subtitle of the op-ed is straightforward: “Behind every great feat in the public record lies an untold story of the unsung foot soldiers.” Less straightforward, however, is the paper’s omission of Farrakhan’s virulent anti-Semitism.

On Twitter, a Jewish reader expressed sadness about the article’s silence on Farrakhan’s anti-Semitism. Dr. Hopkinson replied, “You know what makes me sad? Literally a million people involved in this essay. You dont [sic] center the marchers. You dont [sic] center the Black women who are named and linked. You dont [sic] even center Farrakhan. You center yourself and your feelings. Exactly the problem with history.” The Times reader responded, “I’m quite sure it’s possible to center black empowerment without completely disregarding the valid complaints of another minority group.” Hopkinson retorted, “Somehow among a million possible concerns, you believe yours are supposed to jump to the top. That is called privilege.”

https://twitter.com/NatHopkinson/status/1317908612086419457

A concern that anti-Semitism isn’t being taken seriously in an op-ed in the New York Times is called privilege?

Farrakhan (and those of his followers who think what he says about Jews is true) believe some pretty outlandish things about Jews: According to Farrakhan, both legal abortion and sharecropping “can be traced to the Talmud;” Jews are responsible for racism and slavery (along with “pervasive rape culture…sex trafficking and prostitution”); and the federal reserve is run by “a family of rich Jews.”

In 2018, Farrakhan even teamed up with Michael A. Hoffman II, a Holocaust denier who calls the gas chambers of Auschwitz-Birkenau “fake” and refers to Jews as Satanic –– something Farrakhan has also called Jews. In a speech he gave on July 4 this year, Farrakhan addressed the Anti-Defamation League’s CEO Jonathan Greenblatt by saying, “you are Satan, and it is my job now to pull the cover off of Satan so that every Muslim — when he sees Satan ­— picks up a stone, as we do in Mecca.”

It’s “called privilege” to think that kind of thing should be noted in an op-ed in the New York Times.

For a people who amount to less than a quarter of one percent of the world’s population, Jews are the focus of a lot of hatred, often disseminated in the form of conspiracy theories. Unsurprisingly, Farrakhan covers many of them in his diatribes. (You can find them on the Anti-Defamation League’s website.) Here are a few:

1. Jews as deviants: “The Jews were responsible for all of this filth and degenerate behavior that Hollywood is putting out: turning men into women, and women into men.”
2. Jews as too-powerful: “In all of these cities on a Jewish holiday, business stops because they are the masters not only in America’s cities but in cities throughout Europe and the Western world.” “Did you know that Jesus had a real problem with the Jewish community? They had power, the rabbis of that day, over the Roman authorities just as they have power today over our government.”
3. Jews as bloodthirsty: “In Jewish tradition, in the Talmud, the way they recognize that you are really from God — they poison you. And if you withstand the poison and remain alive — that to them is the witness that you are from God.”
4. Jews as global oppressors: “the International Jew is affected by the rise of socialism, it is in their DNA to fight anything that will raise the common man. This is why they fight any voice that the little man will listen to.” “You that think you have power to frighten and dominate the peoples of the world. I am here to announce the end of your time.”
5. Jews as enemies of the good: “Do you know that the enemies of Jesus were the Jews of his day and the Roman authorities? That wasn’t 2000 years ago alone. That’s today!”
6. Jews as imposters: “You that think that those who refer to themselves as Jews are the real Children of Israel? No. [you are] promoting a deceptive lie.” “You’re not a native Palestinian, no you’re not. You didn’t originate there … the Ashkenazi European, he has no connection at all to the Holy Land. None!”

Along the same lines, Hopkinson wrote in another disturbing tweet, “[People] who have become white should not be lecturing Black [people] about oppression” (emphasis added). Note the familiar themes: the imposter/outsider who is actually an oppressor with privilege and power, an enemy of the good…

In uncertain times and for people who are anxious or feel powerless, conspiracy theories can be an attempt to make sense of a bewildering and chaotic world. Because of the conspiratorial nature of these theories, they are extremely hard to debunk. Efforts to disabuse people of them are often seen as part of the conspiracy. The long history of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories not only makes them resistant to refutation, but in some cases, makes them difficult to discern.

This was painfully illustrated in April 2019, when the New York Times published in its international edition what should have been recognized as a blatantly anti-Semitic cartoon. As Times columnists Bret Stephens described it:

“Here was an image that, in another age, might have been published in the pages of Der Stürmer. The Jew in the form of a dog. The small but wily Jew leading the dumb and trusting American. The hated Trump being Judaized with a skullcap. The nominal servant acting as the true master. The cartoon checked so many anti-Semitic boxes that the only thing missing was a dollar sign.”

Stephens interpreted the publication of the cartoon not as “a willful act of anti-Semitism” but “an astonishing act of ignorance of anti-Semitism — and that, at a publication that is otherwise hyper-alert to nearly every conceivable expression of prejudice, from mansplaining to racial microaggressions to transphobia.”

The same can be said of the glaring omission of Farrakhan’s anti-Semitism in the recent op-ed. Imagine what the Times might have done if, instead of an anti-Semite, the article had revolved around a well-known racist. It’s hard to imagine that the editorial team would have let that pass without a mention.

Imagine what the Times might have done if, instead of an anti-Semite, the article had revolved around a well-known racist.

Consider, for instance, what happened when Bret Stephens cited data about Jewish accomplishments from a peer-reviewed academic paper that he, his editors, and fact-checkers learned only later had been co-authored by someone who later made racists comments (and is now deceased). In response, Times editors redacted every word that had been derived from that paper. And in the note that now appears above that column, the Times’s editors took pains to say that — despite the fact that Stephens had only quoted data (like the proportion of Nobel Laureates and chess masters who are Jewish) — “it was a mistake to cite it uncritically.”

I disagreed with that. But it’s noteworthy that the same paper that rushed to redact data when it came from a morally polluted source has no problem publishing an op-ed that mentions the unrepentant, virulently anti-Semitic Farrakhan seven times — without even hinting at his anti-Jewish bigotry.

As with the cartoon, it’s likely not a willful act of anti-Semitism. But it’s an even more astonishing act of ignorance.

Pamela Paresky, Ph.D., is a writer for Psychology Today, author of A Year of Kindness, and was the chief researcher and in-house editor for the New York Times bestseller, The Coddling of the American Mind. She serves as Visiting Senior Research Associate at the University of Chicago’s Stevanovich Institute on the Formation of Knowledge and Senior Scholar at the Network Contagion Research Institute where she researches extremism and anti-Semitism. Follow her on Twitter @PamelaParesky