New York Times Media Bias Extends To Jews In The US As Well

The Times, It Ain't A-Changing

Rabbi Avi Shafran


I can’t pride myself on having a good long-term memory (as my wife can attest, that’s an understatement), but a February 1 New York Times article did spur my sluggish hippocampus.

The Times article was about Brooklyn’s Crown Heights neighborhood and it noted that “an undercurrent of unease, suspicion and resentment from some longtime residents” remains from the 1991 “riots that exploded between blacks and Hasidic Jews”—as if marauding gangs of Jews and blacks had spent four days attacking one another, when, in fact, the besieged Jewish residents of Crown Heights cowered and prayed as their non-Jewish neighbors attacked them and their property.

My flashback (well, slow dawning) was of correspondence I initiated, as Agudath Israel of America’s director of public affairs, with editors and a reporter at the Old Gray Lady in 2002.