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by Ira Stoll
The headquarters of The New York Times. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.
Most of the time this column about the New York Times is devoted to criticizing it. That makes sense — the paper’s coverage of Israel and Jewish matters is badly flawed, so there is no shortage of possible complaints.
Every once in a while, though, the newspaper gets something right, and just for the sake of balance and fairness, it’s worth my mentioning that, too. Into that positive category falls a recent Times opinion article by Jeneen Interlandi, who is both a member of the newspaper’s editorial board and a staff writer at the New York Times Magazine. Headlined “How to Fight Polio With Cultural Sensitivity,” the article does a terrific job of trying to understand and respect Orthodox Jews instead of condemning them with a broad brush or sweeping stereotypes.
Interlandi writes, “Orthodox Jewish communities are hardly monolithic. Some are ultraconservative. Others use the internet. They are ethnically diverse, too, and in some cases just as politically divided as the rest of the country. Such nuances have a way of getting lost during public health crises, though.”
She goes on, “What most Orthodox communities do have in common is the intergenerational trauma that comes with long histories of displacement and oppression…. Those experiences were compounded by health officials who often fumbled in their dialogues with ultra-Orthodox groups and by politicians who singled them out frequently — and often unfairly — for criticism…at the height of the Covid pandemic, journalists, politicians and health officials in New York focused on Orthodox religious zeal. Less was made of the dense housing in some communities.”
By “journalists” in that previous sentence, Interlandi could easily have been writing about the Times reporters and editors who used Covid-19 as an opportunity to depict Orthodox Jews as disease “vectors” spreading the virus via skullcaps. Interlandi deserves a laurel for attempting to avoid repeating with polio the mistakes that were made in the Covid coverage. It will be interesting to watch whether her colleagues at the Times follow her good advice, or disregard it.
Ira Stoll was managing editor of The Forward and North American editor of The Jerusalem Post. His media critique, a regular Algemeiner feature, can be found here.
