New York Times and antisemitism: the Jewish enemy within

By Rabbi Michael Leo Samuel in Chula Vista, California

Walt Kelly’s Pogo once declared, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.” For the Jewish people, that enemy has too often worn the face of institutional power held by their own. No institution better illustrates this tragic dynamic than The New York Times — America’s self-styled “newspaper of record.” For over a century, the Times has exhibited a consistent pattern of minimizing Jewish suffering, sanitizing threats, and framing Jewish self-defense in ways that echo classic antisemitic tropes. The betrayal cuts deeper precisely because so many of its architects have been Jews seeking acceptance in elite circles. Sometimes the worst antisemites are not the Nazis or radical Islamists, but those who come from the ranks of our own people.

This is not a crude conspiracy but a documented institutional failure. First driven by assimilationist dread of seeming “too Jewish,” later by progressive ideology that casts Jews and Israel as oppressors, the Times has repeatedly chosen social and ideological comfort over moral clarity.

On November 21, 1922, the Times published its first major article on Adolf Hitler. Correspondent Cyril Brown acknowledged the Nazi leader’s “violent anti-Semitism” but immediately downplayed it: reliable sources assured him it was “not so genuine or violent as it sounded” — merely “bait to catch masses of followers.” Once in power, Brown suggested, Hitler would moderate. Existential hatred was reduced to cynical politics.

As Nazi persecution hardened into state law in the 1930s, the Times’ Berlin bureau routinely pulled its punches. This editorial cowardice came directly from the top. Publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger, a Reform Jew of German descent, was a fierce anti-Zionist obsessed with the fear that the Times would be perceived as a “Jewish newspaper” pleading for Jewish causes. As documented by historian Deborah Lipstadt in Beyond Belief, the Times went out of its way to universalize specifically anti-Jewish atrocities. Under Sulzberger’s directive, stories of state-sanctioned violence against Jews were systematically buried on inside pages or stripped of their identity, vaguely framed as general “persecutions” of political dissidents or “minorities.”

The wartime coverage of the Times remains one of the most egregious institutional failures in the history of journalism. In her definitive 2005 exposé, Buried by the Times, journalism professor Laurel Leff meticulously lays bare the statistics of this silence. Between 1939 and 1945, the Times published nearly 1,200 stories detailing the slaughter of Europe’s Jews. Yet, out of roughly 24,000 front-page articles published during the war, only 26 ever made the front page, and only six explicitly identified Jews as the primary victims in the headline.

The horror was actively hidden in plain sight. In July 1942, a report confirming Germany had already slaughtered 700,000 Jews in Poland was squeezed into a tiny, single-column note on page 5. In December 1942, when the Allies issued a solemn declaration condemning the cold-blooded extermination of two million Jews, the Times relegated the story to page 10. Even the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, a historic stand of Jewish resistance, was treated as a minor, passing skirmish, denied any editorial prominence.

Historian David S. Wyman, in The Abandonment of the Jews, shows how the Times’ influence on American elites helped mute public outrage and enabled the Roosevelt administration’s restrictive refugee policies. Even after the war, Sulzberger clung to the view that Zionism posed a greater danger than the plight of survivors. Former executive editor A.M. Rosenthal later called this silence an indelible stain.

Skepticism of Jewish sovereignty persisted after 1948. Coverage of Israel often portrayed it as a destabilizing force rather than a necessary refuge for a shattered people. By the 1970s and 1980s, legitimate policy critique sometimes slid into rhetoric about excessive Jewish power and dual loyalty. The 1982 Lebanon War drew sharp criticism from media monitors for systematic imbalance.

The pattern reached new intensity after the October 7, 2023, Hamas massacres. Linguistic disparities became glaring: Israeli civilian deaths described clinically, Palestinian casualties (often sourced uncritically from Hamas channels) rendered with visceral outrage. Context on human shields and Hamas strategy frequently vanished.

This reached a crescendo on May 11, 2026, with Nicholas Kristof’s column “The Silence That Meets the Rape of Palestinians.” Kristof alleged widespread, near-systemic sexual violence by Israeli soldiers, settlers, guards, and interrogators — including extreme claims like dogs trained for assault. He leaned heavily on sources with documented Hamas links while creating a false moral equivalence to the October 7 atrocities. Israel denounced it as a modern blood libel; Prime Minister Netanyahu and the Foreign Ministry announced plans for a defamation lawsuit. In an age of instant global dissemination through podcasts, social media, and the internet, such an irresponsible and inflammatory article does not merely distort the record — it actively incentivizes more attacks against Jews by reinforcing the ancient image of the Jew as uniquely sadistic and depraved.

The tragedy is compounded when Jews themselves staff the machinery. “Jewish self-hatred” — the internalization and redirection of antisemitic tropes for acceptance — fractures Ahavat Yisrael, the sacred bond of mutual responsibility that sustained the Jewish people through centuries of exile. When Jewish journalists and editors provide intellectual cover for narratives that demonize the Jewish state or minimize Jewish trauma, they do more damage than any external critic. They legitimize hostility and erode the communal covenant of defense.

Sulzberger’s assimilationist anxiety has evolved into today’s progressive binary: Jews as “white-adjacent” successes and Israel as a powerful state automatically fit the “oppressor” category. Jewish ownership, far from correcting bias, now serves as a convenient shield against accusations of antisemitism.

From Cyril Brown’s 1922 dismissal of Hitler’s hatred as tactical, to the buried Holocaust reports, to Kristof’s 2026 blood libel redux, the Times reveals a century-long institutional tilt. It is not cartoon villainy but something more insidious: the quiet prioritization of elite approval and ideological fashion over Jewish security and truth.

The historical record — painstakingly assembled by Leff, Wyman, Lipstadt, and others — demands honest reckoning. Until The New York Times confronts this mirror without deflection, it will continue failing both journalism and the Jewish people at their moments of greatest need.