The New York Times Takes Another Shot at Orthodox Jews

T he other day, I was scrolling through my brother’s camera, and I hit a collection of photos that he took on a trip to Auschwitz. One was of a list of names, arranged alphabetically by last name. My brother had photographed a section of the list that included last names similar to ours.

“That’s the Book of Names,” he told me.

“And that’s one of our relatives,” I responded, recognizing not only the name, but also the town listed next to it: Kremieniec, Ukraine, in what was then Poland — the home from which my grandfather and great-grandfather fled while the rest of their family was shot. I had found a dead relative in a book of dead relatives.

When my few surviving ancestors came to America, they found solace in Orthodox Judaism. Despite all God seemed to have put them through, including the murders of their closest family and friends, they were loyal to His word and committed to finding a deeper meaning to life. The Orthodox movement in America gave thousands of Holocaust survivors the gift of peace in the face of immense inner turmoil. Its ethical principles, which forbid Jews from even speaking negatively of their fellow Jews, nurtured these broken people.

Yet this is not the narrative captured by the New York Times, which this week took yet another shot at the Orthodox community in the U.S. For years, the Times has justified and even perpetuated antisemitism in the form of disdain for the most visibly Jewish Jews. Its latest effort is a documentary, “‘It’s Still an Emergency’: The Vulnerability of Queer Orthodox Jews.” The nine-minute video portrays Orthodox Jewry as a sad, solemn world, where life is bleak, everyone looks the same, and the culture is oh so primiti — I mean, “homophobic.” The opening music of the film recalls The Twilight Zone, and the victim of the community’s homophobia sits down in a dimly lit room as though he’s about to recall interrogations at Guantanamo Bay.

JONAH, or Jews Offering New Alternatives for Healing, is the cruel conversion-therapy organization presented in the documentary, which traumatizes and preys on Orthodox Jews by finding vulnerable gays in the community and forcing them to call one another “fa****,” for instance, in humiliation sessions. JONAH is not part of the Orthodox community; the closest connection the documentary can make between the group and the community is that the former has placed ads in Orthodox newspapers. Yet the video frames the group’s abuse as an Orthodox phenomenon. Immediately after its discussion of JONAH, the documentary cuts to videos of Jews learning in a Hasidic yeshiva (Jewish school), as though the two are related at all or represent each other, when in fact they do not.

Finally, we see white words against a black screen: “There are approximately 675,000 Orthodox Jews in the United States.” There’s a dramatic pause, and then more words arrive: “An estimated 60,000 are L.G.B.T.Q.”

Yet again, the Times is implying here that Orthodox Jews oppress their own, and that this is characteristic of their religious tradition. The film sends the message that tens of thousands of individuals need to be liberated from the JONAH-like Orthodox world.

If you think videos like these have no effect, think again. After the video came out, my mother, who is a psychiatrist, received a link to it on a professional listserv with hundreds of mental-health professionals, urging them to watch the “painful” portrayal. That’s one more group of working adults, therapists in particular, who now believe they need to rescue gay Orthodox Jews from the conversion therapy that they will inevitably experience . . . and maybe from Orthodox Judaism altogether.

For the Times, the community is an easy punching bag. In September, the paper published an exposé: “In Hasidic Enclaves, Failing Private Schools Flush With Public Money.” Maybe to the Times, receiving a thorough religious education (as opposed to a secular one) is alien and suspicious. “For many, the consequences of attending Hasidic schools can ripple across time,” the piece intones solemnly. “Students grow up and can barely support their own families. Some leave the community and end up addicted to drugs or alcohol. Others remain and feel they have little choice but to send their children to the schools.”

Just in the past year, the Times has published over a dozen such articles on the subject of Hasidic schools, a few of which allude to the community’s sway in local politics. The Times exposé of Hasidic schools was widely criticized for its inaccurate portrayal, including by secular Jewish organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League. In April, an Orthodox group even sent a letter to the Pulitzer Prize committee urging it not to reward the Times’ reporting, citing failures in journalistic ethics and the misuse of the Times’ extensive public influence.

Left-leaning publications are generally reluctant to attack minority communities as culturally alien; if anything, they tend to condemn such attacks. Yet for the Times, Orthodox Jews seem to be an exception. Why?