Agudath Israel Writes Pulitzer Prize Board to Protest Reporters Who Published Misleading Articles from Winning Top Prize

By Yehudit Garmaise

Agudath Israel has written an open letter to the Pulitzer Prize Board to protest and prevent New York Times reporters from winning journalism’s most coveted and prestigious award after a series of unrelenting, one-sided attacks on New York City’s Orthodox and Jewish communities starting September 11, 2022.

According to KnowUs, Agudath Israel's organization formed to document and fight the NY Times' unchecked libelous reporting, although the Pulitzer Prize is meant to set the standard for excellence in journalism, the Times journalists, who are up for the top award in investigative reporting,  willfully neglected to include the overwhelmingly positive feedback from the vast majority of Orthodox Jews, ignoring submissions to their own portal, countless social media posts, and nearly 350,000 comments submitted to SED.

Although the best reporters at the smallest local newspapers aim to “leave no stone unturned” to tell as many sides of a story as possible to give readers an accurate depiction of the truth, the Times reporters repeatedly presented one-sided accounts that lied by omission and willful ignorance of the facts.

For instance, instead of including many positive comments about yeshiva education, such as one by Rachel Anfang, who speaks four languages and attended an Orthodox yeshiva all her life before graduating from Columbia University for both her BA and MA in biomedical engineering and biotechnology and whose yeshiva-educated, immigrant father is a double-board certified surgeon, Times reporters repeatedly chose only to include in their stories only sources who report strongly negative feelings and experiences in the Jewish community.

Not only did the Times’ reporters not bother to include any of the hundreds of thousands of yeshiva graduates and their parents who are happy and satisfied with their educations, but the Times failed to recognize the undeniably good, law-abiding citizens and healthy families and communities that regularly emerge from families who choose yeshiva educations.

According to the NY Health Department’s latest Annual Summary of Vital Statistics, for instance, of NYC’s 250 neighborhoods, in 2020, which was not a great year for the city, Boro Park saw the fewest homicides, the lowest drug fatality rate, and BH, the most babies born, as reported by BoroPark24.

“Any constructive, legitimate issues these articles sought to raise were buried by misleading statistics; an unethical lack of transparency of the Times’ sources; and lack of balance,” wrote KnowUs, which feared that awarding the NY Times’ reporters who created the blatantly slanted articles not only showed “poor journalistic integrity” but were “furthering offensive, anti-Semitic tropes.”

The Times “misused its incredible power,” KnowUs wrote. “And the victims of this reporting-Orthodox and Chassidic Jews in New York-are already a marginalized minority already subject to a rising, frightening number of hate crimes." 

To prove its point, Know US cited the NYPD’s 2022 report of 261 anti-Semitic hate crimes, up from 196 anti-Jewish incidents in NYC in 2021 and 121 in 2020.

“We believe that awarding these articles, in any way, will be seen not only as tacit approval and furtherance of offensive anti-Semitic tropes but would dimmish the standing of the Pulitzer Prize by celebrating articles of demonstrably poor journalistic integrity.”

Photo Credit: Flickr