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Dena Tauber's avatar

I was taken aback by the title of Bar-Tov’s op Ed. He appointed himself judge and jury having zero actual knowledge of what is actually happening. It feels like he is writing from a place of hatred for his own country and that is something I will never understand. I wrote about this phenomenon but this piece goes much deeper. Great essay.

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Sam Hilt's avatar

We used to tease that copies of the NYT were mostly useful for lining bird cages. Now, out of respect for their pets, many have discontinued even this practice.

The NYT and their colleagues at the New York Review of Books had a long-standing tradition of always trotting out some hack with a Hebrew-sounding name whenever they published a libelous article that smeared Israel. Hey, if even a Jew says it, it must be true...

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Digging Deeper's avatar

Excellent analysis of The NY Times. I do not know Omer Bartov but I see his situation more as the “Stockholm syndrome,” a coping mechanism within elite academia. The pressures at a university to conform are tremendous. From undergraduate essays to graduate research to getting a university position and getting tenure, accommodating the ones with power and authority is necessary. And the more success, ironically, the more dependence: They need to be invited to give talks, to be cited, to be at the right cocktail parties et al. There are plenty of professors who are independent minded, but they are not among the elite. Glad your voice resonates across this social media, it’s an important corrective

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Clarity Seeker's avatar

The pressure to conform in any "blue" environment is immense ( including many work settings). These pressures began during the obama years and have been super charged since trumps election in 16 and covid. Our schools have been a major contributor to this epidemic and until they are reformed the pressure to conform will be inculcated into tomorrow's voters( by design). Talk to a conservative jewish woman who plays in a card game with liberal friends about their need to just stay silent to ensure they are not excommunicated from the game ( have heard many stories and some are downright ugly). And so many of the excommunicators read and swear by ..the NYT

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Sam Hilt's avatar

When I was an undergrad at Brandeis back in Sixties, I had a French professor who had us read Mao's essays on art and politics from his Little Red Book. This was the period when the door was opened to radical leftists by well-intentioned liberals on the faculty to demonstrate how open-minded they were. Little did they realize that they were sowing the seeds of their own destruction. The leftists only ever hired their own kind, marginalized the liberals, and gradually took over academia. It seems that alligators and serpents, along with the Jihadists and Marxists who are their genetic heirs, never repay kindness with kindness in their quest for dominance.

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Digging Deeper's avatar

alligators and serpents - being in Florida for my career, I appreciate that imagery. My professors wanted to shape the discipline (in my case Anthropology), today's professors are more interested in shaping cocktail parties

My favorite was the Chair of Gender Studies who claimed to be working class because...her father would go to work at his law firm and her mother would go to work at the restaurant they owned. Went to work, working class. She went to a private college, as a legacy admission, and then Ivy League based on undergraduate faculty recommendations. Lorded over many, many cocktail parties

alligators and serpents, indeed

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Robin Alexander's avatar

My husband was just saying today "working class? like managers and owners don't work? We all work!!!"

So, instead of wearing "working class" as a badge of honor only if we sport a blue collar, we should ALL wear that badge with pride, regardless of what we do - except for living in your parents' basement past high school.

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David Bross's avatar

Or maybe he’s just a lying, evil traitor. That’s MY psychoanalysis.

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Michael F's avatar

One of the most boring classes I had at University was an instructor reading from Marx to the class in a voice like Bueller, Bueller, Bueller.

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Clarity Seeker's avatar

When Lennon read a book on Marx the Quartet practiced in the park. Bye bye miss American pie. Now more than ever

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Sam Hilt's avatar

One of history's greatest mysteries is how a writer as boring as Marx managed to inspire others to murder and enslave millions of people.

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Clever Pseudonym's avatar

Yes, this is all the reason.

Bartov sold his soul and betrayed his own people just to make his life easier and to keep his social and professional lives on track.

The Ivy League has become a hotbed of Jew hate and you either become a Social Justice converso and support the campaign against Israel or look for a new job.

And professors are the most cowardly careerists of all, hothouse flowers who would wither and die if moved off-campus and not supported by their gilded credentials.

These same profs (liberal "humanitarian" theorist/careerists) pimped for the Soviet Union and turned a blind eye to Hitler, they can never be trusted to do anything more than run with the crowd and express abject conformity, just with higher-end jargon.

Hopefully Bartov lives long enough to realize his shame.

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Robin Alexander's avatar

I thought I had commented but I don't see it - sorry if this is a repeat.

I have no issue with anything you say, but it has prompted me to write about my head of department, Professor McCormick, Rutgers University. I was in the Comparative Literature Ph.D. program from 1977 - 1981. I wanted a traditional humanities education, like the characters in the British and French novels I read growing up. And that's what I got.

We read philosophy, history, literary history, and literary criticism along with the tragedies and comedies and epics and plays and poetry and novels. We took art appreciation, discussed classical music when applicable, and learned one European language and one ancient language enough to slog through some original text. (Professor McCormick knew 11 languages fluently).

We learned how to read and how to think, and how to compare individual authors, genres, cultures and time periods. And we wrote 20-page papers on manual typewriters about all of it. (There was no time to march).

The sources were mostly western and mostly male -- and it was glorious.

Towards the end of my time there, if students wanted, they added Latin or Asian authors of note, and a few more women, but the literary canon was neither disparaged, nor messed with. Professor McCormick would never have allowed it.

It was, and still is, our legacy: ignited by Old and New Testament thinkers along with Mesopotamian civilizations, grafted onto the Greek and Roman culture, and developed by Europeans through Medieval times, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and all the generations since. It came to this American shore hidden in the sails of the first boats that arrived.

We will lose this precious Western Enlightenment if we don't tell the truth -- about everything -- both sides -- good and bad, and stand up for what we are.

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Miriamnae's avatar

From living deep within a Thomas Hart Benton mural of mid America, also known as the Bible Belt of USA, I have neighbors whose last name is Silver…they have no clue their family origin—I know this because I asked—and comfortably go to the Baptist church on the edge of town in their overalls. Another set of farmers with last name of Rose, the widow quietly knowing her late Milton is Jewish, we talk. He bought her pretty jewelry and she loves him. The Israels, up near the river at my first farm, own the wood mill but at least wear Levis. Oh yeah, a family named Asher. Everyone sends their kids to the state universities which here have larger Ag (Agriculture) departments than journalism schools. We have more veterinarians than doctors now as our county did not comply with masks and forced shots. There is an odd inner discernment of truth and lies in this pocket of people. All hard working and I would bet have never read a NYT article in all their generations. These are the ones I want beside me when the shit hits the fan here, as it will. The ones whom the IDF or the kibbutzim would have wanted near them on Oct 7. I’m not sure how this has anything to do with your perfect piece on Omer Bar Tov’s lies in the prestigious NYT but it all came to my mind making coffee here in the early hours of chores and somehow I know it does.

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Robbin Close's avatar

Amen!

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Robin Alexander's avatar

Fantastic!!!

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Anne Kelly's avatar

The NYT lies about almost everything

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Sam Hilt's avatar

They are outdone only by the Palestinians who lie about absolutely everything. The Italian journalist, Oriana Fallaci, once interviewed Yasser Arafat. "He always lies, even when you ask him what time it is."

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Jonathan Goldberg KC's avatar

Now that is a great article Joshua.

Every word is true.

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Jonathan Goldberg KC's avatar

We live in an Orwellian universe where lies are the new truth.

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Elizabeth Crenshaw's avatar

A great comprehensive essay. The man who doesn’t love his own people and country is to be pitied. What a great price he is paying to be accepted; (and that won’t last) in all probability he will become sick in his soul over his words of betrayal.

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Larry Bone's avatar

Totally agree with you. This Jewish Brown academic will never be truly and actually accepted by the New York Times & Hamas. Because they are too obsessed with the erasure of Israel & Jewish people and Jewish people keep resisting and refuse to be erased which is huge unsolvable problem for NYT & Hamas. No matter how accommodating he might be, still, they will always secretly and insidiously hate him and easily throw him away, once his compliance with implementing their antisemitic insanity aka total erasure of all Judaism, is no longer useful.

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David Bross's avatar

In addition to the dozens, maybe hundreds of articles the media watchdog group CAMERA has published over the decades, critiquing the NYT, CAMERA published a 2012 97-page monograph, “Indicting Israel,” which studied the NYT’s coverage July 1-December 31, 2011 of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The study methodically and comprehensively documented its partisan, unprofessional, markedly biased coverage of the Jewish state.

I had ended my subscription to the NYT years before. But a few years back, I was staying at a hotel, and of course, it provided free copies of the “newspaper of record.” There on the front page was a lengthy feature article supposedly documenting how miserable were Israelis with their lot—based on “in-depth” interviews with two elderly Israelis.

Should I have expected anything different?

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Clarity Seeker's avatar

How does one evaluate or characterize a friend ( especially one who is jewish) who is an ardent reader and supporter of tge NYT? How can you trust their judgment on any political issue? I am not calling for canceling anyone but being extremely wary of any "opinion " they utter especially when the opinion is dressed up as though it was factual. When I hear a friend characterize the NYT as unbiased or middle of the road I just roll my eyes 👀 or chuckle (many do not like that).

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Jeremy Nathan Brown's avatar

Bartov .. what an odious character ! And the New York Times, proves itself to be a trash newspaper.

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Robbin Close's avatar

Thank you Joshua for another brilliant TRUE article. The NY Times has been antisemitic since its inception. That is why I turn to Future of Jewish every morning to begin my learning for the day. Am Yisrael Chai ❤️🇮🇱🇺🇸I used to tell my students, just because it is printed does not make it true. Always check it out before you believe it.

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Michael's avatar

Not News, just propaganda! In comparison, the Sowjet Pravda was a source of solid news..☺️☺️

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Larry Bone's avatar

Joshua's article meticulously uncovers the New York Times hypocrisy and perfidious perversions of fact including it's close coupling with Hamas' info directives filtered through Hamas' American academic community operatives. He reveals the NYT insidious antisemitism contained in a Brown University Israeli Jewish professor's Op-Ed fact tampering and distorting of Gaza conflict truths to gain Brown's fawning academic approval and enable his own reverance for him as a compromised academic holocaust expert. Also, Joshua enumerates how reticent the New York Time was in faintly ignorance of the Holocaust by relegating very limited coverage of its existence in the all the way back of the paper pages.

Hamas instigated and carried out October 7th because there was too much peace there wasn't enough Palestinian death and misery happening that Hamas could use to negatively influence world opinion against Israel. And the Abraham accords that Arab nations signed with Israel showed the world that Arab and Israeli people could peacefully coexist if left alone. October 7th was Hamas simple but childishly cruel retribution against Israel for daring to peacefully coexist with Palestinians. To the outside world Gaza's existence and economic well-being was not actively being discouraged by Israel. And Gaza was not actively and overtly being sabotaged and suppressed enough by Hamas to garner enough world support for its blatant terrorism. They may have temporarily won a propaganda skirmish that can only ultimately result in losing their war with Israel. Antisemitism has always and will forever lose any war it provokes because antisemitism isn't morally sustainable. It isn't, never was and never will be.

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Steven Brizel's avatar

The NYT is Pravda on the Hudson-it has a long history of ignoring facts in favor of narratives of which a short list consists of the consequences of the rise of Communism, Nazism, the uniquely Jewish aspects of the Holocaust, a hostility to traditional Jewish values and an independent Jewish stated defending itself as well as accepting without thinking and bloviating on a daily basis the woke agenda on race , gender and climate

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Michael F's avatar

My view from living in a conservative state after moving from California and Illinois. No takeovers of our Universities/colleges. No Anti-Semitic marches, no ex-communications, no synagogue attacks. But being an Independent there are problems with a Republican dominated legislature, but much less than you'd think. The other big issue is our state is very dependent on Federal funding. We take in more than we give back and we are one of the poorer states.

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