‘Deep failure’ in ‘NYT’ framing of Zionism as explanation for attack on Michigan synagogue

Auschwitz-Birkenau in 2018. Photo by Menachem Wecker.

(JNS) — The New York Times drew widespread criticism for focusing on the ways that Temple Israel in West Bloomfield, Mich., which a man rammed with a car and shot at on March 12, had been founded to support an Israeli state.

“Temple Israel was founded in 1941, dedicated to the formation of a Jewish state,” the Times stated in a headline.

“Seriously, you don’t hate the New York Times enough. A synagogue with a preschool is targeted. The NYT reminds readers it was ‘dedicated to the formation of a Jewish state’,” Honest Reporting, a media watchdog, stated. “The journalistic equivalent of: ‘well… what was she wearing?’”

Jack Simony, director general of the nonprofit Auschwitz Jewish Center Foundation and a grandson of Holocaust survivors, told JNS that the Times should have focused more on the context of the Holocaust in the synagogue’s founding.

“Temple Israel in West Bloomfield was built in 1941, as the Nazi murder machine began its systematic destruction of European Jewry,” Simony stated. “The Jews of Detroit raised its walls while Jews in Europe were being loaded onto trains.”

During the attack, “grandchildren and great-grandchildren of Holocaust survivors were evacuated from the preschool” in the building, according to Simony.

“Thousands of Holocaust survivors rebuilt their lives in West Bloomfield after the war. In 1984, they opened the first free-standing Holocaust museum in the United States, steps from Temple Israel,” he stated. “They did not build a museum to the past. They built a warning about the future.”

“Temple Israel is not just a synagogue,” he added. “It is proof that Jewish life endures.”

Simony told JNS that “when a synagogue and preschool are attacked, the essential fact is that Jews were targeted.”

“One hundred and forty Jewish children were inside that building. Yet the New York Times chose to tell readers about Zionism in 1941,” he said. “That isn’t reporting. It’s framing, and the framing reveals a deeper failure. Some of our most influential institutions still struggle to recognize antisemitism for what it is, hatred of Jews, not a reaction to Jewish politics.”

“We expect more from the New York Times. We expect the same clarity, the same moral urgency, the same instinct to center victims that the Times brings to every other targeted community in America,” Simony told JNS. “We are not asking for sympathy. We are asking for objective journalism.”