Robert Besser is a news editor who has worked in television and newspapers in the United States, Asia and the Middle East.
Publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger: [The New York Times has] “....a number of Jewish reporters working for us. But in all the years I’ve been here we have never put a Jew in the showcase."
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The Times’ foreign correspondents and the Washington correspondents were of a type, they had to be gentlemen....they had to be the right kind of people...Though the paper was Jewish-owned, it was not eager in the thirties and forties and fifties to send Jewish reporters overseas or to place them in executive posts.
When the non-Jewish Arthur Krock, the New York Times Washington Bureau chief refused to hire Jews, staff member Felix Belair questioned Krock. “There are some people here," said Belair, “who think you’re anti-Semitic." “Well," said Krock, “maybe I am." -The Powers That Be by David Halberstam
It is in the moments following a Jewish tragedy that the New York Times’ anti-Israel and antisemitic instincts are unapologetically rolled out for all to see.
Here is a recent example. On March 12, 2026 an Arab crashed his truck through the doors and drove into the hallways of reform Temple Israel in West Bloomfield, Michigan.
Armed with a semi-automatic rifle, 300 rounds of ammunition and having packed his truck with $2,200 worth of fireworks and cans of gasoline, the Arab began shooting and, after exchanging gunfire with the temple’s security guards, he killed himself.
And since today’s tenets of reform Judaism do not allow for their members to behave like men and defend themselves, we will have to assume these reform Jews hid in closets when the terrorist arrived and waited for non-Jews to save them.
As a journalist, I can tell you that this synagogue attack story was a very easy, straightforward criminal attack to report. As they say, it was a no-brainer.
But as only the Jew-hating New York Times could do, within hours of the attack they developed an antisemitic trope that the temple attack must be forgiven because the truck-driving Arab terrorist had lost family to Israeli bombings in Lebanon.
In other words, Israel was to blame for the Michigan Arab crashing his truck through the doors of a synagogue in which 140 Jewish children were in school, and opening fire with a rifle.
Of course, the Michigan Arab’s family who he claimed were killed in Lebanon did, in fact, include a terrorist Hezbollah commander. But don’t expect the New York Times to allow facts to confuse a good blood libel.
And how did the New York Times know that the terrorist lost family to Israeli bombs? Did they have their Lebanon correspondent check on this? Did they call family members in Lebanon?
No…..but they quoted the Arab mayor of Dearborn, Michigan who heard it from someone.
And in case the leftist readers of the New York Times needed a greater dose of their daily anti-Israel hate, here is the headline from a second New York Times story published hours after the attack: “Temple Israel was founded in 1941, dedicated to the formation of a Jewish state."
Again it was reiterated that there was good reason for this Arab terrorist to attack because the Michigan temple supported Zionism and was thus a legitimate target. So, it should come as no surprise that the Times gave its blessings for the attack, because Jews were guilty of the crime of supporting Israel.
In context, we must remember that the reporter who wrote this story has been handicapped by a non-existent education at a western university and, thus, knows nothing about the history of any subjects he or she writes about.
In 1941 when it was founded, this Michigan reform temple would have been strongly anti-Zionist, in keeping with the entire reform movement of that era.
During their Sunday “sabbath" services, following organ concertos and performances by their non-Jewish choir, their reform community leader, in those years he was often a Ph.D. who insisted on being addressed as “Doctor," would have declared during his sermon that Zionism will hurt all American Jews, since Jews will be accused of dual loyalties.
Desperately afraid of being labeled a Jewish newspaper, the New York Times printed many thousands of lines supporting the anti-Zionist American Council of Judaism, an organization created and funded by the reform movement.
And among the leaders of the reform movement was the Adolph Ochs family, which owned the New York Times. In fact, Ochs married the daughter of reform leader Isaac Mayer Wise of Cincinnati.
The New York Times often wrote glowingly about anti-Zionist Jews, even reprinting anti-Zionist articles published in reform publications or speeches delivered by their spiritual leaders.
In the 80 years since World War II, for many Jews in America, particularly those of the barely-Jewish denominations, reading the New York Times has been a religious obligation.
Rabbi Berel Wein reminds us that Jews have always been suckers for a messiah. So just as Jews believed in communism, capitalism, socialism, Freudianism and Marxism, so we Jews also believed in journalism. Indeed, we believed in our souls that journalism would provide us with the truth about the world we live in.
So today it is very, very difficult for we Jews to accept that the New York Times, as well as most of western journalism, are no longer news organizations. Rather, they are today exclusively propaganda organs promoting leftist lies, half-truths, and factual omissions, that seek to guarantee the left can maintain their banal multicultural, internationalist world narratives which embrace the inclusion of everyone, everywhere, except the Jews.
Critically, in our own days journalism has devolved from presenting facts so readers can form opinions, to instead demanding what readers must think. And in this it has been very successful.
However, the only way today’s journalism can impose their leftist totalitarianism is to censor those who oppose leftist lies, as well as omit facts that disprove their mentally ill views of the world.
And what of the Times’ obsession with Israel? For decades the New York Times has hidden its Jew hatred behind a veneer of legitimacy given to them from their overall comprehensive news reporting.
But is the New York Times antisemitic? Writing of the standing ovations given to Benjamin Netanyahu by members of the US Congress during a 2011 speech, Times’ columnist Tom Friedman wrote mendaciously: "That ovation was bought and paid for by the Israel lobby." And remember, numerous Times’ editors thought this libel was proper journalism and signed off on publishing Friedman’s Jew hatred.
Still, to understand the New York Times we must consider that the Times has devolved into a newsroom culture of leftist anti-Israel obsession and Jew hatred. And when the inevitable obituary for the New York Times is written, their Jew hatred will be one of the predominant cancers that rotted out this news organization.
When the demise of the New York Times at last arrives, for many Jews it will not have come soon enough.
And what of the Times’ slogan “All The News That’s Fit to Print"? For decades the New York Times was not even “fit" to wrap a two-day old fish in…..since any self-respecting fish would complain of the foul stench of the Times’ anti-Israel obsession and decades-long Jew hatred.