Sometimes the anti-Jewish bias in the New York Times shows up in the strangest places. The latest example was in T Magazine, the newspaper’s ad-filled moneymaker of a glossy Sunday style magazine. It featured a profile of a 64-year-old black, gay dancer/choreographer Bill T. Jones, whose “husband and companion in all things, the artist Bjorn Amelan,” is described as “a warm and decorous French Jew.” Mr. Amelan is accompanied by “his 95-year-old mother, Dora, a Holocaust survivor.”

What is up with the Times describing anyone as a “decorous” Jew? Are readers supposed to be surprised that Mr. Amelan isn’t loud, pushy or obnoxious? Are Jews assumed to be not decorous unless they are specifically described as such? Describing a Jew as “decorous” is like describing a black person as “articulate” — it’s the kind of compliment that tells more about the unfortunate stereotypes held by the writer than it does about the person being described.

The article gets even worse. The author writes of Mr. Jones: “His company had just performed an early version of the first part of ‘Analogy,’ called ‘Dora: Tramontane,’ which draws on his mother-in-law’s personal history, that of a Jewish girl in a Jewish family that, like so many families of the era and the region, was, during the war, vandalized by fate.”

That’s just nonsense. The Jewish families of Europe during World War II weren’t “vandalized by fate.” They were vandalized by the Nazis and their collaborators. Assigning the guilt or responsibility to “fate” is a kind of sleight of hand, a rhetorical formulation that the Times uses to absolve the human individuals involved of their guilt, moral responsibility and free will.

It’s all the sort of thing that might cause me to hurl the magazine across the room in a fit of disgust if I weren’t such a decorous Jew myself. Here’s the thing: the vandalization of the Jews hasn’t stopped. And it’s not “fate” that is responsible these days, no more than it was in the last century, but the individual writers and editors at the Times who produce this nasty stuff.

More of Ira Stoll’s media critique, a regular Algemeiner feature, can be found here.

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