The national director emeritus of the Anti-Defamation League, Abraham Foxman, is criticizing The New York Times for publishing, on the eve of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, a column endorsing a boycott of Israeli banks.

Foxman tweeted Sunday morning, “NYT when will you stop being so biasedly obsessed with Israel? Today even to the extent of abusing the memory of MLK — an American icon who understood and condemned anti-Semitism and valued the Jewish State. How sad!”

The Times article is by one of the newspaper’s regular op-ed page columnists, Michelle Alexander. It appears on the front page of the newspaper’s Sunday Review section, jumping to nearly a full page inside the section.

The column also drew a denunciation from the American Jewish Committee, which called it “shameful.”

A detailed rebuttal of the Alexander column was published Sunday morning by The Algemeiner, reporting that the Times columnist “seems totally unfamiliar with the reality of Israel.” Although “she concedes that ‘while criticism of Israel is not inherently anti-Semitic, it can slide there.’ … She seems not even the slightest bit aware that her own column is a demonstration of precisely that phenomenon,” The Algemeiner column said.

Ira Stoll was managing editor of The Forward and North American editor of The Jerusalem Post. More of his media critique, a regular Algemeiner feature, can be found here.

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