An upcoming issue of the New York Times magazine will feature an article headlined “Inside the Unraveling of American Zionism.”

The headline is preposterous, as, despite the perfervid fantasies of generations of New York Times editors, “American Zionism” has not unraveled. It turns out to be in fine health. The House of Representatives just approved $1 billion in added funding for Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense by a lopsided vote of 420 to 9. Christians United for Israel, which didn’t even exist 20 years ago, now claims 15 million members. Birthright Israel, which didn’t exist 25 years ago, has brought 750,000 young people on free educational trips to Israel, sharply increasing the percentage of American Jews who have visited Israel. Other new pro-Israel groups, like StandWithUs, have grown to meet new challenges. Immigration to Israel from America is also soaring, with preliminary statistics for 2021 showing a 41% increase over 2020. If American Zionism is “unraveling,” how is it possible that tens of thousands of American Jews — including those, like former Timberland CEO Jeff Swartz, who can afford to live quite comfortably in the United States — are choosing the Zionist dream of returning to the land of Israel?

The conceit of the Times headline is built upon the further falsehoods of the article itself. The magazine feature claims, “at no recent time has there seemed less of a chance that Israelis and Palestinians will reach a peace agreement that might establish a Palestinian state on land presently occupied or annexed by Israel. Israeli politics are so sclerotic that it required four elections in two years to unseat Benjamin Netanyahu, an unpopular prime minister facing corruption charges, with a coalition that, despite the historic presence of an Arab party, is unlikely to significantly alter the country’s approach to Palestinian issues.”

Yet the Times’ own news pages recently reported, under the headline, “In Reversal, Israel’s New Government Engages With Palestinian Authority,” that the new government’s approach is “a major shift from the recent Netanyahu years.” The Times may want to consider publishing a correction of either the magazine article or the news article, because they contradict each other so thoroughly that they can’t both be accurate.

The misleading sentences go on. The Times hypes a letter from a far-left group of immature, Israel-hating rabbinical and cantorial students: “there are an extraordinary 93 names at the bottom of the letter.” For a comparison to the number 93, there are roughly 6 million American Jews, and a recent Gallup review found “about nine in 10 American Jews are more sympathetic to Israel than to the Palestinians. (That compares to about six in 10 of all Americans.) Additionally, 95% of Jews have favorable views of Israel, while 10% have favorable views of the Palestinian Authority — significantly more pro-Israel than the overall national averages of 71% favorable views of Israel and 21% favorable views of the Palestinian Authority.”

It’s precisely reminiscent of how the Times hyped, in 1982, “67 American Jewish scholars, writers and rabbis who signed an advertisement this month in support of the Peace Now movement in Israel. The movement was founded in 1977 to oppose tendencies toward expansionism and reliance on arms.” In 1982 there were 67; now there are 93. The paper would have you believe it’s “extraordinary,” but in fact it’s entirely ordinary; whenever the Jewish state is embattled, there will always be a few Americans willing publicly to denounce its policies and elected leadership and to accept, in return, some admiring attention from the New York Times. Why not a long Times magazine article on the much larger number of American Jews who have chosen to make their family future in the Jewish state?

The Times reports that the new letter was “published in the Forward, America’s most prominent Jewish newspaper” without saying that even in the United States, the Forward’s audience is dwarfed by Israel-based competitors like the Jerusalem Post and Ha’aretz. That would undercut the “unraveling of American Zionism” argument.

The Times lets these rabbinical students share their misconceptions with readers, unchecked. The Times reports, “Hannah Bender, a third-year student at Hebrew Union College, put it to me this way: ‘All of our texts were written during a history when we were the victims. What do we do now that we have power?’” That is nonsense — a misreading of Jewish texts and Jewish history. Jewish power comes from the covenant with God. Is the song of the sea in Exodus 15 — part of the Jewish morning prayers — a hymn of powerlessness? What about Psalm 144: “Blessed is the Lord, my rock, who trains my hands for battle, my fingers for warfare.” The psalms are traditionally attributed to King David, who was no victim. Another rabbinical student, Max Buchdahl, a 25-year-old second-year student at the Jewish Theological Seminary, asserts, “Our connection to the land has conditions.” But at least some, if not all, of God’s promises of Israel in the Bible are unconditional. And while, in the other promises, the continued possession of the land may be conditional, the connection is not.

The Times even unearths the Pittsburgh platform, that old chestnut beloved by Times writers who may be dreaming of currying favor with what little remains of the anti-Zionist, classical Reform strain of the Ochs-Sulzberger family that controlled the paper. The magazine article reports, “the official policy of Reform Judaism at the outset of Zionism, as set by the so-called Pittsburgh Platform of 1885, was antipathy to the very idea of a Jewish nation-state in the Holy Land.” Reform Judaism has long-since repudiated the Pittsburgh Platform (discredited and rendered obsolete by the Kishinev Pogrom, the Holocaust, and by the remarkable success of the Jewish State itself) and swung instead to a robust Zionism of the sort exemplified by figures such as Eric Yoffie, David Ellenson, and Ammiel Hirsch.

Yet the modern-day Times is obsessed with the Pittsburgh Platform — it represents the only kind of Judaism for which the paper, in its post-Bari Weiss era, can muster any sort of enthusiasm. A 2019 Times Sunday review article by deputy Washington editor Jonathan Weisman, with two corrections appended after the author managed to misquote his own rabbi’s Yom Kippur sermon: “In a historical stroke with resonance today, American Jewish leaders gathered in Pittsburgh in 1885 to produce what is known as the Pittsburgh Platform, a new theology for an American Judaism, less focused on a Messianic return to the land of Israel and more on fixing a broken world.” A 2018 Times Sunday review article, by longtime Times-man Steven R. Weisman: “The idea of a special messianic ‘mission’ for Jews achieved an apotheosis at the conclave of rabbis in Pittsburgh who established what became known as Classical Reform Judaism. The Pittsburgh Platform declared in 1885 that it was the duty of Jews ‘to participate in the great task of modern times, to solve, on the basis of justice and righteousness, the problems presented by the contrasts and evils of the present organization of society.’ These pioneering Jews also redefined their history of the diaspora, or exile, seeing these punishments less as retribution for misdeeds committed in antiquity and more as a sacred assignment to disperse…”

Churning through the clichés faster than a Pittsburgh-Platform-era Reform rabbi would scarf down a lobster roll, the Times article also carts out Peter Beinart. Beinart was publicly dislodged from his post as a Times “contributing opinion writer” after less than seven months, but remains a dominant figure in the imagination of Times editors. He was born in 1971, which makes him about 50. The paper neglects to mention Beinart’s age, though it does give the ages of younger sources such as Leah Nussbaum, 28; Max Buchdahl, 25; and Elana Rabishaw, 27.  Perhaps the fact about Beinart is omitted because it undercuts the article’s bogus claim that there is some kind of important generational difference between “young boomers, Gen-Xers and even those of us born in the 1980s, who … grew up with an optimistic view of the peace process” and the 26-year-olds who “were not yet born when Oslo was signed.”

All told, it’s a sorry showing — but file it away in the back of your mind. It’ll be useful as a marker 20 years from now, when the Times, if it is still around at that point, trots out another crew of students, under yet another a headline, claiming an unprecedented American Jewish retreat from Zionism. Like the paper’s coverage of the 67 scholars who signed the Peace Now ad in 1982, it’ll be useful to future readers mainly as evidence of just how wrong the Times was about where American Zionism was headed.

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

Editor’s note: This article was updated to correctly identify Jeff Swartz, the former CEO of Timberland, which was founded by his grandfather Nathan Swartz

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