An 18th-century Hebrew prayer book sold for £57,000 to an international phone bidder at Hansons Auctioneers on Sept. 5, 2023 after an intense international bidding battle. Hansons Auctioneers/Cover Images via Reuters Connect

A weekend opinion piece in the New York Times says of Hebrew, “For some, the language symbolizes far right Israeli militarism.”

The article, written by Ilan Stavans, a professor at Amherst College, extols Yiddish at the expense of Hebrew — while also taking an apparent swipe at the Jewish state.

One paragraph describes Zionism as an “enemy of Yiddish,” claiming the language was portrayed as “jargon spoken by the diaspora” but not a true national language. “To combat this deficit, Hebrew needed to be revived,” Stavans writes. “Soon the myth sprung of the Hebrew pioneer, in sharp contrast with the large-nosed, hunchbacked Jew that Zionists themselves vilified.”

It’s all unkind, oversimplified, and inaccurate.

First of all, the concept of the Hebrew pioneer was not a “myth” but an accurate description of the situation of some of the Jews returning to the land of Israel and starting farms on land that had been desolate.

Second, while Hebrew is slurred as a symbol of “far right Israeli militarism,” nowhere does the Times article acknowledge that Hebrew is also the language of the bible and the Jewish prayer book, both of which include extensive reference to, and praise of, peace. Nor is that ancient history; Hebrew was also the language in which Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin gave his final speech and in which the crowd at the rally where he was assassinated sang the “Shir La’Shalom,” a song for peace. Hebrew is the language of Israeli left-wing advocacy groups such as B’Tselem and Peace Now.

The Times is perfectly capable of signaling with words like “falsely” or “without evidence” when it thinks that the “some” are making false accusations. It does this in news articles all the time — even in headlines: for example, “Trump repeats litany of false claims on 2020 election” and “Putin again falsely claims that Nazis control Ukraine.”

Yet here the Times smears the language of the Jewish people, the state of Israel, and the Jewish religion by just passing along the nastiness.

On Wednesday, the Times published a correction of two factual errors in the piece: “An article on Sunday about the rising use of Yiddish imprecisely characterized current Yiddish speakers. It is not the case that all are monolingual. It also described a Yiddish production of ‘Fiddler on the Roof’ incorrectly. It was staged Off Broadway, not on Broadway.” Uncorrected, still, is the characterization of Hebrew.

The article was greeted with dismay on social media.

The official “Israel” account managed by Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs posted, “There aren’t enough words in the English language to describe how absurd this article from the @nytimes is. Good thing we have Hebrew AND Yiddish.” It proceeded to use words from both languages that mean ridiculous and crazy.

HonestReporting, a watchdog group, posted, “Singling out and maligning the language of the world’s only Jewish state (that’s spoken across the political spectrum) is antisemitic.”

A columnist for the Jerusalem Post, Michael Freund, posted, “The @nytimes has hit a new low, which hardly seems possible. They demean #Hebrew, the language of the #Bible and the prose of the Prophets, suggesting it symbolizes ‘far-right #Israeli militarism.’ Cancel your subscription now!”

The nice thing about the “for some” formulation is that it can be used against the Times as easily as by it. For some, the New York Times symbolizes far left American Israel-bashing. For some, the Times‘ attack on Hebrew was enough to spur a cry to cancel subscriptions to the paper.

It’s all slightly comical, or at least ironic, because when the Times isn’t busy singing the praises of Yiddish (at least in comparison to Hebrew), it’s busy campaigning for the government to shut down the Orthodox Jewish schools in New York where Yiddish is taught.

As The Algemeiner noted previously, articles like this Hebrew-bashing one don’t show up in the Sunday New York Times opinion section by accident. The staff that directs that part of the newspaper has an outsized representation of openly anti-Zionist or non-Zionist Jews.

How academic Yiddish fell into the clutches of extreme and shrill anti-Israel rhetoric is a worthy subject for additional investigation. At Harvard, for example, where the great Ruth Wisse pioneered Yiddish studies, the subject is nowadays taught by Saul Zaritt and Sara Feldman, both of whom signed the “Elephant in the Room” letter falsely demonizing Israel for “apartheid” and ethnic cleansing. When the full story of that decline is someday written, in any language, Stavans’ New York Times article may be worth a footnote.

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.