Israeli soldiers fire mortar shells, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas, near Israel’s border with Gaza in southern Israel, Jan. 3, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Violeta Santos Moura

The executive editor of the New York Times, Joseph Kahn, is boasting that his newspaper is responsible for the Biden administration’s decision to stop sending 2,000-pound bombs to Israel.

Kahn also recently disclosed a $62,500 gift from his family charitable foundation to the Harvard Crimson, a student-run newspaper that has endorsed the movement to boycott, sanction, and divest from Israel and that also calls for Harvard to divest from weapons manufacturers and give amnesty to student anti-Israel protesters.

Kahn’s comment about the bombs came in an interview with the New Yorker magazine that was published online this week.

Asked, “can you talk a bit about how you’re thinking about AI [artificial intelligence] positively?” Kahn replied that the Times “visual investigations team” had used artificial intelligence “in this big investigation about the use of two-thousand-pound bombs by Israel in Gaza, identifying craters and identifying remnants of weapons and quantifying the strikes that actually had a real result in having the US restrict the sale of two-thousand-pound bombs to Israel.”

In a Dec. 2023 column for The Algemeiner, I wrote about the Times project, which was published both in print and video: “The policy goal is clear: to cut off Israel’s arms supply. ‘But the US has not stopped supplying weapons to Israel,’ the Times narrator says at one point, implying that is what the US should do.”

And after US President Joe Biden disclosed, in a CNN interview in May 2024, that he was pausing the shipments of the weapons to Israel, I wrote another column asserting that the New York Times “laid the groundwork for Biden’s decision.”

Now Kahn is validating the two Algemeiner columns, essentially describing the Biden policy decision — widely denounced in the American Jewish community and by pro-Israel lawmakers from both political parties — as a positive result of Times journalism.

The New Yorker reporter also grilled Kahn about a donation from his family charity to Planned Parenthood. Kahn indicated another family member was responsible for it and said, “I’m not making any donations to political organizations, full stop, and I have not in the past, ever.” He said it wouldn’t be appropriate for a New York Times employee to make such a donation: “I would say no, particularly if they’re at all involved in the coverage of those things, and I would not give to those organizations, whether I support them or not.”

The Kahn Charitable Foundation’s tax return for the year ended June 30, 2023, filed Nov. 10, 2023, lists $17 million in assets and Joe Kahn and a bank as the two trustees. Dwarfing the $6,000 donation to Planned Parenthood is a $62,500 gift to the Harvard Crimson. The Crimson just wrapped up a $15 million capital campaign in connection with its 150th birthday. Capital gifts are often payable over five-year terms, so it’s possible that the $62,500 is the first of a quarter-million-dollar commitment to the Crimson by Kahn, who was president of the paper as an undergraduate several years before I was.

The Crimson endorsed BDS with an editorial in April 2022, before the start of the year covered by the Kahn Charitable Foundation’s tax return. The Crimson‘s website lists Kahn as a member of the 150th campaign committee. The Crimson gift is the fourth largest of the 43 gifts listed on the tax return. Many similar foundations avoid such detailed disclosures by routing money through donor-advised funds.

In the New Yorker interview, Kahn also expressed pride in the New York Times‘ coverage of the war in Israel and Gaza: “There are very passionate views on opposite sides of this conflict,” he said. “The suffering of Palestinians in Gaza has been an absolutely vital part of the coverage that we’ve had. The displaced people, the civilian casualties caught up in the conflict have been a constant focus for us. On the other side of the equation, the trauma of October 7th, the shock of what was the largest attack on Israeli soil that Israelis had experienced, the mobilization to defeat Hamas, have also been an important story for us, and we’ve tried to tell it fully. And it’s really true that there isn’t that large a slice of the audience that’s neutral on these issues. But I’m immensely proud both of the news that we’ve done day to day — and this is a huge news story every day, every cycle — but also of the investigative work that we’ve done.”

Kahn has been talkative to the press lately. In another recent interview, with Semafor’s Ben Smith, he said, “I’m not an active Jew.”

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.