Anti-Semitism can sometimes be hard to pin down, but last Thursday, the opinion pages of The New York Times international edition provided a textbook illustration of it.
Except that The Times wasn’t explaining anti-Semitism. It was purveying it.
It did so in a cartoon in which a guide dog with a prideful countenance and the face of Benjamin Netanyahu leads a blind, fat Donald Trump wearing dark glasses and a black yarmulke. Lest there be any doubt as to the identity of the dog-man, it wears a collar from which hangs a Star of David.
The Jew in the form of a dog. The small but wily Jew leading the dumb and trusting American. The hated Trump being Judaized with a skullcap. The nominal servant acting as the true master. The cartoon checked so many anti-Semitic boxes that the only thing missing was a dollar sign.
The image also had an obvious political message: In the current administration, the United States follows wherever Israel wants to go. This is false, but it’s beside the point. There are legitimate ways to criticize Trump’s approach to Israel, in pictures as well as words. There was nothing legitimate about this.
So what was it doing in The Times?
For some Times readers – or, as often, former readers – the answer is clear: The Times has a long-standing problem, dating back to World War II, when it mostly buried news about the Holocaust, and continuing into the present in the form of intensely adversarial coverage of Israel. The criticism goes double when it comes to the editorial pages, whose overall approach toward the Jewish state tends to range from disappointment to thunderous condemnation.
For these readers, the cartoon would have come like the slip of the tongue that reveals the deeper institutional prejudice. The real story is a bit different. The cartoon appeared in the print version of the international edition, which has a limited overseas circulation, a much smaller staff and far less oversight than the regular edition. It was selected and seen by just one editor before the paper went to press.
An initial editor’s note acknowledged that the cartoon “included anti-Semitic tropes,” “was offensive,” and that “it was an error of judgment to publish it.” On Sunday, The Times issued an additional statement saying it was “deeply sorry” for the cartoon and that “significant changes” would be made.
In other words, the paper’s position is that it is guilty of a serious screw-up but not a cardinal sin. Not quite.
The problem with the cartoon isn’t that its publication was a willful act of anti-Semitism. The problem is that its publication was an astonishing act of ignorance of anti-Semitism, at a paper that is alert to nearly every conceivable expression of prejudice, from mansplaining to transphobia.
Imagine, for instance, if the dog on a leash in the image had been a prominent woman such as Nancy Pelosi, a person of color such as John Lewis, or a Muslim such as Ilhan Omar. Would that have gone unnoticed by either the wire service that provides The Times with images or the editor who, even if he were working in haste, selected it?
How have even the most blatant expressions of anti-Semitism become undetectable to editors who think it’s part of their job to stand up to bigotry?
The reason is the almost torrential criticism of Israel and the mainstreaming of anti-Zionism, including by this paper, which has become so common that people have been desensitized to it. So long as anti-Semitic arguments or images are framed as commentary about Israel, there will be a tendency to view them as a form of political opinion, not ethnic prejudice. But anti-Zionism is all but indistinguishable from anti-Semitism in practice and often in intent, however much progressives try to deny this.
Add the media’s routine demonization of Netanyahu, and it is easy to see how the cartoon came to be drawn and published: Already depicted as a malevolent Jewish leader, it’s just a short step to depict him as a malevolent Jew.
I’m writing this column conscious of the fact that it is unusually critical of the newspaper in which it appears, and it is a credit to the paper that it is publishing it. I have now been with The Times for two years and I’m certain that the charge that the institution is in any way anti-Semitic is a calumny.
But the publication of the cartoon isn’t just an “error of judgment,” either. The paper owes the Israeli prime minister an apology. It owes itself some serious reflection as to how it came to publish that cartoon – and how its publication came, to many longtime readers, as a shock but not a surprise.
Bret Stevens is a columnist for The New York Times.
