An Orthodox Jewish advocacy organization praised those who pushed back against reporting from the New York Times after the paper was not awarded a Pulitzer Prize for its reporting on the Jewish community and yeshiva schools.
KnowUs, a campaign of the umbrella group Agudath Israel, urged the Pulitzer Board ahead of their annual awards on Monday to avoid awarding the New York Times for what they described as the paper’s biased reporting about the Jewish community and specifically Jewish boys’ schools, or yeshivas.
“Respected intellectuals, secular Jewish organizations, including the Anti-Defamation League, and numerous national and state elected officials deserve specific appreciation for going on record, standing up for the Orthodox Jewish community, and fending off hateful invectives artfully posing as ‘constructive’ criticism,” KnowUs director Avrohom Weinstock said in a statement provided to Fox News Digital.
“Such actions, and such people, give KnowUs and the Orthodox Jewish community hope for a more transparent, tolerant, and respectful tomorrow,” he added.
The New York Times and Washington Post shared the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for their reporting into alleged Russian interference in the 2016 election. (REUTERS/Lucas Jackson)
The KnowUs campaign began earlier this year in response to a series of investigative stories by the Times about yeshivas and the Hasidic Jewish community associated with Orthodox Judaism.
The articles claimed some yeshivas faced poor standardized test scores and suggested students received inadequate secular education despite significant public funding, which the paper claimed leaves graduates “unprepared to navigate the outside world” and prone to “end up addicted to drugs and alcohol.”
NEW YORK TIMES FACES BILLBOARD CAMPAIGN FROM ORTHODOX JEWISH GROUP OVER ‘CRUSADE’ AGAINST SCHOOLS
KnowUs.org billboard outside the headquarters of the New York Times. (Photo by Fox News Digital)
Agudath Israel leaders claimed that the Times’ coverage was imbalanced and overemphasized individual negative experiences at some yeshiva schools while neglecting to give the Orthodox Jewish community enough opportunity to showcase their potential benefits.
“Any constructive, legitimate issues these articles may have sought to raise were buried by misleading statistics; an unethical lack of transparency of the Times’ sources; lack of balance; omission of critical context; questionable credit-taking for subsequent events; and repeated engagement in negative association fallacy,” the organization’s wrote in an open letter to the Pulitzer Board last month.
A photo of students at a Hasidic School in Borough Park, Brooklyn, New York, provided to Fox News. (Photo provided to Fox News)
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The 2023 Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting went to the staff of the Wall Street Journal for the paper’s “sharp accountability reporting on financial conflicts of interest among officials at 50 federal agencies, revealing those who bought and sold stocks they regulated and other ethical violations by individuals charged with safeguarding the public’s interest.”
