Missing The Story

I am truly baffled by the news priorities of The Jewish Week. Your front page (Nov. 15 issue) has headline articles about GA [General Assembly of the Jewish Federations of North America discussions on pluralism, the nickname of a British soccer team and anti-Semitic students at a public school in upstate New York.

This is after a week where, by all accounts, the U.S. was about to agree to a deal to lift most sanctions on Iran, recognize its “right” to enrich uranium, allow Iran to keep its nuclear centrifuges, and continue developing a plutonium reactor. To find any news item about this serious turn of events in your paper, one would have to go to page 34. But even there, the focus is that Netanyahu’s “hard line” criticism of the deal puts U.S. Jews in an awkward position. There is no discussion of the awkward position that the U.S. deal would put Israel in, of being threatened by Iranian nukes. Nor the awkward position that Israel and other Mideast allies find themselves in, of finding the administration’s many firm assurances over the years are abandoned like yesterday’s bagels. Nor is there an editorial analyzing or taking a position on the deal, other than mention in the editor’s column about Netanyahu’s criticism. None of this is apparently as newsworthy as a decades-old soccer nickname.

In 2001, The New York Times famously acknowledged that throughout World War II, it had neglected to properly report on Nazi threats and atrocities against the Jews, and buried what stories it did print in the back pages. I hope that The Jewish Week is not going down a similar road with regard to the threats from Iran, and its would-be enablers in the U.S.Editor’s Note: Besides pointing out that the page 1 piece on the GA in Jerusalem includes coverage of Prime Minister Netanyahu’s passionate criticism of the proposed Iran deal, we add that our print edition seeks to provide fresh reporting, given the constraints of deadlines. Today’s issue has front-page analysis of the Iran situation as well as an Editorial. And our online edition, constantly updated, includes reports on major issues in real time.