The New Yorker’s Fact Crisis
Is Masha Gessen’s performative anti-Zionism an exception to the magazine’s commitment to factual accuracy and independent style, or a reflection of broader decay?
It was a commonplace among right-minded people at the dawn of the 20th century that hatred and bigotry were the products of ignorance and would be eliminated through the sanitary means of education. Unfortunately, the horrors of the 20th century would prove this theory to have been radically false. Even the horrors of the Holocaust failed to immunize Western societies against the plague of antisemitism, which is clearly thriving in major Western culture centers to an extent that Victorian optimists and post-Holocaust pessimists alike would find incredible.
So how did so many intelligent people go wrong? In the case of plain old bigotry, they missed the fact that hatred and resentment are at least as foundational to the human psyche as love or the desire for social progress. It is also clear that antisemitism is distinguished from other tribal hatreds and bigotries by the fact that it is a conspiracy theory, and conspiratorialism in societies, institutions, and individuals has an inherent tendency to become more extreme and deranging over time rather than less so. That’s because, by substituting a cosmos of false causes for real ones, conspiracy-theorizing traps its victims in a mirror world in which they progressively lose hold of demonstrable relationships between causes and effects. The more deranged the sufferers become, the more dissonance they feel, and the angrier they get at those they hold responsible for their ills—and, in their minds, the world’s ills. Entire societies—the Spanish Empire, czarist Russia, 20th-century Germany—can descend into the pit of conspiratorial antisemitism and never be heard from again. Which is why normal people who don’t ordinarily give a hoot one way or another about Jews and Israel should greet the yearlong orgy of deranged Jews-are-Nazis pronouncements from the country’s leading universities and culture organs with alarm.
It may come as a surprise that the biggest star among the Jews-are-Nazis crowd works at The New Yorker, a magazine once synonymous with editorial excellence and still synonymous with the art of dressing up Jews in WASP clothing for the consumption of recent Ivy League graduates looking for a guide to normative urban thought and behavior via its famous cartoons. In a moment in which the mid-20th-century marriage between Jews and WASPs has clearly come apart, The New Yorker is undergoing an identity crisis—in which the magazine is “too white” and “too Zionist” for WASP progressives and the Jews who crave their acceptance, yet at the same time clearly unwilling to defend its distinctive if dated American literary voice against the schizophrenic demands of its own class, which includes both its audience and its Upper West Side editors. As the product of a failing cross-cultural marriage, The New Yorker is probably fated to wind up in rehab regardless. But the speed at which it does so is a choice.
Enter Masha Gessen, once a brilliant author, whose early books are classics. The memoir about Gessen’s grandmothers, Ester and Ruzya, and the books about Vladimir Putin and Pussy Riot are distinguished works of journalism, of the type that would no doubt have earned Gessen many warm welcomes at progressive synagogues throughout America in the early 2010s. Over the past decade, however, Gessen has become a purveyor of unhinged conspiracy theories about everything from Butlerian understandings of gender as a vast, malign cultural conspiracy to the malign influence and actions of the State of Israel—which as the ur-conspiracy theory of Western civilization, is inevitably where both Gessen and The New Yorker have wound up.
Gessen, in three lengthy pieces, one in December, one in February, and one recently, has become The New Yorker’s point person on Gaza—at the direction of the magazine’s editor, David Remnick. Unsurprisingly, the chief argument that Gessen wishes to prosecute is that Netanyahu’s Israel is now fully equivalent to Hitler’s Germany.
Gessen’s February New Yorker piece claims that “Israeli officials probably speak for their country when they say, in effect, How can you call it genocide if it’s waged by us?” Gessen bizarrely ventriloquizes Jewish opinion as follows: Jews should (“probably,” or “in effect”) be allowed to slaughter any other people, since they can never by definition commit genocide. One only imagines that The New Yorker’s once-vaunted fact-checking department allows this kind of ad hominem attack on an entire category of people on the theory that Jewish descent necessarily makes Gessen an adequate source for “what Jews secretly all believe,” just as a Black writer would be allowed to pronounce on “how Blacks feel about Donald Trump.” Which is another way of saying that fact-checking is a relic of the 20th century, i.e., The New Yorkeris in trouble.
The actual “Jewish argument” about genocide in Gaza, if such a thing can be said to exist, based on actual, checkable sources, like public statements by the leaders of Jewish institutions or newspaper op-eds, is that Israel’s actions in Gaza don’t fit the definition of genocide given by any dictionary—and that the incessant use of the word shows an obvious desire to turn the symbolic tables, depicting Jews as perpetrators rather than victims of the crime they are most famous for enduring. Yet, like all the death-to-Israel crowd, Gessen would be incapable of breathing without the ability to use the word genocide in every other sentence. Gessen’s February article describes a federal court trial in Oakland brought by a Palestinian family whose relatives had been killed in Gaza. Gessen quotes a historian named Barry Trachtenberg:
Trachtenberg testified to a consensus opinion among historians of genocide that what is happening in Gaza can indeed be called a genocide, largely because the intent to cause death on a massive scale has been so clear in the statements of Israeli officials.
Yet there is no demonstrable “consensus opinion among historians of genocide” that Israel is committing a Holocaust against Palestinians. One wonders whether any historian of genocide other than Barry Trachtenberg shares his opinion—at least, no one is cited. The “statements of Israeli officials” that Trachtenberg refers to were widely misreported, as Yair Rosenberg proved.Any New Yorker fact-checker of yore would have raised a ruckus about such an arrantly incorrect, politically motivated claim. Even the International Court of Justice, biased against Israel as it is, refused to call the Gaza war a genocide. Instead, it ordered Israel to “take all measures within its power to prevent” genocide, as the court presumably would demand from any party in a war. (The court did not “order Israel to minimize casualties,” as Gessen claims.) But slinging the charge of genocide is an indispensable weapon for Israel-haters who can’t let facts get in the way of antisemitic propaganda.
The Dec. 9, 2023, piece provided the key line that has enabled Gessen to outdistance Max Blumenthal, Judith Butler, Naomi Klein, and the rest of the Jewish Jews-as-Nazis crowd. Gessen wrote, “The ghetto is being liquidated.” The piece further explained: “For the last seventeen years, Gaza has been ... not like the Jewish ghetto in Venice or an inner-city ghetto in America but like a Jewish ghetto in an Eastern European country occupied by Nazi Germany.”
Oh, really? In reality, Israel has repeatedly displaced the population of Gaza in order to avoid killing them, while the Nazis displaced Jews in order to murder them en masse. To any thinking person this would seem like a meaningful difference. Not to Gessen, who is fixated on the niche pornography of dressing up Israeli generals like Jürgen Stroop.
In the December story Gessen refers to “the thousands of residents of Gaza killed in retaliation for the lives of Jews killed by Hamas.” It’s the word “retaliation” here that stings. The Jew is vengeful, willing to do anything to satisfy his bloodlust. Saving your citizens, Jewish and Arab, from being raped, tortured, and burned alive by a terrorist army, or simply defeating an enemy dug into an underground tunnel city built with hundreds of millions of international aid dollars and missile launching sites set up in the courtyards of hospitals and schools, was not actually the aim of the Gaza war. Rather, it was well-poisoning, the chief pleasure of the warped Jewish psyche.
Pursuing a tortured comparison between Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and Israel’s war of self-defense, Gessen concedes that Hamas is a “tyrannical power that attacked Israel,” but then asks, “Do these differences matter when the case being made is for killing children?” Israel is guilty of a pogrom in Gaza, and furthermore has killed lots of “children” (i.e., people under 18)—though no one actually knows how many—so Israel is like Putin’s Russia, and the Jews are just as guilty as Hamas. Et voilà!
Gessen hops up and down when anyone questions the righteousness of anti-Zionist (i.e., Israel-hating) Jews. “The inherent conflation of Jews with the state of Israel is antisemitic,” Gessen writes. But since half the Jews in the world live in Israel, and since the overwhelming majority of the rest support the embattled state’s continued existence, the conflation makes perfect sense—for everyone, it would seem, except Jews who want to write for The New Yorker.
Performing for this narrow audience, Gessen denounces the notion, attributing it to Benjamin Netanyahu, that Jews “have an exclusive claim on victimhood.” No one, including Netanyahu, is saying this. “In the eyes of Israel’s supporters, Palestinians in Gaza can’t be victims because Hamas attacked Israel first,” Gessen asserts. In fact, Israel’s defenders acknowledge the horrors that the war has imposed on Gaza. Palestinians are victims, just as much as Israelis, and for nearly 300 days they have suffered through nightmarish conditions. But they are victims because Hamas started a war.
“On average, a child in Gaza is killed every ten minutes,” Gessen agonizes—a figure that seems plucked out of thin air.
Even if the piece were more reliable on the numbers of dead in Gaza, Gessen still neglects the moral necessity to compare this conflict with other wars of self-defense, all of which have caused the terrible death of innocents. Hundreds of thousands of German and Japanese children were burned to death by Allied bombers. Before and after D-Day alone, America and Great Britain killed an estimated50,000 French civilians. Were those Allied actions the equivalent of Nazism? One could argue—idiotically, but according to some internally consistent logic—that they were. But Gessen doesn’t bother to do so. Apparently, only Israeli actions can be equivalent to Nazism. Why is that?
Gessen is not afraid to deploy even more absurdly obvious misstatements, one that even a quick glance at any history book would dispel (but that The New Yorker has let stand, contrary to my assumption that the magazine’s fact-checking department still exists). Gessen writes about Israel’s 1948 War of Independence: “Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled the fighting. Those who did not were driven out of their villages by Israeli forces.” According to Benny Morris, the Haganah expelled only 2% of Palestinians—the overwhelming majority were fleeing a combat zone. (By contrast, Arab armies expelled all Jews from the areas they conquered.) Though there were a “relatively small number of civilian casualties” in 1948, Morris notes, Palestinians feared Jewish violence—there were massacres on both sides. But large numbers of Palestinians chose to remain in the new Jewish state and became Israeli citizens. Gessen makes no mention of the Palestinian citizens of Israel—20% of the population—some of whom were murdered by Hamas on Oct. 7.
Speaking to NPR, Gessen peddles that shopworn greatest hit: Anti-Zionism is just “criticism” of Israel, rather than a campaign of hatred, and any criticism of Israel whatsoever is instantly labeled antisemitic.
In her NPR interview Gessen says,
Human Rights Watch issued a report stating unequivocally that Israel is using starvation as a weapon of war, which not only is a war crime, but it is a war crime that was committed by the Nazis. I think we’re seeing the exact same thing happening in Gaza. [...] with the majority of the population of Gaza, suffering from starvation: we can say that it really resembles the situation not only of ghettos, but of the liquidation of ghettos in Nazi occupied Europe.
Gessen outrageously asserts that most of Gaza’s population is starving, when even Hamas sources claim that, as of April, 32 people among 2 million have actually starved. Gaza’s food shortages have caused dreadful hardship for many months. But Israel has delivered staggering amounts of food to Gaza in the middle of fighting a war against a terrorist army that is deeply embedded in the Gazan population and uses the deliveries as a source of funding and social control—and that has attacked food delivery sites. U.S. or Iraqi forces were hardly criticized for not trucking in large quantities of food or medical aid behind ISIS lines during the siege of Mosul. Instead, it was broadly understood that asking the U.S. to feed and provide medical care to its enemy and its human shields at the cost of the lives of American soldiers and the success of their military operation was not a normal part of warfare.
Perhaps most telling of all is how Gessen minimizes the Hamas rapes on Oct. 7, subjecting them to whataboutism that The New Yorker would surely never tolerate in its pages if any other group of women on the planet claimed to have been sexually harassed on a college campus, let alone subjected to premeditated mass rape as a weapon of war. Gessen writes that “Israeli propagandists had promoted terrifying fictions,” “promoting stories of sexual violence—horrific, crazed, grotesque sexual violence.” Gessen cites, as evidence that the Jews are just as bad, videos of “soldiers playing with women’s lingerie found in homes in Gaza”—which is surely the moral equivalent of cutting off women’s breasts and shooting women in the head while raping them.
The New Yorker was a magazine whose identity was rooted in sterling long-form reporting. If Gessen felt that the assertions of Israeli rape victims were false or overblown, the editors should have suggested that Gessen speak to the people who claim to be survivors of the crimes, in addition to the “criminologist and feminist scholar” of “wartime violence against women” Gessen did interview. And this is true more broadly. If The New Yorkerhad sent someone like Jon Lee Anderson into Gaza, and that person had returned with a deeply reported document of devastation, no one would quarrel with the findings or his use of adjectives. Instead, since Oct. 7, the magazine has chosen to platform a performative anti-Zionist conspiracy theorist as one of its main voices on Gaza—in not one but three long pieces.
Gessen’s pieces are so over the top that Zadie Smith—who was presumably judged to make the magazine less vulnerable to progressive criticism because she is Black, female and not Jewish—was brought in to play good cop to Gessen’s bad cop. Smith’s New Yorker piece on the Gaza war (May 5, 2024) was roundly denounced by progressives, who were offended because she said Israelis might have a legitimate interest in not being massacred. But Smith happily fell into the Jews-as-child-killers motif when she condemned “the monstrous and brutal mass murder (at the time of writing) of a reported fourteen thousand five hundred children.” (The word “reported” here acts as sufficient cover for using Hamas’ partly fictive statistics.)
Did Israel really commit a “brutal mass murder” of children in Gaza—like, by selecting out children under 14, in Aktions, then mowing them down with machine guns, and tossing their bullet-riddled little bodies into pits dug for that purpose, just like the Nazis did during the Holocaust—to use Masha Gessen’s favorite metaphor? Of course not. So why use language making it appear to any unfamiliar or biased reader that they did?
You can stop right there, because there is no good answer to that question, other than the deliberate choice by the writer and editor to employ antisemitic tropes to color Israeli actions as uniquely monstrous and beyond the pale of normal human behavior—the shorthand for which is “antisemitism.”
Smith couldn’t run her piece, it seems, without voicing the current progressive shibboleth: Israel goes out of its way to butcher kids. Typical of those who deplore Israel’s war in Gaza, Smith has not a single word explaining how the IDF could have in fact saved more lives than it did. Though she stops short of redescribing Jews as Nazis, she has lost all moral heft, along with her grasp on reality.
The lacunae in the magazine’s Gaza coverage are hardly confined to essays by Gessen and Smith. In every case, they are big enough to drive a truck through. Egypt sealed its border with Gaza and accepts no refugees, but this can never be mentioned or criticized. Before the war, the U.N. Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) had over a third of its global employees stationed in Gaza, some of them associated with Hamas to the point of holding kidnapped Israeli captives in their homes.
It should be shocking that The New Yorker, for many decades renowned for indefatigable fact-checking, could let Gessen’s distortions stand. The New Yorker’s stringent regime of fact-checking reached its zenith under William Shawn, who took over the magazine when founding editor Harold Ross died, in 1952. Shawn, once described as a rather sedate “Jewish leprechaun,” had many strengths. A superbly sensitive editor, he nurtured and shepherded sterling talents like John McPhee, Janet Malcolm, Ian Frazier, Penelope Gilliatt, and Ved Mehta, who wrote a worshipful book about him. Shawn was nothing if not scrupulous. Always on guard against mistakes of fact, argument and English style, and hyper aware of every nuance, Shawn was the towering editor of his day.
One of Shawn’s virtues was his conviction that it was OK for readers to be a little bored. Extremely thorough accounts of remote parts of America and the world were welcome in Shawn’s New Yorker. Slowly flipping the magazine’s pages past ads for Irish hats and Patek Phillippe watches, the reader sensed her eyelids gradually lowering as some writer meticulously described the Arctic tundra, a Cape Cod fishing boat, or a market in Lisbon. “I don’t remember Mr. Shawn’s New Yorkerpublishing anything about Zionism, cancer or homosexuality,” Mehta noted.
Robert Gottlieb, who succeeded Shawn, loosened things up. A stunningly successful editor at Knopf, he liked to disarm writers by pretending to be a nebbish, just as Shawn pretended to be a kind yet firm therapist, a milquetoast superego whose mildness and patience produced better results than any threats. Brendan Gill said Gottlieb faked an air of “fey disorientation,” which did not prevent him from saying, the moment he met Gill, “I want to cut your salary in half.” After a few years S.I. Newhouse, the magazine’s owner, replaced Gottlieb with Tina Brown, who turned the respectable lady that The New Yorker used to be into a hard-partying tramp, or so the grumblings went. Eventually Brown yielded to David Remnick, who was a superb writer about Soviet Russia and boxing, but who turned the magazine into a hothouse for Ivy League conformism and idées reçues.
From its beginnings The New Yorker was selling something. In Ross’ day it was metropolitan savvy tempered by a mid-American Protestant sobriety. The magazine threaded its way between Scylla and Charybdis—Vanity Fair’s carefree glitz and the Saturday Evening Post’s straight-hewn, cornfed normality. Ross, who was from Aspen, Colorado, posed as a roughneck like William Demarest in the Preston Sturges screwball comedies. Brusque and fast-moving, he liked to blow his top when confronted with the incompetence of those around him, and often, Brendan Gill said, “suspected writers of trying to put something over on him.” Ross knew nothing about literature, art, music, or even sports—all he knew was writing. Ross was baffled by “females,” and famously excluded anything remotely sexy from the magazine’s pages (“sex is an incident,” he liked to say, not a subject matter). One wife said she had never seen him naked, since he always wore a nightgown to bed. Rarely, the bashful Ross would launch himself at a woman, attempting a kiss or an arm-around, and was nonplussed when she turned him down. James Thurber and E.B. White, those two pillars of Ross’ New Yorker, might have been inspired by Ross when they penned their classic tome Is Sex Necessary? Cartoonists delighted in sneaking a dirty caption past Ross. Peter Arno, a confirmed ladies’ man, once drew a young couple carrying a car’s back seat, explaining to a surprised policeman, “We want to report a stolen car.” Ross didn’t get it, but since people seemed to find it funny, he ran the cartoon.
Thurber wrote, “Ross was like a sleepless, apprehensive sea captain pacing the bridge ...” At any moment The New Yorker might run aground, he feared. “We have no manpower or ingenuity,” he lamented to Thurber. “I never know where anybody is, and I can’t find out. Nobody tells me anything. They sit out there at their desks, getting deeper and deeper into God knows what.” Restless, he would stride to the window and stand there jangling the change in his pocket, detecting no trace of hope anywhere. But his anxiety was productive. Ross steered The New Yorker to shining success, publishing White, Liebling, Perelman, Thurber, Dorothy Parker, Joseph Mitchell, John O’Hara, and many more.
“Ross has the most astute goons of any editor in the country,” H.L. Mencken once cracked. Ross’ fact-checkers told Mencken that he couldn’t possibly have eaten at a certain restaurant in Paris because there was no such establishment at the address he had given. They didn’t back down until Mencken produced the menu.
Shawn dialed down the excitement of the Ross years. Steady at the tiller, he talked for hours with his writers about the little things that, it turned out, matter enormously. Shawn’s editorial practice was unparalleled anywhere on earth; fact-checking and stylistic niggling were the name of the game. The fearsome Eleanor Gould—Miss Gould to writers—would cover an author’s proofs with minute scrawls—suggestions, queries, corrections, and erudite data points. Receiving a “Gould proof” was like being honored by a reigning monarch. Susan Sontag, who usually did not take kindly to editors, called her a genius.
The New Yorker’s long slide toward conformism began in the 1970s with Jonathan Schell—Shawn’s designated heir, though he thankfully never became editor of the magazine. (Schell attended Dalton with Shawn’s son Wallace, the overrated, pretentiously moralizing playwright.) Shawn reserved vast stretches of The New Yorker for Schell’s gaseous huffing and puffing in the Notes and Comment section at the front of the magazine (commandeered these days by the equally pompous and vapid Jelani Cobb).
In “The Time of Illusion” (July 7, 1975), Schell said that “under the administration of Richard Nixon, the American Constitutional democracy was almost destroyed by its President. Then, as the Nixon administration was forced from office, the nation seemed—for the time being, at least—to reaffirm its allegiance to its Constitutional tradition ... the nation seemed to rediscover its forgotten political principles.”
Schell specialized in the tiresome cliché of personifying “the nation” and making it alternately hope, despair, and recover its hallowed principles. His hyping of Nixon’s crimes finds its descendant in the magazine’s repurposed Perils of Pauline talking points which posit that Donald Trump has tied American democracy to the railroad tracks and that She can only be rescued by right-thinking Ivy graduates who participate joyfully in Act Blue Zooms.
Contrary to what you may have heard, though, American democracy did not come within an inch of its life in the past five years. First Trump brazenly tried to steal an election, and then the Democrats, equally shamelessly, convicted the frontrunner in a presidential election of a supposed crime no one in history had ever been charged with. Presidential elections have in fact been stolen before (JFK vs. Nixon), and neither Teapot Dome nor Watergate capsized the republic. But from the 1970s to the present, The New Yorker has never ceased trading in breathless fake pieties about the imminent demise of the country or, even better, the entire planet. First Jonathan Schell gloom-porned us with The Fate of the Earth, his bestseller about the coming nuclear war, and then the baton passed to Bill McKibben, who for years whipped up a doleful frenzy about global warming, encouraging us to kiss human life on earth goodbye in the next year or two.
At this point, alas, the last vestiges of The New Yorker’s past glory seem to have disappeared. Shouts and Murmurs, the humor column begun by Alexander Woollcott in 1929, has for a long time been dreadfully unfunny. (The “newsbreaks,” goofy paragraph-long malapropisms plucked from local newspapers, a feature inaugurated by E.B. White, vanished a long time ago.) A few of the cartoons can still raise a laugh, though you wonder how many more intelligent dogs, castaways on desert islands, couples in bed, and snarky kings on thrones you really need to see in this lifetime. There are a few distinguished arts critics still, Alex Ross chief among them. It’s been decades since anyone looked to the fiction or poetry in the magazine as a standard bearer for quality work. Its political commentary has the dullness of what passes for received wisdom among the coastal elites, which is to say that it neither provokes thinking nor shows any evidence of it.
This addiction to clichés about the fate of humanity and the world, which began in the Schell era but accelerated over the past decade and a half, has become fatal to both decent prose and common sense in its current iteration. While Gessen’s idea—that Israel is the summit of all human wickedness, fully comparable to the Nazi regime—may be new, it’s of a piece with the decline of the institution as a whole. Saying what one is supposed to say, and at great length, is not a successful recipe for a magazine that anyone looks forward to reading. The fact-checkers of old are tearing their hair out, and Ross and Shawn are rolling in their graves at the waste of their legacy.
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