New York Magazine Turns Its Back on the City’s Jews
Welcome back to Forgotten Fact Checks. This week, we look at a widely criticized New York magazine cover story that purports to celebrate Arab and Muslim culture in New York City, but instead attacks the Jewish community, and we cover more media misses.
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New York Magazine: NYC is ‘Habibi City,’ the Jewish State is Merely a ‘Land Mass Currently Called Israel’
“A cultural shift is underway,” New York magazine declared last week in a 31-page, six-part package on the rise of “SWANA” culture in the Big Apple.
That shift, the magazine says, is “led by a generation of New Yorkers coming into its own.”
But what follows is less a celebration of the culture of New Yorkers from Southwest Asia and North Africa than an attempt to erase the city’s longstanding Jewish culture, and an attack on Zionism and Israel.
In fact, the series goes so far as to describe the Jewish state as “a land mass currently called Israel.”
The author behind the main “Habibi City” cover story is Zaina Arafat, a “queer Arab-American” writer and adjunct professor at Barnard College.
The article, which is about the city with the largest Jewish population in the U.S., suggests the October 7, 2023, Hamas terrorist attack on Israel was a turning point that brought on a cultural sea change in the city.
“In the months after October 7, however, we were increasingly spilling into view, desperate to be close to people who knew what it felt like to pretend everything was normal when your family — not just blood relations but people who looked like you and spoke like you — was living under the threat of annihilation. So we protested, we boycotted, we wrote op-eds. And slowly, out of that resistance, a cultural ecosystem started to bloom.”
The article not only suggests Palestinians were facing “annihilation,” but completely ignores that the October 7 attacks left 1,200 people dead. End Jew Hatred knocked the magazine for “failing to mention the massacre of Jews that actually happened that day and the ongoing threats from Hamas, the regime of Iran, and its terror proxies.”
Arafat says the strengthening of the SWANA community has been “beautiful to witness,” but that the community still faces “xenophobia, Islamophobia, and Zionism — along with the repercussions of speaking out against them.”
The American Israel Public Affairs Committee blasted the magazine for “treating Zionism as though it belongs in a list of identity-based hatreds,” saying the comparison “erases what [Zionism] actually means to millions of Jews: the belief that Jews, like other peoples, have a right to national self-determination and safety.”
While the piece laments the struggles facing the SWANA community, it also fails to mention that New York City has recorded a sharp rise in hate crimes this year under Mayor Zohran Mamdani, with more than half of those incidents targeting Jewish New Yorkers, as the New York Post reported.
The Jewish outlet Tablet Magazine called the magazine’s spread “antisemitic” and “absurd” and said a six-page piece on the city’s Middle Eastern restaurant scene included in the package read like a loaded “intifooda.”
“In the three years since October 7, awareness of Israel’s genocide of Palestinians and the wars that keep proliferating have turned eating out into just one more way people are expressing their views on Israel, on Gaza, on Lebanon, on Iran,” Madeline Leung Coleman writes for the mag.
“While pro-Israel New Yorkers have doubled down on supporting Israeli restaurants, those horrified by the genocide are turning away — and toward chefs who they would rather support,” she adds, asking readers to accept the idea that the war in Gaza is a genocide as a foregone conclusion.
The reporting includes coverage of the “Palestinian soul food” restaurant Ayat, which features a menu with a “cheerful, tourist-style map in which the land mass currently called Israel is titled ‘Discover Palestine.’”
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The CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, Jonathan Greenblatt, said in a post on X that the cover story “has too many issues to count.”
“Calling for other peoples’ self-determination while labeling the Jewish people’s request for the same treatment as hate is not factual — it[’]s a blatant, disgusting double standard,” he said.
Notably, the ADL received a total of $3.5 million from James and Kathryn Murdoch’s private foundation, Quadrivium, between 2022 and 2024, according to the Washington Free Beacon, which notes that James Murdoch took control of New York magazine on July 8 and declared “the beginning of a new chapter.”
While Combat Antisemitism Movement says it’s likely that editor in chief David Haskell commissioned the piece “well before” Murdoch’s purchase of the magazine was complete, the organization calls out Murdoch’s business ties to Qatar nonetheless.
Murdoch’s Lupa Systems, which purchased New York magazine, previously partnered with Indian media executive Uday Shankar in February 2022 to launch a separate investment platform called Bodhi Tree Systems — and Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund, the Qatar Investment Authority (QIA), committed $1.5 billion to the venture.
“That doesn’t necessarily mean Qatar is dictating New York Magazine’s editorial decisions,” the group says, but notes the financials suggest Qatar is “making a concerted effort to shape America’s public space against Jews and Israel.”
Still, despite the criticism, the magazine’s leadership stood by the cover story.
“Our latest cover story is an exploration of a New York subculture that is making its presence felt, both culturally and politically, in new ways over the last few years. As with other communities forged by common experiences of conflict, there is an irreducible political dimension to any coverage of this subject,” the magazine told the New York Post.
“We have endeavored to capture the tensions and live debates that exist within these communities, including how they relate to Israel. We are aware of the wide range of responses to the piece, including critiques from some in the Jewish community. We take these comments seriously, and, as always, we welcome and acknowledge good faith discussion and criticism about our journalism.”
Headline Fail of the Week
Back in December, President Trump announced a seemingly innocuous nationwide athletic competition in celebration of the country’s 250th birthday. But, as with most things to do with Trump, the media opted to cover the Patriot Games with a more sinister tone. Numerous outlets immediately amplified Democrats’ comparisons to the Hunger Games, a young adult book series that follows young people forced to compete in a televised fight to the death.
By the time the actual competition rolled around this month, the “Hunger Games” comparison had lost its Democratic attribution and was fully adopted by several media outlets.
“Hunger Games, MAGA Style,” reported The Atlantic. New York magazine claimed “Trump’s MAGA Hunger Games Was Even Weirder Than Expected,” while The Guardian said “Trump’s Dismal Patriot Games were the Hunger Games ordered off Temu.”
How, one might wonder, did the Patriot Games compare to the Hunger Games? Only in that a male and female high school athlete were chosen to represent each state and territory.
The offending event included high school students competing in games of dodgeball, tug of war, monkey bars, basketball, and an obstacle course, with the winning boy and girl each earning a $125,000 college scholarship.
Nonetheless, ABC Australia also described the games as the “Hunger Games” and said Trump “pitted 120 students” against each other.
The Boston Globe said the games introduced a new generation “to the ugly side of politics.”
Media Misses
- New York Magazine will no longer publish Ross Barkan’s column after an investigation found 67 of his columns did not include proper attribution of language, information and/or sourcing. The magazine launched a review after a Washington Post reporter published screenshots on social media comparing a lede from one of his stories to a similar lede Barkan wrote days later.“Upon conclusion of the review, we have determined that we will no longer publish his column,” the magazine said in a statement to Semafor’s Maxwell Tani. “We regret that his work did not live up to our editorial standards, and apologize to the writers whose work was not appropriately attributed.”Barkan, for his part, told the New York Post: “We’ve decided to end the column and I send all the best to New York Magazine. In the course of nearly 250 pieces, there were times I should have been more careful with my citation. I’m sorry about these errors and will work to do better, more careful work in the future.” He said he is writing a new column for The Nation “at a more considered pace.” However, The Nation has since told Tani it is “conducting an internal review in the wake of New York’s announcement.”
- Stanford political scientist Adam Bonica published an investigation on his Substack on Sunday detailing “how Democratic consultants, committees, and party leaders built a fundraising spam pipeline that funnels money from a captive pool of elderly donors into their own operations.” But before getting into the nitty gritty of his revealing year-long investigation outing the Democratic machine for squeezing elderly donors, he tells readers something nearly as interesting: that he first planned to publish the story at the New York Times, where he worked alongside editors for eight months to ready the piece. But he says the paper axed the article at the eleventh hour, even after it had a scheduled publication date, because it received a cease-and-desist letter from the Elias Law Group on behalf of the DCCC and the DSCC that demanded the Times not publish the article. Bonica says he then brought the story over to The Bulwark, where it was delayed several times after lawyers for the Progressive Turnout Project and Mothership Strategies similarly responded with legal letters demanding the article not run. Bonica says despite the article clearing several rounds of legal reviews, the outlet eventually said the article could only run if he accepted what he described as an “extensive rewrite” of the piece, which he says “removed key empirical findings without explanation, introduced claims contradicted by the data and fact-checking record, and presented the subjects’ legal defenses as my own conclusions.” Bonica rejected the terms and says the piece was released back to him. The New York Times and The Bulwark did not respond to requests for comment from National Review.
