{"id":92751,"date":"2022-01-28T17:05:11","date_gmt":"2022-01-28T15:05:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=92751"},"modified":"2022-01-28T14:09:21","modified_gmt":"2022-01-28T12:09:21","slug":"05-05-73","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=92751","title":{"rendered":"The New York Times \u2018Gets\u2019 It Wrong Again"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>The New York Times \u2018Gets\u2019 It Wrong Again<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/h5>\n

Ira Stoll<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

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The headquarters of The New York Times. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

A week after publishing a\u00a0correction<\/a>\u00a0acknowledging error in describing the Jewish divorce document known as a\u00a0get<\/em>, the\u00a0New York Times<\/em>\u00a0has again made what appears to be an error in writing about the issue.<\/span><\/p>\n

The January 16 correction had said: \u201cAn article last Sunday about the billionaire Ronald O. Perelman referred imprecisely to a get. It is a written document obtained from a Jewish rabbinical court that grants permission to divorce; it is not a religious tradition by which men leave their wives without leaving the faith.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The January 24\u00a0New York Times<\/em>\u00a0obituary<\/a>\u00a0of Sheldon Silver, a former speaker of the New York State Assembly, includes this sentence: \u201cEarly political victories reflected his legislative savvy and his religious faith: An Orthodox Jew, he sponsored a 1983 law that abolished religious barriers to remarriage for Jewish women \u2014 who required a \u201cget,\u201d or Jewish divorce decree, from their husbands \u2014 in opposition to traditional Jewish law.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s a typically convoluted, difficult-to-parse\u00a0Times<\/em>\u00a0sentence. Increasingly, as I\u00a0mentioned<\/a>\u00a0the other day in identifying another case of a misplaced modifying phrase, the\u00a0Times<\/em>\u00a0has gotten to the point where it\u2019s sometimes hard to tell whether the problems stem from bias or just incompetence.\u00a0What does the phrase \u201cin opposition to traditional Jewish law\u201d modify? The get requirement? The 1983 law? Silver\u2019s sponsorship of it? The women?<\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s possible I am misreading it, but the\u00a0Times<\/em>\u00a0sentence seems inaccurate on two counts. First, it\u2019s not true that the 1983 law \u201cabolished religious barriers to remarriage for Jewish women.\u201d Such religious barriers aren\u2019t within the power of the New York legislature to eliminate. It doesn\u2019t make sense; it\u2019d be like the governor of New York enacting a law abolishing Jewish religious barriers to pork-eating.<\/span><\/p>\n

Second, far from being \u201cin opposition to traditional Jewish law,\u201d the Silver-sponsored law was drafted by an Orthodox Jew, Nathan Lewin, and supported by a fervently Orthodox Jewish religious organization, Agudath Israel of America, according to a contemporaneous\u00a0account by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency<\/a>. That account does a better job that the\u00a0Times<\/em>\u00a0obituary did of explaining the substantive provisions.<\/span><\/p>\n

As Egon Mayer wrote in\u00a0a 1983 letter to the\u00a0Times<\/em><\/a>, \u201cThe bill does not mandate any kind of religious divorce. It simply calls on people who are seeking a civil divorce to attest that no prior contractual agreements exist that would prevent either partner from remarrying.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

When Governor Mario Cuomo signed the bill into law, the\u00a0Times<\/em>\u00a0account<\/a>\u00a0began, \u201cJewish husbands who refuse to grant their wives divorces under Jewish religious law will be barred from obtaining civil divorces under a measure signed today by Governor Cuomo.\u201d That accurately made it clear that what was affected directly by the New York law were\u00a0civil<\/em>\u00a0divorces in New York, not the religious barriers. The same\u00a0Times<\/em>\u00a0account reported: \u201cRabbi Moshe Sherer, president of Agudath Israel of America, a major orthodox group, said: \u2018This is a happy day for many sad people. We expect it to be challenged; we expect to be ready to fight the challenge.\u2019\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

This may seem like a subtle point. By changing the law about civil divorce, the New York government\u2019s action had the practical effect of decreasing the frequency of cases in which Jewish women were \u201cchained\u201d to husbands who refused to grant them religious divorces. For Constitutional and other reasons, however, this distinction between the civil divorces and the religious ones is important to maintain, not to blur or to confuse.<\/span><\/p>\n

Perhaps the\u00a0Times<\/em>\u00a0will get it right by publishing a second get-related correction in a single month. Something to the effect of: \u201cCorrection: An obituary of Sheldon Silver imprecisely characterized a 1983 law he sponsored. The law directly affected civil divorces, not religious marriages. The legislation was consistent with traditional Jewish law, not in opposition to it.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Ira Stoll<\/strong> was managing editor of the Forward and North American editor of the Jerusalem Post. His media critique, a regular Algemeiner feature, can be found\u00a0<\/em>here<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

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The New York Times \u2018Gets\u2019 It Wrong Again Ira Stoll The headquarters of The New York Times. Photo: Wikimedia Commons. A week after publishing a\u00a0correction\u00a0acknowledging error in describing the Jewish divorce document known as a\u00a0get, the\u00a0New York Times\u00a0has again made what appears to be an error in writing about the issue. The January 16 correction […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[26,24],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92751"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=92751"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92751\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":92764,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92751\/revisions\/92764"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=92751"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=92751"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=92751"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}