A month or so back, JTA’s Jacob Berkman reported on one Jewish organization’s plan (later dropped) to auction off a subscription to Playboy and a trip to the mansion. What we missed (yes, I know this is old) was the bigger scandal: the magazine’s anti-Israel bias.

Just when you thought it was safe to read the articles, Heff’s mag runs a piece by Jonathan Tasini slamming Israel. Among other things, he insisted that Jimmy Carter was right to describe “the control over Palestinians’ movements as similar to South Africa’s apartheid system” and criticized politicians for pandering to Jewish voters.

(Hat tip: CAMERA)

Here’s a thoughtful response from the editor of the New Jersey Jewish News, Andrew Silow-Carroll, to my post on the New York Times Magazine.

My standard joke on Larry King is that he could have Adolf Hitler on for two hours and the Holocaust would not come up. But Jerry Seinfeld may have outdone me…

All that said, maybe Jerry needs to lighten up.

Forget about The New York Times Magazine. Maxim this week released its list of the five “unsexiest women alive.” See if you notice a pattern:

• Sarah Jessica Parker (Jewess)
• Amy Winehouse (Jewess)
• Sandra Oh (plays Jewess on top-rated television drama)
• Madonna (Kabbalist)
• Britney Spears (ex-Kabbalist)

UPDATE: I’ve received some complaints from Maxim fans who say I’ve ignored the magazine’s “Women of the IDF” tribute. Fine, so the question is whether the magazine has an American Jewess problem.

The public editor of The New York Times, Clark Hoyt, recently gave a real spanking to the Sunday magazine and Deborah Solomon over her approach to the weekly “Questions For” feature. Next time he has the magazine on the brain, maybe he could get to a question that’s been bugging me for months: Does the NYT Magazine have a Jewish problem?

I wouldn’t normally put it that way, but the first troublesome item to catch my attention was the January 14 profile by James Traub titled “Does Abe Foxman Have an Anti-Anti-Semite Problem?”

Next was Ian Buruma’s February 4 “Tariq Ramadan Has an Identity Issue.” And, finally, “Orthodox Paradox,” Noah Feldman’s much-discussed July 22 lament about being cut like a foreskin from his high school alumni newsletter on account of his marriage to a non-Jew.

All three articles contained a Jews-should-get-over-it-already bias: Traub’s piece was a critique of Abe Foxman’s crying “gevalt” over anti-Semitism, with the underlying message that the Jewish community in general needs to stop stifling debate on Israel. Buruma basically told American Jewish organizations to stop picking on Tariq Ramadan, a controversial Muslim scholar whose chance to teach at Notre Dame fell through because the State Department would not give him a visa. Feldman portrayed any effort by Orthodox institutions to uphold a communal taboo against intermarriage as a primitive obstacle to “reconciling the vastly disparate values of tradition and modernity.”

Of course, harping on bias in the NYT Magazine is like complaining about chocolate chips in a Toll House cookie. If you expect straight cookie, then stick to the newspaper — the magazine is a place for writers to open up, both in terms of space and voice.

Still, creative freedom doesn’t mean creative license. Each of these stories either danced up to or crossed the line on pertinent facts — in a way that served to bolster the writer’s agenda. In at least one case, the journalistic misdeed was serious enough for the public editor to urge one Jewish organization to write a letter to the editor — which the magazine then failed to print.
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Back in August I moderated a panel discussion at the 92nd St Y titled “The Evolving Landscape in ‘New’ Jewish Media.” My favorite moment came when I asked Rebecca Wiener of Heeb if it was fair to say that her magazine had made its mark by pushing the envelope on sex.

She blushed, and seemed genuinely perplexed over why I would think such a thing.

Well here’s the latest cover (that’s a tube of K-Y Jelly in Jonah Hill’s hand)…

Hey, Rebecca, what do you call that? Pushing the envelope on bagels?

Not that there’s anything wrong with that. The real shanda over at Heeb is that the offices there (so we hear) were closed for Columbus Day, but staffers needed to use vacation days to take off for Rosh Hashanah.