Jewish newspaper declares 24-hour moratorium on Trump coverage

An American Jewish newspaper on Monday announces it will impose a 24-hour blackout of coverage of Republican candidate Donald Trump in protest over the anti-Semitic onslaught faced by many Jewish journalists from far-rightists claiming to support Trump.

“The attack on journalists, and journalism, that we are witnessing today is of a more significant and far more dangerous order of magnitude than anything I’ve seen over decades in this business,” explains The Forward editor Jane Eisner in an op-ed Monday.

“Online bullying is a nonpartisan activity — both the far left and the far right are quite good at it — but the virulent anti-Semitism many journalists experience today comes from what is known as the ‘alt-right,’ shadowy white supremacists who mainly hide behind the anonymity of Twitter to traffic in horrible Holocaust imagery and directly threaten Jews,” Eisner explains.

These anti-Semitic attackers tend to support Trump, she adds, “draw on connections with Trump’s presidential campaign, using Trump’s image and targeting his critics, including several of our regular writers.”

Even if “you don’t believe that the presumed Republican standard bearer has stoked this cyber-hate (which is a generous assumption), you have to admit that he appears to have done nothing to minimize or condemn it.”

Starting Tuesday at 5 a.m., the 119-year-old New York-based Jewish paper will not report on Trump or his campaign for 24 hours.