NYT’s Jerusalem bureau chief leaving Israel

After four years, The New York Times’s Jerusalem bureau chief will return to New York City to cover legal affairs. He will be replaced by Jodi Rudoren, who has immediately come under fire for perceived anti-Israel bias, based on some of her comments on Twitter, from writers at Tablet, Commentary and the Washington Free Beacon.

In recent years, the individuals in the highly sensitive Jerusalem position have frequently come in for criticism from audiences on both sides of the aisle, for being either too pro-Israel or too pro-Palestinian.

The departing chief, Ethan Bronner, has a son who served in the IDF to fulfill his compulsory national service, which caused controversy among New York Times readers and activists who claimed Bronner was not able to be objective in his coverage of Israel and the Middle East.

The paper’s management stuck by him, enabling him to continue his role. Yet Haaretz reported that ombudsman Clark Hoyt, the Times’s liaison to its readership, advocated for his reassignment.

Bronner stressed that the decision to return to New York City was his own. “I have not been reassigned. I asked to return,” he told Politico. He has two sons in the United States, and his original plan was to stay in Israel for only three years, he said.

Rudoren, the incoming chief, was named Tuesday. The tweeting controversy was reported on Politico.

For example, Adam Kredo of the conservative news site Washington Free Beacon wrote: “Already, Rudoren is beaming out cutesy missives to prominent, self-described anti-Zionist players such as Ali Abunimah, co-founder of Electronic Intifada, a website that contains a treasure trove of writings highly antagonistic toward the Jewish state.”

These were the tweets that set things off:

[blackbirdpie url=”https://twitter.com/AliAbunimah/status/169477556108668928″]

[blackbirdpie url=”https://twitter.com/rudoren/status/169499017762439168″]

The conservative Jewish magazine Commentary, noting this exchange, suggested that Rudoren was “reaching out to anti-Israeli activists.”

In an interview with Politico, Rudoren responded: “It’s wildly premature to assess my biases. I have written nothing, other than a few tweets. It is certainly possible, as some have suggested, that I was not careful enough in what I wrote in some tweets, and what exactly I tweeted. But I hardly think that the half-a-dozen or dozen tweets that I’ve sent out in the last 24 hours add up to anything.”

She added that her tweets to Ali Abuminah, the editor of Electronic Intifada, were meant to be direct messages and not public tweets.

Rudoren has been with the New York Times for 13 years. She was previously a Chicago bureau chief for the paper.