A NYT columnist set out to praise 'Jewish brilliance.' The result was another explosive controversy.

[dalton99a]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/a-new-york-times-columnist-set-out-to-praise-jewish-brilliance-the-result-was-another-explosive-controversy/2019/12/30/64b8d02a-2b2b-11ea-9b60-817cc18cf173_story.html

A New York Times columnist set out to praise ‘Jewish brilliance.’ The result was another explosive controversy.
By Paul Farhi
Dec. 30, 2019 at 4:46 p.m. CST

...

There was, for example, the “bedbugs” flap in August, wherein [Bret] Stephens challenged a college professor’s joke about him on Twitter. The professor then posted the angry letter Stephens wrote to his boss, leading to an explosion of news coverage about Stephens’s thin-skinned reaction. There was also Stephens’s first column for the Times in 2017, which questioned some of the science behind climate change. That one went over so well that Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. wrote a personal appeal to readers who canceled their subscriptions.

The latest Stephens storm involves a column the Times published Friday in which he lauded a long tradition of Jewish contributions to the arts, sciences and ideas. Citing Albert Einstein, Benjamin Disraeli and Franz Kafka, among others, Stephens asked, “How is it that a people who never amounted even to one-third of 1 percent of the world’s population contributed so seminally to so many of its most pathbreaking ideas and innovations?”

The column might have been little more than a nice Hanukkah gift except for one thing: To bolster his argument about “the secrets of Jewish genius” (as the headline put it), Stephens, who is Jewish, cited and linked to a 2005 study that argued in favor of a genetic hypothesis for the allegedly superior intelligence of Ashkenazi Jews (those who settled in central and Eastern Europe). The study was co-authored by Henry Harpending, a far-right ideologue and advocate of discredited ideas about racial superiority. Harpending has been labeled a white nationalist by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

An overwhelmingly negative reaction to the column built on social media over the weekend, prompting the Times to affix an editor’s note to it Sunday.

Link to tweet

[mopinko]

1. what a bedbug.

[dalton99a]

2. A very, very smart bedbug!

[sweetloukillbot]

3. And yesterday they published a "romantic" story about a husband murdering his wife...

and committing suicide because she had Alzheimer's and he didn't want any help taking care of her.

They're really trying to out crap themselves to end the year...

[dalton99a]

4. Yep. And the guy had plenty of money

[WhiskeyGrinder]

6. That was horrifying.

[WhiskeyGrinder]

5. Not only did he write that antisemitic trash, but editors thought it should be published.

What a fucking mess.