Poetry editor quits NY Times over Gaza
NewsA sign of the muddled thinking of these times:
I have resigned as poetry editor of the New York Times Magazine.
The Israeli state’s U.S.-backed war against the people of Gaza is not a war for anyone. There is no safety in it or from it, not for Israel, not for the United States or Europe, and especially not for the many Jewish people slandered by those who claim falsely to fight in their names. Its only profit is the deadly profit of oil interests and weapon manufacturers. The world, the future, our hearts—everything grows smaller and harder from it. This is not only a war of missiles and land invasions. It is the ongoing devastation of the people of Palestine, people who have resisted throughout decades of occupation, forced dislocation, deprivation, surveillance, siege, imprisonment, and torture.
Because our status quo is self-expression, sometimes all artists have left is to refuse. So I refuse. I won’t write about poetry amidst the ‘reasonable’ tones of those who aim to acclimatize us to this unreasonable suffering. No more ghoulish euphemisms. No more sanitized hell-words. No more warmongering lies.
If this resignation leaves a hole in the news the size of poetry, then that is the true shape of the present.”
—Anne Boyer
Good for her, and I hope she is able to find an equally good job, as there aren’t many posts as poetry editor available. Her thinking is not muddled, far from it. For anyone with the slightest sense of perception, it is obvious that the NY (waste of) Times is simply a mouthpiece for the State Department. Biden has no intention of limiting the bloodshed in Gaza or reigning Netanyahu in. Israel is seizing the opportunity to eradicate Gaza, having made no attempt to conceal their intention in the past. Gaza has not experienced a day free of Israeli occupation since 1967. All that Israel did 18 years ago when it pulled out its Jewish settlers, was to run the occupation more remotely, exploiting new developments in weapons and surveillance technologies.
Gaza has not been occupied since 2005. You may know music, but clearly you don’t know history.
True. It’s only been under aerial surveillance, total border control, severe import restrictions, regular military strikes, and political domination. So, under siege.
All of those measures after 2005 were essential for legitimate self-defense in response to rocket attacks and terrorist acts. The moment Israel made a mistake of relaxing, October Seventh happened.
According to your rationale, the occupying (a.k.a., as “settlers) in the West Bank should be bombarded relentlessly also?
> the NY (waste of) Times is simply a mouthpiece for the State Department
That must be why they love Igor Levit so much. Levit does not deviate from the Democratic State Department on a single policy point. You will not find another musician who toes the line this closely.
Glad to see you go. Hopefully some additional antisemitic or confused woke “journalists” will follow your steps. At the moment the great NYT is a disgrace.
She must have received a plum offer from Al Jazeera
She should stick to editing “woke poetry”. She is nothing more than a “useful idiot”. Outside of the BBC the NYT is one of the most hostile media outlets to the State of Israel. They also have a history including covering up the holocaust
Only a poetry editor would imagine that they have shaken the world with the seismic waves that followed their epic protest resignation. All the best love.
One reads the comments in these pages and elsewhere and sees humans reduced to childish jeering. A reminder of what war does to people.
The great tragedy is that among the brutally murdered residents of villages near the Gaza Strip, there were many people with the same views. They sincerely believed in peace and fought for the creation of a Palestinian state, took very ill children from Gaza for treatment to Israeli hospitals, and hired workers from Gaza to work in their kibbutzim. Many of these “workers” on October 7 gladly killed those who helped them and wanted peace…Perhaps just before their death they realized something else, something they didn’t understand before…This poetry editor from the New York Times doesn’t understand either and most likely will not understand. Sadly…
One horror does not justify another horror.
You buried the lead: “The New York Times has had a poetry editor”.
Thank you Mr Lebrecht for sharing the details of her departure – she leaves a media outlet which is so poised to provide anti-Israel bias, that only Al-Jazeera supersedes it. The NYT, along with the BBC and NPR, are tainted by hatred toward Israel and the values of the US founding fathers and mothers. The day that the idiotic woke leftists are forced daily to recite Koranic verses because sha’ariah law is the law of the land, they will remember the fight that Israel fought with yearning and thankfulness.
Long live The Two State Solution. Eliminate Hamas and Bibi Netanyahu!
Just resign and go. You don’t have to announce your departure, you are not at the airport.
Long live Israel … but without Bibi Netanyahu and his theocratic crazies!
Good for her. It’s easy to be behind Israel given the atrocities committed against it on October 7. But there is so much more involved, starting with the 4,000 dead Palestinian children who had no stake in any of this.
A perfect candidate for the Stalin Prize for newspeak poetry.