A few days ago, after the horrific stabbing attack on a Hanukkah party in Monsey, New York, The Daily Beast ran an article by Jay Michaelson on the recent wave of anti-Semitism that discussed, among other things, Jersey City school official Joan Terrell-Paige’s bigoted Facebook rant about the kosher supermarket shootings in that city earlier in December. Terrell-Paige…deplored the displacement of black residents by “Jewish brutes,” urged sympathy for the shooters’ “message,” and asserted, as an example of Jewish evildoing, that “we learned six rabbis were accused of selling body parts.”
Michaelson notes that this grotesque claim “evokes 800 years of anti-Semitic myths of Jews using gentile body parts for ritual purposes” — specifically, the medieval belief that Jews murder Christian children to use their blood in Passover rituals. However, he also says that it’s “a possible reference to a 2009 scandal of rabbis trafficking in organs for transplant,” albeit used in a clearly anti-Semitic context. A note at the bottom says this text was added in an update, presumably after someone alerted the author or the editors to the 2009 story.
There’s only one problem: no such scandal ever happened.
If you go to the linked article and then to the original source, it becomes clear that the allegation of organ-trafficking by rabbis was the product of a garbled news story. Perhaps worse, this 10-year-old screw-up was recently dredged up by progressives on Twitter in an attempt to deflect from a blatant instance of anti-Semitism on the left and score points against an ideological foe — even at the cost of making de facto excuses for bigotry. (It should be noted that this does not apply to Michaelson or The Daily Beast.)
The polemics began shortly after Bari Weiss, the controversial opinion writer and editor at The New York Times, tweeted the story about Terrell-Paige’s rant with the comment, “This woman believes that a group of rabbis sold body parts. She is a member of the Board of Education in Jersey City.”
…[T]he Twitter thread began to fill with snide comments asserting that the story was real — and had been covered by Weiss’s own newspaper. Most of these jabs came from small left-wing accounts or even anonymous trolls who stalk Weiss on Twitter. (Weiss gets a lot of grief, often for the most trivial reasons, partly because she is a highly visible, female, bisexual, politically liberal critic of left-wing identity politics who has influence on liberal turf.) But some fairly big names joined in, too — notably left-wing blogger Ben Faulding, a.k.a. “The Hipster Rebbe,” and veteran journalist Brooke Binkowski…
Yet a quick look at the July 23, 2009 New York Times story touted by Weiss’s detractors did not support their claim that Terrell-Paige’s conspiracy theory was real. The article reported the arrest of 44 people in New York and New Jersey — mostly politicians and public officials, but also five rabbis — on corruption and fraud charges. (The rabbis had been involved in using religious charities for money laundering.) One of the people charged in the sweep was an Israeli citizen living in Brooklyn, Levy Izhak Rosenbaum, who was accused of arranging black-market sales of kidneys for transplant; he later pleaded guilty to three counts of such trafficking and one count of conspiracy to arrange another sale. The only link between Rosenbaum and the money-laundering rabbis was that they were all busted with the help of the same federal informant.
…On the next day, Slate ran an article in its religion section titled “Organ Failure: The arrests of rabbis who trafficked body parts uncover more complicated issues.” Most of the piece, penned by acclaimed Jewish journalist/author Benyamin Cohen, had nothing to do with the Brooklyn case and examined the fraught issue of organ donation in Jewish religious law and Jewish culture. However, it opened with an attention-grabbing paragraph about the New York/New Jersey bust and its “ingredients of salaciousness and scandal”: “corrupt politicians, money laundering … and rabbis trafficking organs.”
Inexplicably, Cohen misidentified Rosenbaum as a rabbi and then referred to “the rabbis’ organ trafficking.” Presumably, he gave the Times story a cursory read, saw the reference to rabbis and illegal kidney sales, and decided it would make a good lead for an article about Jews and organ donation.
…Over the years, judging by a Twitter search for “rabbis” and “organs,” these “broken telephone” stories generated a small but steady trickle of anti-Semitic comments, invariably implying that the mythical organ-trafficking rabbis were killing non-Jews to harvest their organs for the benefit of Jews. (In reality, Rosenbaum was paying Israeli donors $10,000 apiece for kidneys for American patients.)
Such chatter probably spawned the rumors that inspired Terrell-Paige’s recent post. Then, the fake news resurfaced in the controversy over that post — particularly in response to Weiss’s tweet. While a few people pointed out that there were no organ-trafficking rabbis in the story, they were ignored. In her response to me on Twitter, Binkowski insisted that the claim about rabbis selling body parts “had a factual basis.”
…While this is a relatively minor episode, it’s a depressing commentary on the state of the media. At first, sloppiness and sensationalism without ill intent created a “fake news” story that feeds into one of the most vicious anti-Semitic myths. And then, some progressives, including journalists, used this fake story and gave it new life because they wanted to humiliate Bari Weiss on Twitter and dunk on the IDW.
Maybe next time leftists deride Trump supporters for their tendency to peddle “fake news,” their tolerance for racist dog-whistles, and their obsession with “owning the libs,” they should look in the mirror.
