Wednesday, February 22, 2023
Elder of Ziyon
It is impossible to imagine Israeli anti-occupation writing without thinking of Yossi Gurvitz. A relentless, fearless, incredibly knowledgeable, prolific, and sharp writer, Yossi passed away last week at the age of 53.....Yossi’s roots were as far from the left as one could imagine. He was born to a national-religious family and educated at Nehalim Yeshiva, an Orthodox boarding school...Yossi hated religious studies, and even more so the racism and nationalism he encountered at school, including among the rabbis. Gradually, he began to lose his faith. “I started devouring philosophy books,” he would later write: "By the time I started grade 11, I was Orthodox in name only. Earlier, I rejected Jewish law as racist; now I could no longer believe in a deity which was managing the world and interested in our lives … "
I only wrote about Gurvitz twice, over a decade ago, but he stuck in my mind as an exemplar of everything a journalist shouldn't be: a bigot, a liar, and an antisemite.
In 2012, Gurvitz claimed that a person wrote a halachic question to a rabbi essentially asking whether it is permitted for Israeli soldiers to rape women, and that the answer was that they could. He completely misrepresented the question and answer - as well as the rabbi's clarification after the fake story exploded. The question was about how horrible the thought of such a thing was, and the rabbi agreed. It was obvious the rabbi was saying that such an act is forbidden today, the exact opposite of Gurvitz's claim.
Gurvitz let his inner antisemite out in his original text: "Those texts were written mostly in a barbaric period by ignorant people, fuelled by the hatred of mankind which is endemic to Judaism." It leaves no doubt that Gurvitz could not be trusted to write about Judaism at all. (The +972 editors quickly changed that when they realized how bigoted Gurvitz's words were.)
In the +972 obituary, they say, "During his time at +972, his writings on the racism found in some Jewish religious texts was a constant source of editorial frustration. No matter how much the other editors and I explained that some phrases that worked in Hebrew would not translate well into English, and could lead to accusations of antisemitism (or that we should simply pick our battles), Yossi would hear none of it. What made matters worse was that none of us had the depth of knowledge to argue with him."
Notice that not one of the "journalists" at +972 even considered that Gurvitz's hate of Jews and Judaism, which he didn't hide, might color his reporting. Not once did they fact check his lies against what a knowledgeable religious Jew would say.
That is the state of +972's "journalism."
But the other time I looked at Gurvitz's work was perhaps even more damning to him and to +972. Gurvitz repeated the lie,that there were Israelis dancing in celebration of 9/11 in New Jersey. He wrote this in context of claiming that Israelis are all inherently supportive of international terrorism, a truly libelous and absurd assertion, based entirely on a couple of comments in a news article.
Again, the professional editors at +972 didn't bother to fact check Gurvitz. And again, Gurvitz's own bigotry drove the story - not the facts. The only place to find the "dancing Israelis" lie is on the very same right-wing conspiracy theory websites that +972 readers would consider antisemitic in any other context.
Why was Gurvitz reading them? Because he shared their opinion of Jews.
Yes, Gurvitz wrote thousands of other articles. I haven't read any of them. Once I saw these two, why assume that they are anomalous? It isn't like Gurvitz or 972 apologized for the lies they published.
I'm sorry Gurvitz is gone. But I am not mourning the loss of a bigot and antisemite whose hate of Jews that started when he was a teen informed his entire adult life.
