The New York Times ‘Gets’ It Wrong Again

Ira Stoll

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The headquarters of The New York Times. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

A week after publishing a correction acknowledging error in describing the Jewish divorce document known as a get, the New York Times has again made what appears to be an error in writing about the issue.

The January 16 correction had said: “An article last Sunday about the billionaire Ronald O. Perelman referred imprecisely to a get. It is a written document obtained from a Jewish rabbinical court that grants permission to divorce; it is not a religious tradition by which men leave their wives without leaving the faith.”

The January 24 New York Times obituary of Sheldon Silver, a former speaker of the New York State Assembly, includes this sentence: “Early political victories reflected his legislative savvy and his religious faith: An Orthodox Jew, he sponsored a 1983 law that abolished religious barriers to remarriage for Jewish women — who required a “get,” or Jewish divorce decree, from their husbands — in opposition to traditional Jewish law.”

It’s a typically convoluted, difficult-to-parse Times sentence. Increasingly, as I mentioned the other day in identifying another case of a misplaced modifying phrase, the Times has gotten to the point where it’s sometimes hard to tell whether the problems stem from bias or just incompetence. What does the phrase “in opposition to traditional Jewish law” modify? The get requirement? The 1983 law? Silver’s sponsorship of it? The women?

It’s possible I am misreading it, but the Times sentence seems inaccurate on two counts. First, it’s not true that the 1983 law “abolished religious barriers to remarriage for Jewish women.” Such religious barriers aren’t within the power of the New York legislature to eliminate. It doesn’t make sense; it’d be like the governor of New York enacting a law abolishing Jewish religious barriers to pork-eating.

Second, far from being “in opposition to traditional Jewish law,” the Silver-sponsored law was drafted by an Orthodox Jew, Nathan Lewin, and supported by a fervently Orthodox Jewish religious organization, Agudath Israel of America, according to a contemporaneous account by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. That account does a better job that the Times obituary did of explaining the substantive provisions.

As Egon Mayer wrote in a 1983 letter to the Times, “The bill does not mandate any kind of religious divorce. It simply calls on people who are seeking a civil divorce to attest that no prior contractual agreements exist that would prevent either partner from remarrying.”

When Governor Mario Cuomo signed the bill into law, the Times account began, “Jewish husbands who refuse to grant their wives divorces under Jewish religious law will be barred from obtaining civil divorces under a measure signed today by Governor Cuomo.” That accurately made it clear that what was affected directly by the New York law were civil divorces in New York, not the religious barriers. The same Times account reported: “Rabbi Moshe Sherer, president of Agudath Israel of America, a major orthodox group, said: ‘This is a happy day for many sad people. We expect it to be challenged; we expect to be ready to fight the challenge.’”

This may seem like a subtle point. By changing the law about civil divorce, the New York government’s action had the practical effect of decreasing the frequency of cases in which Jewish women were “chained” to husbands who refused to grant them religious divorces. For Constitutional and other reasons, however, this distinction between the civil divorces and the religious ones is important to maintain, not to blur or to confuse.

Perhaps the Times will get it right by publishing a second get-related correction in a single month. Something to the effect of: “Correction: An obituary of Sheldon Silver imprecisely characterized a 1983 law he sponsored. The law directly affected civil divorces, not religious marriages. The legislation was consistent with traditional Jewish law, not in opposition to it.”

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Ira Stoll was managing editor of the Forward and North American editor of the Jerusalem Post. His media critique, a regular Algemeiner feature, can be found here.

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