Ex-NYT Mag Writers Explain Why They Quit Over Anti-Israel Letter: ‘This Is The Time You’re Supposed To Speak Up’

Two former writers for The New York Times Magazine appeared on Democracy Now!’s podcast this week to explain why they broke the newspaper’s policy against public protest and signed an open letter decrying Israel’s “genocide against the Palestinian people.”

Jazmine Hughes and Jamie Lauren Keiles both resigned after being reprimanded by management for breaking The Times’ policy.

“I think the biggest difference, or the biggest note that I want to make, that I signed that letter as a magazine journalist, right? I wasn’t working in the newsroom, I wasn’t doing the sort of stories where you take this sort of distant, authoritative stance where you are presenting unbiased and unfiltered facts,” Hughes said on the progressive podcast.

“First and foremost I signed the letter as a person. I feel that growing up in America as a Jew you’re asked all the time, ‘What would people do if there was another Holocaust?'” said Keiles, a self-described observant Jew. “And for me it was just really important to say, ‘This is the time when you’re supposed to speak up.’ Like, this is the moment that you’ve been hypothetically asked about your entire life. So, journalism aside, I signed it as a person, and I think it’s the right thing to do. And I wouldn’t support an ethno-state anywhere else in the world for any other group, and I don’t support it for my own people. ”

Keiles argued that as a “contributing writer” and not a full employee with benefits, he owed “nothing to the institution of the Times if the Times gives nothing to me.”

“The idea that the magazine, or the Times as a whole, would have some hold on my speech just seemed ludicrous to me,” Keiles said. “So, in some way, it was a small amount of protest over the labor conditions in the industry at large.”

Earlier this year, both Hughes and Keiles signed a letter of protest “regarding the paper’s coverage of trans issues.”

When announcing Hughes’ resignation in an email to magazine staff, editor Jake Silverstein emphasized that she broke company policy, and was not reprimanded for the content of the letter she signed claiming “genocide”:

“While I respect that she has strong convictions, this was a clear violation of The Times’s policy on public protest,” Silverstein wrote. “She and I discussed that her desire to stake out this kind of public position and join in public protests isn’t compatible with being a journalist at The Times, and we both came to the conclusion that she should resign.”

Watch the clip above via the Democracy Now! podcast.