Conflicting media reports identified the sefer as either a volume of Talmud Yerushalmi or the sefer Shev Shmaytsa. If it was indeed the latter, it would uncannily call to mind the story told of Rav Chaim Shmuelevitz’s seaborne journey to the United States from Shanghai, when, awesome masmid that he was, he was consumed throughout the trip with his assiduous study of the Shmaytsa. At one point, a fellow traveler, impatient for the long trip to end, asked the Mirrer rosh yeshivah, “Where are we?” Without missing a beat or lifting his head, Rav Chaim replied, “In Shmaytsa Gimmel.”

If we didn’t already know it, this little episode in Scotland shows us Jews to be one intense group of people. Here was nothing more (nor less) than a precious picture of a Jew and his sefer, oblivious to his surroundings. What could be simpler to understand than that? Rav Leff’s daughter captured it perfectly when she said, “We’re used to seeing our father like that. It’s not even weird for us. Our father takes the Gemara with him everywhere, even the supermarket. Every time he has a spare moment he sits and learns.”

For some, however, this rather straightforward point — a Jew’s love-bond with Torah — did not suffice. Some Big Lesson had to be mined. For one, it was a parenting lesson that can help address the problem of “at-risk” teens. For another, it was that great people prefer using their brains for “self-improvement” to watching a ball being kicked around. Each of these, in turn, had to be debated fiercely.

When the picture of the studious rabbi came onto the screen, one announcer joked, “I think he missed the goal,” to which his counterpart responded, “Must be a good read.” They just can’t understand that there are people who get their kicks from delving deeply into a Yerushalmi or a Shmaytsa.

And besides, they’re just plain wrong. What I saw in that picture was someone completely focused on the goal.

BLACK AND WHITE AND YELLOW For a few years now, the Algemeiner news site has regularly featured a column by the writer Ira Stoll that critiques the New York Times’s coverage of Jews, Judaism, and Israel. Judging from the pieces I’ve seen, many of the critiques are on-point and well-deserved, some are weak, and a few are simply mistaken.

Consider two recent entries. In one, Stoll writes that although he’s critiqued things in the newspaper’s food and travel sections, movie reviews, and even its dance and fashion coverage, he had never found a bone to pick with the Times crossword puzzle, but “there’s a first time for everything.”

In the crossword in question, the clue provided for twelve-down was “Ninth month of the Hebrew calendar,” which the answer key appearing the next day for the previous day’s puzzle identified as “Kislev.” This, Mr. Stoll says, proves the Times’s “complete ignorance of the current Jewish calendar,” since “modern Jews tend to think of the calendar starting with the month of Tishrei.”

And the hoary authority cited for this contravention of the Torah’s declaration that “Hachodesh hazeh lachem rosh chodashim, rishon hu lachem l’chodshei hashanah?” A fellow journalist named Benny, who assured Stoll that the Times “needs some editors who know something about Judaism.” An additional source cited as having “more information on this” is the venerated Acharon known as Wikipedia.

Stoll writes that it will “be interesting to see whether the Times is willing to publish a correction,” which would join a “long and unfortunately ever-growing list of Times corrections” regarding Israel and Jewish topics. But equally interesting will be whether the columnist will issue a correction of his own now that he’s undoubtedly been apprised of his blunder by the more learned members of the Algemeiner’s readership.

In another recent column, Stoll takes up a New York Times column by Ginia Bellafante entitled Is It Safe to Be Jewish in New York?, in which these two paragraphs appear:

When a Hasidic man or woman is attacked by anyone in New York City, mainstream progressive advocacy groups do not typically send out emails calling for concern and fellowship and candlelight vigils in Union Square, as they often do when individuals are harmed in New York because of their race or ethnicity or how they identify in terms of gender….

Sympathies are distributed unevenly. Few are extended toward religious fundamentalists, of any kind, who reach the radar of the urbane, “Pod Save America” class only when stories appear confirming existing impressions of backwardness — the hordes of children delivered into the world whom families refuse to vaccinate and keep semiliterate.

This struck me as an admirable critique of the reality that progressive sympathy toward beleaguered minorities seems somehow to falter when the victims in question are Orthodox Jews, who are treated instead to condescending disdain. That’s not, however, how Mr. Stoll saw it, writing that even “when it’s trying to stand up for Jews, the New York Times somehow manages to find a way to insult us.”

I understood Ms. Bellafante’s reference to “semiliterate hordes” of religious children as an arch critique of the way progressives view us, not an agreement with it. But Ira Stoll, straining to find bias and slander in yet another Times offering, takes her words quite literally, as somehow reinforcing, rather than critiquing, secular liberal paternalism. Not Orthodox himself, it rings hollow when he takes umbrage on behalf of the “yeshivah students to whom the Times columnist is apparently referring [who] are highly literate, most of them, in biblical, Mishnaic, and prayerbook Hebrew and in the Aramaic of the Talmud.”

To be clear, I hold no brief for the worldview of the New York Times, as the numerous columns I’ve written over the years roundly assailing its politics and vigorously defending our community from its slings and arrows ought to evince. That the Gray Lady is all-too-prone to yellow journalism regarding black-and-white-clad Jews is beyond cavil.

But Stoll’s stumbles in these two columns point up the folly of a regular column with a monomaniacal focus on just one newspaper, whether the Times or any other. Things just aren’t black-and-white in that way.

For all its long, unforgivable record of bias and calumny stretching back to the Holocaust years, the Times has now and then also featured positive, even touching pieces about the frum community. And, by contrast, other newspapers which Mr. Stoll might well regard positively for their right-wing political orientation, have featured numerous hit jobs on us. The New York Post comes to mind, with its outrageous reportage in recent years on stories like the murder of a chassidic businessman, the Williamsburg modesty signs, and the suicide of a troubled formerly frum woman, to name a few.

The willingness to take a broader view, to see issues, people, and institutions through a multi-chromatic lens, is a sine qua non of good journalism.

But when a journalist dedicates himself to hunting one exclusive target, he’s at risk of mistaking another writer’s sarcastic nuance for bias and spotting ignorance on the crossword puzzle page where there is none — other than his own.

Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 737. Eytan Kobre may be contacted directly at kobre@mishpacha.com