A writer from the New York Times Magazine resigned following her endorsement of a letter that accused Israel of genocide.
Jazmine Hughes departed from the publication on Friday, as confirmed by an internal email obtained by the New York Post.
Jazmine Hughes, an award-winning New York Times Magazine staff writer, resigned from the publication on Friday after she signed a letter that voiced support for Palestinians and protested Israel’s siege in Gaza. https://t.co/FcsG3Bji9i
— The New York Times (@nytimes) November 4, 2023
New York Times Magazine Editor Jake Silverstein cited Hughes for breaching the company’s public protest policy.
Silverstein commented, “While I respect that she has strong convictions, this was a clear violation of The Times’s policy on public protest. This policy, which I fully support, is an important part of our commitment to independence.”
He continued, “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.”
Hughes endorsed a letter, dated October 26, titled “Writers Against the War on Gaza,” which explicitly alleges that Israel is engaged in acts of genocide against Palestinians.
The letter reads, “Israel’s war against Gaza is an attempt to conduct genocide against the Palestinian people. This war did not begin on October 7th. However, in the last 19 days, the Israeli military has killed over 6,500 Palestinians, including more than 2,500 children and wounded over 17,000. Gaza is the world’s largest open-air prison: its 2 million residents—a majority of whom are refugees, descendants of those whose land was stolen in 1948—have been deprived of basic human rights since the blockade in 2006.”
The letter specifically took issue with the New York Times’ editorial, which stated, “What Israel is fighting to defend is a society that values human life and the rule of law.”
The letter also condemned “establishment media outlets” that characterized the October 7 terrorist attack by Hamas as “unprovoked.”
The letter reads, “We cannot write a free Palestine into existence, but together, we must do all we possibly can to reject narratives that soothe Western complicity in ethnic cleansing. We come together as writers, journalists, academics, artists and other culture workers to express our solidarity with the people of Palestine. We stand with their anticolonial struggle for freedom and for self-determination and with their right to resist occupation.”
Hughes wrote for the New York from 2015 to 2023.
Jamie Lauren Keiles, a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine, also added her signature to the letter and declared her departure from the publication on Thursday via X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.
Keiles wrote, “I resigned from my contributor writing position at the times mag earlier this week because having a formal institutional affiliation was starting to become a liability to my work. nobody asked me to leave. was a personal decision about what kind of work i want to be able to do. all this said, i stand by my choice to sign the @wawog_now letter and pray for a free Palestine soon.”
