The New York Times is under fire for sanitizing an antisemitic slur without, apparently, a single editor asking what it actually meant.

The controversy centers on a piece titled “I Think That MAGA Is Dying: Inside the Youth Movement at CPAC,” in which Times reporter Nathan Taylor Pemberton described young conservatives debating “the conservative backlash against those who were ‘J-pilled’ (far-right slang for skepticism of Israeli influence).”

The term does not refer to skepticism of Israeli policy. It refers to conspiratorial and hostile beliefs about Jews. Urban Dictionary, the crowdsourced slang reference, defines the related phrase “Jew pill” in precisely those terms. The “J,” multiple commentators noted pointedly, does not stand for Israel.

“Here’s a hint. It isn’t Israel,” said Melissa Weiss, executive editor of Jewish Insider, who questioned how the description survived the scrutiny of multiple editors. Jerry Dunleavy, chief investigative correspondent for Just The News, accused the Times of “casually whitewashing what ‘J-pilled’ actually means” before adding the same pointed aside: Israel does not begin with the letter J.

Lahav Harkov of Jewish Insider drew a telling comparison, likening the Times’s framing to the BBC’s practice of translating Palestinian references to “Yahood” — the Arabic word for Jews — as “Zionists,” a substitution that obscures antisemitism behind the veneer of political critique.

Political writer Katya Sedgwick suggested the Times’s handling of the term was less an anomaly than a habit. “They are so used to smoothing out woke left antisemitism,” she wrote, “they did the same to woke right.”

The Times has not issued a correction.

(YWN World Headquarters – NYC)