The board, and its overseers at Columbia University, don’t want to answer questions about whether they vetted Hamas apologist Mosab Abu Toha before giving him the coveted Pulitzer Prize for Commentary.
We don’t get a lot of emails from the Pulitzer Prize committee here at the Washington Free Beacon, so when I received one in November of last year asking me to serve as a member of a Pulitzer Prize nominating jury, I was sure it wasn’t real—possibly a sophisticated phishing attempt, or more likely a joke at our expense.
As it turns out, the invitation wasn’t the joke—the Pulitzers were. The committee asked me to serve on the nominating jury for the National Reporting category. That meant reviewing the applications to that category and deliberating over them with four other jurors at Columbia University in February, narrowing the pool down to three finalists. Before doing so, I signed an agreement to keep my membership on the jury and our selection of finalists confidential “pending the formal announcement of the winners.”
After the five- or seven-member juries select the three finalists, they are kicked up to the Pulitzer board to select a winner. The 19-member board, composed of establishment journalists and a few academics, is overwhelmingly liberal—many members are nakedly partisan Democrats—and the prizes, which reflect their worldview, long ago became an object of derision among conservatives, and as irrelevant to the average American as the standings in Major League Soccer.
But even by that standard, this year’s award for Commentary managed to generate some attention.
The prize went to the Palestinian “poet” Mosab Abu Toha for his essays in the New Yorker. The board praised Toha for documenting the “physical and emotional carnage in Gaza” in a way that combined “deep reporting with the intimacy of memoir to convey the Palestinian experience of more than a year and a half of war with Israel.” Abu Toha is currently a “visiting scholar” at Syracuse and was previously a “visiting poet” and “librarian in residence” at Harvard.
It took about a half second for Abu Toha’s public remarks objecting to the media’s “humanization” of Israelis abducted by Hamas to emerge. “How on earth is this girl called a hostage? (And this is the case of most ‘hostages’),” Abu Toha wrote on Facebook in early February, just weeks before the Pulitzer deliberations began. “This is Emily Damari, a 28 [year-old] UK-Israeli soldier that Hamas detailed [sic] on 10/7… So this girl is called a ‘hostage?’ This soldier who was close to the border with a city that she and her country have been occupying is called a ‘hostage.’”
Emily Damari was abducted from her home in Kibbutz Kfar Aza on Oct. 7 and spent 471 days in Hamas captivity. Imagine for a moment a Pulitzer going to an extremist Israeli settler poet who had minimized and mocked the suffering of civilians in Gaza; who put “Palestinian” or “innocent civilian” in quotation marks the way Abu Toha does “hostages.” You can’t, because it would never happen.
Last week, Damari denounced the Pulitzer Board for giving Abu Toha the prize, calling out the Pulitzers for elevating “a voice that denies truth, erases victims, and desecrates the memory of the murdered.” A spokeswoman for Damari told the Free Beacon that neither the Pulitzer organization nor Columbia University have reached out to her since.
At the Free Beacon, we had questions.
Abu Toha’s work was submitted to the Pulitzers by the New Yorker. The nominating jury that made him a finalist included Zeba Khan, the founder of Muslims for Obama; Jon Allsop, who has raised the prospect that the Israeli military is deliberately targeting journalists and cheered the “consequences” the Biden administration imposed on the Jewish state; and Julia Preston, who resigned from her job at the liberal Marshall Project because the organization doesn’t allow staff to engage in partisan political activity, citing her belief that Trump is “an existential threat to our democracy.”
We wanted to know:
- Were members of the Pulitzer board themselves aware of Abu Toha’s public statements?
- Did Pulitzer board member and Columbia University president Claire Shipman cast a vote on this entry?
- Did Pulitzer board member Viet Thanh Nguyen, a Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions supporter who, eleven days after Hamas’s savage attack on Israel, signed an open letter describing Israel as “the occupying power” and decried its “grave crimes against humanity,” recuse himself from deliberations over this entry?
We put some of these questions to Pulitzer Prize administrator Marjorie Miller, also a board member, and received a non-response response about the board’s commitment to recognizing “excellence in reporting.”
So I started emailing members of the Pulitzer board individually in an effort to shake loose the inside story about the board’s deliberations over this award and Columbia’s role in it. The vast majority did not reply. One cited a commitment to keeping the board’s deliberations confidential. I did not push back. And a spokeswoman for Columbia University said Shipman did not cast a vote on the award.
On Tuesday morning, I received an email from Miller, subject line “Confidentiality,” alleging that my emails violated the confidentiality agreement I signed when I became a Pulitzer juror and that, while jurors are selected “for their character, expertise and integrity … Unfortunately, we occasionally misjudge.”
Miller is right about that. She and her colleagues have misjudged, starting with the minor issue of what the confidentiality agreement actually says. As part of providing my services to the Pulitzers, I agreed not to discuss deliberations over the National Reporting category, nor to reveal the finalists before the winner was announced. I did not agree to refrain from reporting on a separate category in which I had no role.
The Pulitzer board’s position that any reporter who participates on one of its many juries is prohibited from doing any reporting about the organization itself—even when one of its awards has become an international news story—is preposterous. Here we have an institution, ostensibly committed to supporting “fearless” journalism, trying to strangle reporting about what was known to the jury and when—and which board members cast votes on this award.
Miller told the Free Beacon that the Pulitzer Prizes “are based on a review of works that have been formally submitted for consideration.” See no evil, hear no evil.
In media interviews, meanwhile, Abu Toha has continued to shed light on the board’s most profound misjudgment of honoring an apologist for terrorism, lying on MSNBC over the weekend when he said, “First of all, I did not question [Damari’s] status as a hostage, because she is a hostage.”
Pressed, gently, by the Washington Post’s Catherine Rampell about why he lashed out at the media for humanizing Israeli hostages, Abu Toha snapped, “Do you know what I’m going through every day? Do you know how many members of my family were killed? … And you are requesting me [sic] how to use language here?”
How to use language is precisely a journalist’s job—and a poet’s, too. It’s not outlandish, then, to believe that Abu Toha meant exactly what he said and said exactly what he meant: No mercy for the men, women, and babies Hamas kidnapped on Oct. 7.
But hey, the Pulitzer board, they occasionally misjudge. Don’t you dare report on it.
This article was originally published at freebeacon.com
