Furor As Food Critic Fails To Invoke Politics In Recent Review

A cardinal sin of cultural commentary.

Tel Aviv, January 26 – A writer for Israel’s flagship left-leaning news outlet sparked an uproar today when her article comparing the home-delivery offerings of various restaurants in this city of 436,000 included not a single dig at Netanyahu or his right-wing allies, in defiance of established precedent among the paper’s culture and lifestyle personnel.

Haaretz’s restaurant critic Lee Eintaam posted her weekly column today and immediately faced a storm of criticism from colleagues both in-house and at other publications, who noticed that the veteran of Israel’s food scene had committed a cardinal sin of cultural commentary: she failed to draw unfavorable analogies to the prime minister or his party; included no gratuitous invocation of violence by Jews against Arabs; omitted any reference to the axiomatic racism of anyone who disagrees with the far left; and squandered an obvious opportunity, in writing about adaptations restaurants have made to COVID lockdowns, to blame Netanyahu for the situation, among other offenses.

Editors took down the review pending revision within an hour of it going online, a spokesman for Haaretz acknowledged Tuesday, but not before a dozen angry tweets, text messages, and Slack group chat reactions had already captured screenshots of the travesty. Haaretz Editor-in-Chief Aluf Benn attempted to assure his employees, contractors, and colleagues in the industry that his management team will act swiftly to remedy the oversight, if they indeed conclude it an oversight by Eintaam, or to take appropriate disciplinary measures if they deem the offense deliberate or malicious.

“Lee is an old hand at this; it’s hard to believe she would knowingly violate such a basic rule of journalism,” Benn told reporters. “We have long-established procedures for the composition of review pieces, as anyone can see from perusal of, for example, Rogel Alpher’s television criticism. Every column must contain at least two overt and three veiled references to the inhumanity, bigotry, or malice of anyone to the right of Che Guevara. Any writer who goes more than two columns without bashing traditional Judaism faces probation. Whether this incident resulted from negligence, provocation, or simple bad luck, we will do our utmost to prevent a recurrence. Not jut our columnists and critics will hear from us on this point, but the departmental editors, as well.”

Eintaam has remained unavailable for comment since the incident came to light, having been canceled on social media and all major communications platforms for sharing questionable reports and for spreading intolerant, hateful content.

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