The increasingly irrelevant Pulitzer Prizes were awarded on Monday to a slew of left-wing news reports, chronicled by our colleague Andrew Stiles here.
The prize for commentary went to the “Palestinian poet” Mosab Abu Toha for his work in the New Yorker—”deep reporting with the intimacy of memoir,” as the Pulitzer board put it—chronicling the evils of the Israeli military campaign in Gaza.
It took just more than 24 hours for Abu Toha’s public statements defending the atrocities of Oct. 7 and assailing the Israeli victims of those attacks to surface. (“How on earth is this girl called a hostage?” he wrote of Emily Damari, a 28-year-old IDF soldier abducted by Hamas. He objected to the media’s humanization of Israeli “hostage” Agam Berger: “These are the ones the world wants to share sympathy for, killers who join the army and have family in the army!”)
Somehow the intrepid reporters on the Pulitzer Prize board missed them. Huh.
Columbia University’s role in the administration of the Pulitzers and selection of the prize winners is not lost on us. The president of the university, Claire Shipman, sits on the Pulitzer board, which selects the prize winners. So does the president of the Columbia School of Journalism, Jelani Cobb, and the editor-in-chief of the Columbia Journalism Review. The administrator of the prizes, Marjorie Miller, is also a Pulitzer board member and a Columbia employee. Deliberations over the prize winners take place on the Columbia campus.
Were the Pulitzer board members, including Shipman and New Yorker editor-in-chief David Remnick, aware of Abu Toha’s public statements before they gave him the award? Will they reevaluate their decision given that, in the immortal words of Jeff Lebowski, new s— has come to light? They aren’t saying, but Miller leaves us to read between the lines, telling the Washington Free Beacon, “The Pulitzer Board is committed to recognizing excellence in reporting, literature, history and culture, and the selection process for each award is based on a review of the submitted works.” Hey, ignorance is bliss!
Bestowing this award when the university is under federal investigation for violating the civil rights of Jewish and Israeli students takes chutzpah.
The Trump administration officials currently negotiating with Shipman and her colleagues about whether the school will enter into a consent decree with the government can only consider taxpayer support for the university based on its submitted works. The latest is a middle finger.
