The conservative news site The Daily Caller published — and then, after being accused of anti-semitism, deleted — a video saying “NYT’s Glenn Thrush has a lot of chutzpah.” The video showed New York Times reporter Glenn Thrush repeatedly saying “chutzpah” and in the background, the Israeli folk song, “Hava Nagila” could be heard.
The Daily Caller article link now goes to an error page. John Aravosis, editor of America Blog, re-posted a screenshot and the video of the Daily Caller story page, after the video was removed, Business Insider noted. See that post below.
Thrush recently stopped using Twitter, but his fellow New York Times White House reporter Maggie Haberman flagged the video in a tweet this evening, writing, “Am I seeing this correctly and the Daily Caller made a vid of Thrush saying ‘chutzpah’ with hava nagila playing?” iMediaEthics has written to the Times for a response to the video.
Betsy Rothstein, a media writer for the Daily Caller–which was founded by Tucker Carlson–tweeted numerous times to “explain how the @GlennThrush ‘Chutzpah!’ video was born.” Rothstein said she saw Glenn Thrush on MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell Show and “heard Thrush utter the most perfect pronunciation of ‘Chutzpah’ that I, as a Jewish woman, have ever heard in my life.” She continued that she was “in awe” of the pronunciation, “thought it would make for a funny video” and asked someone to make it. She denied having “intended to mock his religion” and said that after the video was posted and removed, she called Thrush to “explain myself.” That said, she argued the video “was accidentally released too soon,” that she planned to write something, and that it “lacked proper context.” We’ve written to Rothstein to ask if the video will be re-published, then, when her article is complete.
UPDATED: 9/28/2017 10:31 PM EST Rothstein posted a new article in which she says the Daily Caller will not be re-posting the chutzpah video. Rothstein called Thrush’s pronunciation of chutzpah “the most succinct pronunciation this Jewish woman has ever heard in her entire life.”
Pairing the word with Hava Nagila “had the feel of a Seinfeld episode,” Rothstein argued. “Unfortunately, the video was posted without proper context and that is when things on Twitter went awry,” she continued, explaining she hadn’t had time to write her story before the video was posted.
“Without proper context, the video on its own doesn’t look good and was misconstrued as intending ethnic harm on Thrush,” Rothstein wrote. “I do not fault people for thinking this. For that reason, we are not re-posting it.”