How The New York Times turned a family interview into an anti-Israel hit piece
This summer, The Old Gray Lady was happy to promote irrelevant slander about Benjamin Netanyahu if it meant she got those clicks on social media.
A July 2025 segment from The New York Times series “The Interview” featured veteran actors Mandy Patinkin and Kathryn Grody discussing their life, love, family, and finding viral success. What’s notable is not their stories but how host David Marchese and the publication seized on a political tangent to promote their views against Benjamin Netanyahu, which they subsequently posted to their millions of followers on social media.
Who are the Grody-Patinkin Family?
Mandy Patinkin and Kathryn Grody found initial success in theatre and television. They have been married for more than 45 years, and during the pandemic, found renewed fame among younger audiences on TikTok when their son Gideon would film their everyday antics.
In a 3,255-word transcript of an on-camera interview, the writer prefaces by saying he discusses a myriad of topics, including “being Jewish in this fraught moment”. After diving into their long marriage and some of the personal challenges they faced along the way, the writer addresses “Gaza and the tragedy of that situation”.
The interview then devolves into a 700-word rant about Benjamin Netanyahu and the guilt Jewish people around the world are expected to harbor due to his government’s reaction to the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7. What’s more, this portion was then clipped and posted on the company's Instagram account, reaching almost 20 million followers.
Patinkin says the following:
“To watch what is happening, for the Jewish people to allow this to happen to children and civilians of all ages in Gaza, for whatever reason, is unconscionable and unthinkable. And I ask you Jews, everywhere, all over the world, to spend some time alone and think, Is this acceptable and sustainable?”
Why This Matters
Not only is this digression unrelated to any other topic discussed in the broader interview, it isn’t even correct - and lacks important context. As is frequently noted (but ignored by most Western outlets), the number of reported deaths in Gaza is unreliable for several reasons: Primarily, the Hamas-run ‘Ministry of Health’ does not distinguish between terrorists and civilians in its death count, making it impossible to determine the true numbers. Second, these numbers themselves are usually artificially inflated to be used as a propaganda talking point and ensure that Israel and the IDF can be accused of war crimes.
As noted by Henry Jackson Society in its April 2025 report:
“The Hamas Government Media Office (GMO) curated the data to spin media-ready versions that inflated women’s and children’s deaths to levels that gave the deceptive impression of indiscriminate Israeli attacks on women and children.”
“He was a threat to my child”: Patinkin imagines a villain in Netanyahu
Patinkin leans further into his reputation as a “talker,” a label given to him by Marchese. He recalls an unrelated occasion where he had attended an event in the 1980s in the presence of Netanyahu, then-Ambassador from Israel to the United Nations. He had imagined how the future Prime Minister posed some kind of threat to his youngest child as they sat beside each other. This anecdote contains no relevance to the theme of the interview, nor even to the topic of modern-day Israel. Yet he chooses to express it - much to the glee of The New York Times, which spotlighted the soundbite and shared it online.
It’s a play almost as old as Israel itself. And The New York Times can’t help but fall for it each time. This time, though, it is using the voices of passionate but misinformed celebrities to provide the mouthpiece Hamas so desperately craves.
Appealing To The Young, Misinformed
This example perfectly demonstrates several things: First, that The New York Times is content in selecting a deliberately contentious topic as its main hook in an interview that has little to do with the broader conversation - all in the hope of clicks and shares. But it also highlights a more troubling trend: that it knows exactly what inaccuracies will resonate with its audience and that to go viral on Instagram or TikTok means to spread disparaging things about Israel, Netanyahu, and to place guilt among Jews globally.
What should have been a conversation about family, relationships, and career was cheapened into a quick political weapon to attract young and impressionable eyes. And The New York Times knew that all along.