The New York Times called Isaac Bashevis Singer a Polish writer. Wikipedia warriors made him Jewish again.
The New York Times called Isaac Bashevis Singer a Polish writer. Here’s how Wikipedia warriors made him Jewish again.
Few things rile an online crowd like a mistake in The New York Times. One example is the Twitter account of a contemptuous troll dedicated to pointing out typos and grammar mistakes in the paper of record.
But there’s another category of error — the botching of a fraught historical detail — that elicits a special shock and insult.
In April, novelist Sigrid Nunez, writing an essay about unexpected bonds between strangers in the Times’ style magazine, was found to have committed such a violation. She described, in passing, Isaac Bashevis Singer as a “Polish-American author.”
The various reactions featured words like “yikes,” “obscene,” “disgusting,” aghast” and “shanda.”
“Shame on @NYTIMES for erasing his identity and heritage,” one Twitter user wrote.
It may be true that the Nobel laureate was born and raised in Poland, but Singer is, in fact, best described as a Jewish author, and any labeling that elevates the former while ignoring the latter will strike many Jews as tone-deaf at best. This sensitivity is understandable given that Singer’s hyphenated identities are the result of his immigration to the United States only a few years before the near annihilation of Polish Jewry.
Since Nunez surely didn’t mean to bring about a crime against history, the question is where did she pick up the wording that appeared in The Times?
The likely answer is quite obvious: Wikipedia.
At the time, the introduction to the Wikipedia entry on Singer described him as a “Polish American writer in Yiddish.” The word “Jewish” appeared lower, in the body of the text.
Check now and you’ll see a different first line: Singer is “a Polish-born Jewish-American writer.” But the process of editing these few words was long and complicated, offering lessons on the pitfalls and continued promise of decentralized knowledge in the era of disinformation, with some possible insights about Polish ultranationalism.
The story of how a set of Wikipedia warriors made Isaac Bashevis Singer Jewish again starts a few years ago with a keyboard battle between two strong-willed strangers on the internet.