In the spring of 2013, the Daily Targum’s Board of Trustees, made up of student leaders, alumni, and business professionals, asked the student managers of the paper to consider firing one of their own because of what the Board saw as controversial and potentially biased edits to a letter on Iranian nuclear capabilities. Amani Al-Khatahtbeh, the opinions editor who made those changes, had not even been on the editorial board for a week at the time of the request.

Later that year, then Targum Managing Editor and acting Editor-in-Chief Skylar Frederick changed the publication date of a politically-motivated letter at the request of an outside organization in order to increase the letter’s viewership.

In the midst of a wave of letters following the distribution of mock eviction notices by Students for Justice in Palestine, Rutgers Hillel Senior Associate Director Rabbi Esther Reed asked that her letter on the matter be published on a different day. Despite protests from some of the student staff, the Targum published the letter on the day Reed requested.

It is unknown whether or not Frederick acted of her own accord or at the behest of the Board. Unconfirmed reports suggest that someone affiliated with Rutgers Hillel initiated the conversation about Reed’s letter’s publication with someone at the paper and that Frederick reached out to Reed on the Board’s advice. Frederick did not respond to calls for comment.

More credible sources state that the Board forced the opinions editor at the time to comply with Reed’s request under threat of termination. Rabbi Reed’s mother, Barbara Reed, sits on the Daily Targum’s Board of Trustees.

In response to these events, which have become public in the last week, a Rutgers University Student Assembly formed a committee in October of last year, immediately after the publication of Reed’s letter, to examine the relationship between the Daily Targum Board of Trustees and its student managers, after what the Assembly saw as many interjections by what is widely understood to be the paper’s advisory board into the day-to-day student-run operations of the paper.

Timeline of Events

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The RUSA Select Committee on Targum Affairs, headed by School of Arts and Sciences senior Dhrumit Joshi, formed after the paper’s student staff raised concerns about the possibility of undue influence other Rutgers organizations might have with the Targum’s Board of Trustees. “[The] purpose [of the committee] is to look at the relationship between the Board of Trustees and the staff of the Targum and determine what that relationship is and if that relationship is constricting student free speech,” Joshi said.

Melissa Hayes, a Board of Trustee member and reporter at the Bergen Record, contends that the Board’s role is solely advisory and that students act on their own accord after receiving advice from the Board’s members. Further, Hayes said that they have never suggested student managers take a particular position supporting any argument.

“The Board has no position either way [on the Israel-Palestine issue]…The Board has never told the paper to take a position supporting one side or the other,” Hayes said.

Accusations of bias and influence at the Daily Targum have mostly revolved around the topic of the state of Israel or its occupied territories, known collectively as the Palestinian Territories or Palestine.

Individual members of the Jewish community as well as organizations like Rutgers Hillel have expressed concern about the publication of what they allege is anti-Semitic or anti-Israeli content.

Similarly, individuals from the university’s Muslim and Arab communities and student groups like Students for Justice in Palestine claim that the paper’s Board of Trustees restricts the publication of content that is critical of Israel. This criticism is paired with allegations that Rutgers Hillel has influence on the Board.

On the question of Board member Barbara Reed’s maternal relationship with Rutgers Hillel Senior Associate Director Rabbi Esther Reed being a conflict of interest, Hayes suggested that was not a concern.

“Professor Reed has been a member of the Board for a very long time. She’s involved in the Society for Professional Journalists. She is a professional. She has never acted in a way that would present a conflict. She really hasn’t been involved in any of the discussions on this issue at all,” Hayes said.

Amani Al-Khatahtbeh, former opinions editor at the paper, mentions the relationship between the Reeds in a blog entry at the Huffington Post, where she claims that she had been targeted from the outset of her tenure because she is openly Muslim, wears a hiijab, and is of Jordanian and Palestinian descent and that the university’s Hillel has had a hand in it.

Al-Khatahtbeh writes:

I was the only Arab on the 145th editorial board. I wear a scarf on my head. I believe it was in part because of these things and the polarized political environment at Rutgers that I was placed under a microscope as soon as I took up my position as opinions editor. There is strong evidence to support the claim. My superiors, and especially interested outside parties, were on top of me for any hint of showing a “bias” — and remarkably enough, this interest was only shown when it concerned the topic of Israel. I think all of my colleagues will agree that none of them had to experience the same scrutiny.

“[Hillel’s influence] is part of the investigation…That’s one concern that the committee began with. Its not the only concern of the investigation but you can say it’s a starting point and that its something the committee has looked at,” Joshi said, commenting on long-standing allegations of Rutgers Hillel’s influence on the Daily Targum’s Board of Trustees.

Rutgers Hillel is not the only organization under the Committee’s purview. Joshi said the Committee is also seeking to determine whether it should apply similar scrutiny to other groups on campus, in particular groups that might be in direct opposition to stances taken by Rutgers Hillel. That includes organizations like Students for Justice in Palestine.

“In regard to any of the groups, including Hillel, we haven’t yet made a determination [as to] whether there has been any undue influence.”

Joshi stressed that the Committee’s mission was not to determine whether or not there was bias in the coverage of Israeli-Palestinian issues in the Daily Targum but rather to better understand the relationship between the Board of Trustees and the editorial board, or student managers, as the Daily Targum Concept Plan describes.

A concept plan must be submitted prior to each triennial Targum referendum. The referendum asks students to vote on whether or not a fee of around $11 should automatically be included in each semester’s term bill in order to fund the paper. In the 2012–2013 academic year, Rutgers collected $650,000 in Daily Targum fees. The Daily Targum took $585,000 from the sum. The university took the remaining $65,000 for itself, in what it referred to as annual administrative costs.

The paper operates on those fees and advertising revenue alone. Students have the right to request a refund of the fee each semester.

According to the most recent concept plan, a document authored in 2012 by the paper’s Board and approved by the Rutgers Senate and Rutgers President Robert Barchi, the Board of Trustees is “meant to serve as the final authority on matters which come to its attention.”

The concept plan further describes the Board’s duties as such:

Board members are meant to serve as the final authority on matters which come to their attention. Examples of this may include special personnel issues, final budget approval, advice on various matters of day to day business operations. Board members provide personal, professional experiences as a means of suggesting a given course of action.

The ambiguity in the concept plan’s description of the Board of Trustees’s duties and responsibilities is another tier of the committee investigation.

“Part of the investigation is to determine how much power over the editorial board the Board of Trustees has and to propose any sort of recommendation as to what the next concept plan should say about the [relationship],” Joshi said.

The recommendation Joshi refers to is the RUSA recommendation to the Rutgers Senate on whether or not to approve the next concept plan.

The information collected by the Committee from interviews with former Targum staff members, has yielded no hard evidence as to whether or not Rutgers Hillel has any undue influence with the Board of Trustees, as of yet. Nor has it yet shown if the Targum’s Board of Trustees has overstepped the boundaries set up by the concept plan.

Yet allegations seem to suggest that Hillel has been able to manipulate the editorial content of the paper through the Board of Trustees.

Various sources at the paper attested to one of Al-Khatahtbeh’s claim, that the paper’s student staff was made to publish the “pro-Israel letter” on a different day than their editorial standards would suggest. However, those sources conveyed different understandings of the events that led to the the change in the student managers’ publication timeline.

Both versions of events agree that Rutgers Hillel Senior Associate Director Rabbi Esther Reed submitted a letter for publication in that Thursday’s edition of the paper. The letter was not published on Thursday but left for publication for the next day, Friday.

According to Enrico Cabredo, former editor-in-chief of the paper, Al-Khatahtbeh saw the opinions section as representative of the conversation on campus and sought to publish alternating viewpoints on alternating days. An examination of the letters to the editor published after news of the mock eviction notices broke confirms that alternating opinions were published on alternating days. Based on the observable pattern, Reed’s submission would have ran on Friday but instead ran Monday, alongside an opposing viewpoint.

In an interview from November of last year, Reed explained the Monday publication of the letter as an option Skylar Frederick, editor-in-chief of the paper at the time, gave her after Reed’s letter was not published in Thursday’s edition of the Targum. Reed stated that she had not received an explanation as to why her letter was not published on Thursday and that Frederick’s outreach was unexpected. Reed chose to run the letter on Monday because she was aware that Monday had higher readership rates.

Frederick, in an interview with College Media Matters’ Dan Reimold, referred to this particular event thusly:

As an apology, the Board reached out to the other side, which happened to be the pro-Israel side, and said, ‘If you want to write a letter, we’d be happy to run it on Monday as an apology for the article being so one-sided and clearly biased.’ …

The article Frederick refers to was a letter submitted for publication, an opinion from a Targum reader. Frederick further explained that the paper has a policy of not publishing content authored by their staff that is critical of the paper. According to several former staff members, there is no such official policy.

Another version of events explains the on Reed’s letter was a response to pressure from Reed and Rutgers Hillel to make up for alleged bias shown by Al-Khatahtbeh.

The critical eye towards the Targum’s contributions to the campus’s ongoing debate on Israeli-Palestinian issues grew from general criticism to documented criticism when Al-Khatahtbeh took up the position of Opinions Editor.

Jake Binstein, School of Arts and Sciences senior and webmaster for Rutgers Hillel, sectioned off an area of his personal website to, as he states, “objectively [report] the anti-Israel bias of the Daily Targum.” Daily Targum Bias, the title of the page, examined its first instance of alleged bias on the same day Al-Khatahtbeh’s position was announced.

In his first post, Binstein wonders if what he has found should be expected going forward:

While Binstein’s criticisms are his own, a website created to document Al-Khatahtbeh’s alleged anti-Semitism and bias within weeks of the beginning of her tenure seems to support her claims that she was the target of added scrutiny because of her beliefs.

If Binstein’s documentation is correct, however, it does suggest that Al-Khatahtbeh did not perform her duties in an unbiased way, changing the points of view of aspects of letters submitted. Binstein contends that Al-Khatahtbeh removed references to Israel having a democratic form of government, that she inserted words that changed entire arguments into otherwise unedited letters, and rephrased historical contentions on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

While Al-Khatahtbeh’s claims of bias are in relation to her, the most recent claim of undue influence on the Targum Board of Trustees comes after an exchange of letters between the Board and Rutgers Hillel. In the exchange, the Board submits to several of Hillel’s requests:

After learning of Ms. Jolly’s letter and because of various issues over the past year — including but not limited to the editing of letters submitted by Hillel representatives, inaccuracies in opinions pieces related to Israel and Palestine, and issues of imbalance being raised — the board has taken the unusual step of requiring the editor-in-chief to submit all letters and commentary on this topic to the Board for approval before they can be published. While we do not like to insert ourselves into the editorial process, we understand that there is a long history of problems here and we want you to know that we are taking steps to address them. In direct response to your requests, please accept our apology to Rutgers Hillel and the entire Jewish community. As stated above the Board is now working directly with the student editors to regulate what does and does not appear on our opinions page. … The Board is exploring professional training with media industry experts. Once we decide on a program, all editors will be required to attend.

Hayes contends that the Board of Trustees responded directly to Rutgers Hillel because they received a letter from the campus organization. “I want to make it clear: the Board has no relationship with Hillel. The only group we have a relationship with is the Daily Targum,” she said.

Alex Meier, current editor-in-chief of the Daily Targum, did not wish to go on the record about any of these claims.