An update on the controversy about Jodi Rudoren, the New York Times' education editor who has just been appointed the paper's Jerusalem bureau chief: I think it's generally agreed that the Jerusalem job is the paper's most sensitive, and Rudoren did a couple of unwise things in the immediate aftermath of her appointment, tweeting to Ali Abunimah, an advocate of Israel's destruction, in an overly shmoozy fashion that she has heard "good things" about him and would like to talk. (As I pointed out here, there's nothing wrong with interviewing Abunimah -- I've interviewed plenty of like-minded Hamas and Hezbollah figures -- though I don't think he's quite so central to the overall story as she thinks he is, but there's something odd about her tone. Just imagine, by contrast, if she had tweeted to an extremist settler rabbi that she had heard "good things" about him; the outcry would have been loud, and appropriate.)

Her bigger mistake was to endorse Peter Beinart's upcoming book about Zionism and the American Jewish community. Peter has a very anti-Likud bent, which, again, is fine, but it's not a reporter's job to praise controversial Middle East polemics, but simply to, you know, report on them. (Part of the obvious concern here, as Shmuel Rosner has noted, is that she's poisoning her chances of building trusting relationships with various Israeli sources by taking sides in Israeli politics. But unlike Shmuel, I think she can undo the damage by showing, over time, that she's fair, and represents accurately the positions of all sides.)