The New York Times columnist whose article accused Israel of using dogs to sexually assault Palestinian prisoners has been condemned by the Israeli foreign ministry as “one of the most hideous and distorted lies ever published against the State of Israel in the modern press.” The article has now prompted Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar to instruct lawyers to file a defamation lawsuit against the paper. The columnist turns out to have a family history that raises deeply uncomfortable questions about his motivations. The Washington Free Beacon revealed in a damning expose that Nicholas Kristof, whose article accusing Israel of using dogs and carrots to rape Palestinian prisoners is being denounced by the Israeli foreign ministry as “Hamas propaganda,” “fabricated,” and a “baseless blood libel,” had a father who served on the Nazi side during World War II. Kristof’s own memoir admitted what he had spent a lifetime concealing: “When I was growing up, and other kids talked about their dads heroically battling the Nazis, I kept quiet. I didn’t want to admit that my father had actually fought for a year on the same side as the Nazis.”
The Princeton historian Bernard Lewis, who served Britain in World War II in the Royal Armoured Corps, the Intelligence Corps, and MI6, identified the mechanism clearly in his 2005 essay “The New Anti-Semitism” in The American Scholar. For over half a century, Lewis wrote, any discussion of Jews had been overshadowed by the crimes of the Nazis and the complicity or indifference of so many others. But as that memory fades, Israel and its problems afford an opportunity to relinquish the unfamiliar and uncomfortable posture of guilt and contrition and to resume the more familiar and comfortable position of stern reproof from a posture of moral superiority. For the son of a man who fought on Hitler’s side, the psychological utility of portraying Israel as the world’s paramount abuser is not a small thing.
Kristof himself acknowledged in his memoir that a “tortuous family history helped turn me into the kind of reporter I became” and that “all this shaped me.”
The historical record of what Ladis Kristof’s army was doing while his son served in it is not in dispute. The International Commission on the Holocaust in Romania concluded that Romanian forces took direct part in the Holocaust, murdering hundreds of thousands of Jews across Bessarabia, Bukovina, and Transnistria, and that no country besides Germany itself bears responsibility for the deaths of more Jews. Kristof’s father was born in Cernăuți (today Chernivtsi, Ukraine), a city that had been a center of Jewish life and culture, whose Jewish community was decimated in precisely those years. Yad Vashem preserves the testimony of a Jewish child, Pnina Pearl Kaltman, from Karapchiv, Kristof’s father’s own village. Kaltman described how her father was shot into a mass pit, and a neighbor saw him still alive and trying to claw out of the dirt, but he lacked the strength to survive. In all of Kristof’s multiple columns about his father’s hometown, he displays no curiosity about what happened to the Jews who had lived there.
Instead of reckoning with that history, Kristof and his father offered a series of shifting, sanitized accounts of his family’s history. His family-owned winery in Oregon, which sells pinot noir for $65 a bottle, depicts the columnist’s father as having been on the side of the Allies, omitting his service in an army allied with Hitler during the Holocaust.
The father’s own moral framework, put in writing, is revealing. In 1989, Kristof’s father wrote a letter to the editor of the Times defending Paul Touvier, the intelligence chief of a pro-Nazi militia in Vichy France, who was convicted of killing seven Jewish hostages. In the letter, his father argued that in World War II, it was often difficult to distinguish between “friend and enemy” and that “to do good, you often had to do evil too.” The man convicted of killing those seven Jewish hostages was, in Ladis Kristof’s moral accounting, someone deserving of a public defense in the pages of America’s most influential newspaper.
The Washington Free Beacon’s investigation of immigration documents reveals that the inconsistencies in Kristof’s accounts of his father are not minor memory lapses. The documents include the ship his father arrived on, the year he arrived, his stated nationality, his age, his place of birth, and his name. Kristof wrote about his father in at least eight separate Times columns, videos, and blog posts over more than two decades, repeatedly getting basic documented facts wrong.
What is unusual is for a Times columnist to write so frequently about his own family member while also showing so little interest in documentation, such disregard for accuracy, and such determination to avoid reckoning openly with his father’s Holocaust-era guilt.
Israel’s Foreign Ministry called Kristof’s column “one of the most hideous and distorted lies ever published against the state of Israel in the modern press.” Netanyahu wrote on X: “They defamed the soldiers of Israel and perpetuated a blood libel about rape, trying to create a false symmetry between the genocidal terrorists of Hamas and Israel’s valiant soldiers. We will fight these lies in the court of public opinion and in the court of law. Truth will prevail.”
Kristof’s father shot himself with a hunting rifle in 2010. Kristof writes in his memoir that in his final days, his father “spoke frequently of his childhood home in Romania.” He never publicly answered what he did during the years Romanian forces were murdering Jews in that same region. His son has now published what the Israeli government is calling a modern blood libel, alilat dam, against the Jewish state, in the same newspaper where his father once defended a man convicted of killing Jewish hostages. The apple, it seems, did not fall far from the tree.
