Pulitzer Prize Official Mocked Juror For Questioning An Anti-Israel Writer’s Award

A Pulitzer Prize administrator mocked a conservative journalist and member of its nominating jury for questioning why the group gave an award to an anti-Israel journalist who downplayed Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack on Israel.

Eliana Johnson, editor-in-chief of the Washington Free Beacon, as invited this year to serve on the five-member jury for the Pulitzer Prize’s National Reporting award. But after the Pulitzer’s Commentary award went to Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha — who objected to the media describing an Israeli victim of  the October 7 massacre as a hostage — Johnson had questions.

As she wrote in the Free Beacon this week, Johnson asked Pulitzer Prize administrator Marjorie Miller several questions about the prize, most notably, whether or not “members of the Pulitzer board themselves aware of Abu Toha’s public statements?”

The statements in question had to do with Emily Damari, who was taken hostage at Kibbutz Kfar Aza on October 7 and held by Hamas for 471 days.

“How on earth is this girl called a hostage? (And this is the case of most ‘hostages’),” Abu Toha wrote just before the Pulitzer deliberations began. “This is Emily Damari, a 28 [year-old] UK-Israeli soldier that Hamas detailed [sic] on 10/7… So this girl is called a ‘hostage?’ This soldier who was close to the border with a city that she and her country have been occupying is called a ‘hostage.’”

“Imagine for a moment a Pulitzer going to an extremist Israeli settler poet who had minimized and mocked the suffering of civilians in Gaza; who put ‘Palestinian’ or ‘innocent civilian’ in quotation marks the way Abu Toha does ‘hostages,’” Johnson wrote. “You can’t, because it would never happen.”

In response to Johnson’s query, Miller — whose social media accounts are littered with pro-Kamala Harris and anti-Trump posts — delivered what Johnson called a “non-response response about the board’s commitment to recognizing ‘excellence in reporting.'”

Johnson then began querying other members of the Pulitzer committee, prompting Miller to allege that Johnson’s emails violated the confidentiality agreement she had signed upon joining the jury.

Miller ended her email by noting that, while jurors are selected “for their character, expertise and integrity…Unfortunately, we occasionally misjudge.”

“She and her colleagues have misjudged, starting with the minor issue of what the confidentiality agreement actually says,” Johnson noted.

“As part of providing my services to the Pulitzers, I agreed not to discuss deliberations over the National Reporting category, nor to reveal the finalists before the winner was announced,” Johnson wrote. “I did not agree to refrain from reporting on a separate category in which I had no role.

“The Pulitzer board’s position that any reporter who participates on one of its many juries is prohibited from doing any reporting about the organization itself—even when one of its awards has become an international news story—is preposterous.”

Other jurors on the board with Johnson included Zeba Khan, the founder of Muslims for Obama; Jon Allsop, who has accused the Israel Defense Forces of deliberately targeting journalists; and Julia Preston, who has stated that President Donald Trump is “an existential threat to our democracy.”

Damari slammed the Pulitzer board, saying they had rewarded a voice that denies truth, erases victims, and desecrates the memory of the murdered.

“How to use language is precisely a journalist’s job—and a poet’s, too,” Johnson noted. “It’s not outlandish, then, to believe that Abu Toha meant exactly what he said and said exactly what he meant: No mercy for the men, women, and babies Hamas kidnapped on Oct. 7.”