Yair Rosenberg Joins The Times

Nothing powers a beat like a steady stream of good story ideas. Yair Rosenberg is more like a monsoon.

Over the course of 15 years chronicling Jewish life in America and abroad, Yair has taken on the biggest, thorniest stories on the beat. First at Tablet magazine and most recently at The Atlantic, he's driven agenda-setting coverage of rising antisemitism around the world and the widening political divides among American and Israeli Jews.

But Yair knows better than most that these fraught moments are not all that define Jewish life today - not even close. And so he's taken readers inside Albert Einstein's friendship with an orthodox rabbi. He's explained why Joe Biden appeared to have trouble spelling Hanukkah consistently. He's gotten to the bottom of how that one character on the TV show "Firefly" came to be Jewish.

Now, Yair will bring that boundless energy and deep expertise to a new religion beat on National focused on Jewish American life, chronicling a period of extraordinary tension but also possibility and reinvention.

"There is no reporter with sharper insights about what animates American Jews, no one who better captures the nuances of their experiences, their arguments, their celebrations, their history," said Jodi Rudoren, who spent her five-year hiatus from The Times as editor in chief of The Forward, the nation's leading Jewish news outlet. "I was jealous of everything he filed. Every. Single. Thing."

Yair brings a deep understanding of American Judaism and the vast, diverse and multifaceted community that falls under that big umbrella. His reporting and writing are rich with nuance, speaking clearly to Jews and everyone else at the same time. It's a perspective that can only come from real experience. When I first met Yair for coffee, he left mid-conversation; a group in the next room was one short of a minyan, and he'd agreed to be their 10th - even if it meant stepping away.

Since 2021, Yair has written The Atlantic's Deep Shtetl newsletter, and staked out a place as one of the leading voices covering Jews and Judaism. Amid the global resurgence of antisemitism in recent years, that kind of work made him a target.

After the Anti-Defamation League found that Yair had received more abuse than any Jewish journalist or commentator but one during the 2016 election cycle, he wrote a guest essay in The Times, disarming trolls with his signature wit.

Yair has also taken a leading role in combating online abuse and is frequently called upon to speak publicly on the topic. In a piece last year, he laid out a strategy for social media platforms to beat back abuse without censorship.

Please join me in welcoming him.

- Nestor