GUEST POST: I was an Award Winning Jewish Journalist for 12 years. I got Canceled Due to a Bot. Here's My Story.
"Mind you, I was a freelance writer. Who worked for a Jewish, Zionist newspaper."
The following essay comes to you from Stacy Gittelman, former Detroit Jewish News freelance reporter. Tag along on her future journey by visiting her new blog, LaKoom.
After 12 years of churning out award-winning journalism as a freelancer for the Detroit Jewish News, I was canceled at the request of a bot who accused me of being too “biased” and “racist” on my personal social media platforms to continue to write lest I tarnish the reputation of the 82-year-old publication.
Let’s back up a bit.
In 2013, I relocated from Rochester, NY, to Detroit due to my husband’s work in the automotive industry. The DJN published my first introductory piece to its readers in August before my family and I unpacked and settled into our new home.
I started with feature writing.
As time went on, I began to delve into issues-oriented reporting.
It was an honor to get to know and write about Detroit’s Jews. The strong, proud, and stable community filled with large extended families contains people at the forefront of social justice issues such as poverty, water rights, and immigration rights. They aid victims of sex trafficking, fight for sensible gun control reform, and LGBT, and women’s reproductive rights.
In the spring of 2019, I wrote no less than nine stories about a measles outbreak in Southeast Michigan and how it impacted Detroit’s Jewish community. At the time it seemed as if it would be our generation’s worst public health crisis.
My editors trusted me with increasingly weightier assignments that kept me working around the clock, such as covering and localizing mass shooting incidents including the Tree of Life Synagogue, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, Michigan State University, and Oxford High School.
As antisemitism increased, it wasn’t long before I developed a niche for covering breaking incidents of Jew-hatred. Around metro Detroit, I became the “it” girl, the go-to reporter if you will, on the topic.
If a little girl from a recent Syrian immigrant family wearing a hijab told another little Jewish girl that she didn’t want any Jewish people sitting next to her on the school bus, I’d get a distressed call from that mom asking what to do.
In the months following the horrific 2018 MSD High School mass shooting, Jewish high school students in suburban Detroit received hateful texts and Snapchats from classmates saying that Jews made too much money. Then, a video was being passed around of someone who wanted to “step on the necks of every Jew he saw.” The video showed someone indeed getting their neck stepped on by a combat boot.
Again, I would get the panicked calls and texts. My first question to them was always: “Have you contacted the ADL?”
I thanked them for trusting and reaching out to me.
I would tell them, “Yes, I’d contact my editors if they wanted to go on record for a story.” But first, I instructed them to contact the ADL and offered the Michigan office’s phone number and website for reporting the incident.
Then came the spring of 2023.
I was visiting my parents in Florida, having a lovely lady's shopping day at an outlet mall with my mom and her friends when I got multiple texts, Facebook messages, and calls. From the dressing room at Soma, I reached out to these panicked Jewish parents.
There had been a school-wide mandatory diversity, equity, and inclusion assembly day at Bloomfield Hills High School. That’s the public high school with the largest Jewish student body in Michigan.
Allegedly, it was a program completely organized by students. Allegedly, none of the speakers from marginalized communities, who were supposed to talk about the discrimination they faced in high school, were vetted by any educators or high school faculty members.
One of the guests was Huwaida Arraf, a human rights lawyer, and a Christian Palestinian activist who was one of the founders of the International Solidarity Movement. The ISM is an organization that helped plan the 2011 Gaza Flotilla.
Speaking to 1,800 students who knew little to nothing about Israel, Palestinians, or the Middle East, Arraf declared that Israel is a genocidal apartheid state that should be dismantled of its Zionist structures. She praised the work and the death of ISM volunteer American Rachel Corrie, the 23-year-old who was killed in the West Bank in 2003 when she stood in front of an IDF tractor and did not heed warnings to get out of the way.
With each separate grade, Arraf took to the stage four times with minimal interruption from the teachers and other faculty in the auditorium. Fortunately, several Jewish students had the gumption to secretly record Arraf’s presentations, which were shared with me through their parents.
So, on vacation, I broke this story. When I returned home, I wrote a second and third on the fallout of the incident that shook the community and caused the resignation of the high school principal and district superintendent.
The story made national and international exposure, and I was recognized for my work by the Society of Professional Journalists Detroit Chapter and the American Jewish Press Society.
In other stories, I covered vandalism incidents of the Hillel sukkah getting trashed at Michigan State University, one put up on the premises of a metro Detroit Jewish food pantry. The community excused the incidents because they were “just some drunk kids.”
Over the years I wrote about hateful Valentine’s Day email messages Jewish students received at Eastern Michigan University or hate Jewish students received in class chat groups to work on class projects at MSU.
Sometimes I would have to turn down assignments, like when I was told that a bunch of eviction notices had been strewn around several off-campus apartments in Ann Arbor, home to the University of Michigan, wherever a mezuzah was displayed on a doorpost.
At the time, I was in the passenger seat driving down the FDR in NYC between seders. I had to tell my editor, sorry, but this time around, I’d have to pass.
Sometimes I turned down taking a story about Jew hatred simply because I was burned out and could no longer take it. Such as the time when I just filed a story about Jewish students getting hate emails at Eastern Michigan University in Ypsilanti from an account linked to “Hitler” only to find out another student at the same university reported that her dorm room mezuzah had just been ripped down and smashed on the floor.
In the 2018-2019 school year, I covered a rash of anti-Israel bias incidents in the classrooms at the University of Michigan, including the first report of a just-tenured faculty member who refused to write a student a letter of recommendation because she had chosen a study abroad program in Israel.
Honestly, I have lost track of how many incidents, especially campus-related incidents of antisemitism I have covered in Michigan.
Then came October 7th.
The anti-Israel activism and encampments beat kept me quite busy covering protests, encampments, and classroom and graduation ceremony disruptions on four of Michigan’s college campuses.
But I was ready.
I called upon the sources I spent years and months cultivating.
Sources who trusted me.
Sources who invited me into their parent and student Facebook and WhatsApp groups. On and off the record, on background and always referring me to yet another source, they confided in me and told me their stories of what transpired in and out of their classrooms.
They trusted that I would get it right.
They trusted that I would never publish any comments that I read in any conversation threads and only what was told to me on the record in formal interviews.
Never was there a time when the DJN received a complaint from a source that I had betrayed this trust? Or that I had misquoted or slandered anyone.
The DJN in turn assigned me to extensively cover disruptions in classes, at honors ceremonies and graduations, and the encampments at the University of Michigan and Wayne State University.
The DJN last summer sent me to Israel on assignment to travel with students with Michigan ties on birthright.
Then came the events of January 2025, with the Israel-Gaza ceasefire and with it the first hostage releases in over a year.
That’s when, weary of war, of the constant hatred, the constant chants for ceasefire, and the lies and accusations that Israel was committing genocide and starving the population of Gaza, it finally got the best of me.
Anyone who knows me knows I am outspoken on social media about Israel and the rise of antisemitism in America. And I have been this way long before October 7th, 2023.
Over the years, when people saw things that just did not seem right when it came to biases about Jews, they would privately share it with me on social media rather than sticking their own necks out for fear of being canceled by friends and acquaintances.
Right at the top of my Facebook page, I clearly state that my opinions are my own.
To counter the lies about Israel committing genocide and using starvation as a weapon, in the fall of 2024 I changed my Facebook profile picture to a red text box with the words that read:
“There was never starvation in Gaza. There was never a genocide in Gaza. It’s all lies. The Palestinians have somehow succeeded in brainwashing the entire world into thinking they are the victims when it is they who chose this war. They are not the victims. It is time for someone to say this out loud.”
I chose this profile picture because more trucks with humanitarian aid were going into Gaza than before the October 7th attack. I chose this profile picture because any claims that Israel was committing genocide have been repeatedly refuted by war experts such as John Spencer of West Point and retired British Army officer Richard Kemp or stellar journalists like Douglas Murray.
When I saw the footage out of Gaza of our first hostages to go free under a macabre propaganda release ceremony – complete with gift bags and completion certificates; when I saw emaciated and injured Israeli women having to wave to the crowd of cheering, well-dressed, not starving and not genocided Gazans during a production all staged by Al-Jazeera, when I watched well-coiffed Gazan men and boys wearing green bandanas declaring victory, pledging their allegiance to Hamas and chanting “Kyber Kyber Ya Yahud” for even more October sevenths to fall on the Jews, let’s say I went a bit dark.
Mind you, this was before the recent developments of Gazans who are coming out to protest for the ouster of Hamas.
The more that Gazans say they want a better life, a way forward without Hamas, perhaps my doubts will be assuaged.
At this point, the will to conjure up any compassion for Gazan civilians broke inside me. I was not lashing out as a biased reporter but as a broken and traumatized Jew.
My skepticism of the existence of innocent Gazans at a societal level was bolstered as I stood last June in the ruins of Kibbutz Be’eri, where I listened to the story told by a man who defended his kibbutz for 12 hours until the IDF arrived. I wrote about how this kibbutznik, Rami Gold, spoke of his sister-in-law who had for decades participated in peace programs between Israeli and Palestinian women, and given aid to Palestinians living across the fence, only to be taken out of her home to be shot dead by the people she helped.
As journalist Haviv Rettig Gur admitted on his Feb. 10 “Ask Haviv Anything” podcast, the sight of our emaciated hostages amid the glee of not starving not genocided Hamas and Palestinians coming to these staged releases, his journalistic objectivity and judgment was also made “fuzzy.” Because it was personal. Because it was us who they killed and us who they wanted to continue to kill.
I posted that I had doubted the existence of any innocent Palestinians in Gaza. They were all in some way, as a society, linked to Hamas.
My doubts were affirmed when I saw footage of and heard the accounts about the thousands of “ordinary” Gazans pouring through the fence to pillage, burn, rape burn, and murder Israelis to join the party Hamas kicked off.
My doubts were affirmed for months, when hostage survivors from the first release of November 2023 spoke of “ordinary” people running in the streets to beat them. When they spoke of Gazan nurses and doctors cheering in the hospitals that day, or how they were treated with no anesthesia, or how doctors and nurses poured bleach or chlorine in their wounds as treatment.
My doubts about Gazan innocents were affirmed by accounts of IDF soldiers, who said there were entrances into Hamas’ tunnel network, funded with billions of dollars of aid and rivaled the extent of the London Underground that was found in every Gazan kitchen, every child’s bedroom.
I questioned the innocence of Gazans when freed hostage Liri Amlog said she was surrounded by 2 million terrorists, including the children who she had to care for who cursed and spit at her.
But I did all this doubting and posting on my own time.
Not below my byline.
The day before I got the call from the editorial staff about the complaint was a good day.
It was MLK weekend and I was attending a DJN book club event in our town’s only independent bookstore.
About 100 people came out to hear a local Jewish author speak about his series of mystery novels set in Detroit. I congratulated our executive director with a hug on the great turnout.
The table where the author sat and gave his talk was piled high with stacks of the latest issue of the DJN.
My story profiling Israeli-American author and activist Noa Tishby was on the cover.
I felt completely on top of my craft.
But it would be the last story I would ever write for the DJN.
Shortly after my cover story on Tishby was released, a “formal complaint” was emailed to my editors. Someone somewhere must have a search alert when an article about Tishby appears.
Because that is what flagged this person not to check out my other bylined work, but my personal social media posts. It read:
“Hi there,
I am writing to issue a formal complaint about one of your writers, Stacy Gittleman. I never do this, but I am concerned that Stacy is tarnishing this publication by posting openly racist content on her social media. I read one of her articles from DJN and was curious to look at her Facebook. I understand that the war has a lot of our fellow Jewish people angry and passionate. That being said. Stacy openly spouts hatred towards ALL Palestinian/Arab/Muslim people on Facebook.
Having hatred towards Hamas I understand, but wishing death and harm on innocent women and children? Denying that there are innocent people in Gaza that are hungry? Wishing harm on anyone who shows empathy towards Palestinians? Unacceptable and immoral. It’s very gross to see. Please do not allow this racist woman to write in our beloved Detroit Jewish News publication any more. She makes our people look bad.
I’ve attached some screenshots of her grotesque posts.”
In a series of terse phone calls with the editorial staff, I was told that I came off as biased.Against all Palestinians. Against all Muslims.
And that my posts make me come off as racist and Islamophobic.
I mentioned that, at the time, a poll by The Palestinian Center for Policy Survey and Research revealed that over 75 percent of Palestinians favored the October 7th attacks. (A recent poll that came out in May repeated this sentiment.)
My editor’s reply: “Yeah, but that’s not everybody.”
Maybe that’s not everybody. But that’s three out of four. I am not going to get into it here about hostage survivor accounts of no one helping them, no one showing them a glimmer of kindness or humanity, not one Gazan took up Israel’s offer of five million dollars and safe passage for the whereabouts of any hostage.
I was told I should never post anything that would let people know my opinions on any given issue. And I was told that my social media profile should be as neutral and nonpolitical as possible.
Mind you, I am a freelance writer. Who worked for a Jewish, Zionist newspaper.
I am not on staff.
I use my own cell phone, laptop, and camera for my work.
I received not a salary but a per-story stipend no matter how many hours I put into a story. And I put in many hours, including on nights and weekends. But I did it with honor. I did it with diligence. I did what I needed to do to get after a story and to get that story right.
Because that’s the job.
Over the years I have expressed my opinions about women’s reproductive rights, the rights of the LGBT community, and gun safety control reform without clouding my judgment when on assignment.
In the summer of 2022, the DJN assigned me to cover a press conference in Detroit where Attorney General Dana Nessel was to speak about codifying reproductive rights into the Michigan State Constitution if Prop 3 could make it onto the ballot for the midterm elections.
I was transparent with my editor back then: “I am collecting signatures to get Prop 3 on the ballot.” She told me, “I don’t care about that. Just go downtown and write me a story.”
On social media, I lambasted the NRA after each mass shooting our country has endured, yet I wrote several stories localizing mass shootings and guns and their impact on the Jewish community.
However, my expressions of disgust about the behavior of Gazans during the thick of the hostage releases of January while Jews were and are still processing and grieving the worst massacre of Jews in one day since the Holocaust was, I guess a bridge too far for my editors.
I proposed to my editors that I would make a video explaining my post and position and would send it to this disgruntled reader. And I made it. It’s on YouTube. It is not great and I know that, as a print journalist, my skills on Capcut or Tiktok need to improve if I am to reach a younger audience.
I made the video and, writing to “Leona Angel” sent it to the email address of the person issuing the formal complaint.,
It immediately bounced back as undeliverable.
My searches for Leona Angel revealed no such person in the Detroit Metro Jewish community or the wider community.
She is not a paid DJN subscriber.
There is no such person on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, or X.
Finally, I did find someone by that name.
However, they lived in Illinois and passed away in 2015.
As a journalist, I always investigate my sources.
And if such a person wanted to issue a formal complaint about me, then at least have the decency to leave your real name, real email address, and real phone number maybe.
And of real, actual people?
The ones I meet out on walks in my neighborhood when walking my dog or the ones who recognize me in the parking lot at our local Trader Joe’s?
They tell me how much they appreciate both my social media posts and the articles I penned for the DJN.
Whoever Leona is — or was —got their way.
I am no longer writing for the Detroit Jewish News.
This has been a painful time for me. I have no hard feelings about the DJN, its staff, and its editors. It has been around for 80 years, is surviving as a scrappy non-profit agency, and still plays a vital role as a Jewish community magazine.
I worked at the pleasure and discretion of the editorial staff. It was their prerogative to offer or no longer offer me assignments.
There are still stories impacting Michigan’s Jewish and wider community in the face of anti-Jewish and anti-Western ideology that need uncovering and telling.
The University of Michigan is not Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, or UCLA.
But it is the University of Michigan — one of the world’s most storied public institutions with a vast alumni body possessing great influence in every segment of our global society.
After he dismantled the school’s often-described “bloated” DEI program, President Santa Ono resigned his post at the University of Michigan to accept an offer to be President at the University of Florida after only two years. But the bulk of those two years saw his campus embroiled with pro-Palestinian protests that included multiple vandalizations of his home.
How will both these developments shape the next years for students, faculty and the wider community connected to UMich?
In December of 2023, the University of Michigan established the Raoul Wallenberg Institute with the mission of “studying hatred directed against religious and ethnic communities, fostering cross-cultural understanding, and elevating civic discourse. Through teaching, research, and public engagement, the institute will develop strategies to combat antisemitism, divisiveness, and discrimination.”
What impact will it have on the campus as a collective body? Or will this all fade away into a nothingburger with Ono’s departure?
The University has many faculty members who are vocally anti-Israel. It was evident when, on October 11, 2023, over 1000 faculty and graduate students signed an open letter criticizing University President Santa Ono’s concern for Israel, and without mentioning Hamas, blamed the “violence” of October 7th on Israel’s systemic apartheid state. (The letter has recently been deleted on Google Drive. Luckily, I attained a pdf of the letter with all the signatories thanks to one of my sources,)
Just ask Regent Jordan Acker about how the anti-Israel bias persists within the University Faculty Senate and how slow they were to react when his home and business were vandalized three times in 2024.
I still would like to be the one to uncover what it’s like to be Jewish, or just someone who disagrees with the agenda put out by these faculty members when enrolled in their classes.
Are Jewish students or those who go against the woke grain continued to be shunned and shut out of organizational life on campus? Because I know this is happening to Jewish professionals in the real world, who are being quietly omitted from library and museum boards and other community organizations.
The story is out there. And I still want to cover it.
Stacy Gittleman is an award-winning freelance journalist and contributing writer to Downtown Publications and Birmingham Lifestyle magazine. Her work has also appeared in The Forward and The Times of Israel.
Follow her now on Substack at LaKoom, where she aims to publish more Jewish news and highlight stories of American Jews who are taking a stand against antisemitism as Gittleman strikes out on her own on Substack.
This guest essay was brought to you by Toni Airaksinen, Senior Editor of Liberty Affair and a journalist based in Boca Raton, Florida. Follow her on X @Toni_Airaksinen, and on Instagram, and read how to support her trip to Jerusalem here.
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Stacy, I am horrified and disgusted that this happened to you. Something is deeply rotten in American Jewish institutions, and the fact that they exploited you for this long only to turn on you for having the audacity to be a proud Zionist Jew… I’m flabbergasted. I appreciate that you don’t harbor ill will and I think that is a clear testament to how levelheaded and professional you are, but they should be absolutely ashamed of themselves. A fucking shanda
This is so well documented and I hope your voice can still be heard Stacy. I was disappointed that your complainant was not rigourously investigated before you were removed. Bit of a bad smell there.