Dear 2024-2025 Pulitzer Prize Board,

We, the undersigned, are deeply concerned by your decision to award a Pulitzer Prize in Commentary to Mosab Abu Toha, who has repeatedly denied the humanity of Israelis taken hostage during the attacks of October 7, 2023 on social media, justified their abduction, and disparaged calls for their release.

While Abu Toha has since deleted some of his most egregious social media posts, you will find at the bottom of this letter some screenshots. In two cases, Abu Toha insists that young Israeli women who were violently abducted on October 7, 2023, are not in fact “hostages,” but killers — simply because they served in the Israeli military, as nearly every Israeli is required to do. 

In another since-deleted post, Abu Toha ridiculed news organizations for covering the murder in captivity of Shiri Bibas and her two young children. In a not-yet-deleted post on X, Abu Toha encouraged his followers to doubt that Israeli hostages had been tortured during their captivity in Gaza. Finally, more than a year after Hamas’s false claim of an Israeli airstrike on a Gaza hospital was widely debunked, Abu Toha continues to peddle that claim.

We amplify the words of freed Israeli hostage Emily Damari, who survived 471 days in Hamas captivity, during which she suffered physical and emotional torture and starvation:

“You claim to honor journalism that upholds truth, democracy, and human dignity. And yet you have chosen to elevate a voice that denies truth, erases victims, and desecrates the memory of the murdered. Do you not see what this means? Mosab Abu Toha is not a courageous writer. He is the modern-day equivalent of a Holocaust denier. And by honoring him, you have joined him in the shadows of denial. This is not a question of politics. This is a question of humanity. And today, you have failed it.”

Had Abu Toha dehumanized any other people — or justified a terrorist attack on any other nation — it is doubtful that the Pulitzer Prize Board would have considered him for the most esteemed prize in journalism and literature. Certainly, an Israeli author who dehumanized innocent Palestinians in Gaza would — justifiably — not be awarded a Pulitzer Prize.

We call on the Pulitzer Prize Board to rescind the 2025 Prize for Commentary awarded to Mosab Abu Toha, and to include a more careful examination of an author’s social media posts before awarding future prizes.

Dr. Marcy Gringlas

President and co-founder, Seed the Dream Foundation

Co-founder, I Believe Israeli Women Global Movement

Meredith Jacobs

CEO, Jewish Women International

Co-founder, I Believe Israeli Women Global Movement

Former editor-in-chief of the Washington Jewish Week

Signed:

Yardena Schwartz

Award-winning journalist and author

Yaakov Katz

Former editor-in-chief, Jerusalem Post

Natalia Mehlman Petrzela

Columnist, MSNBC

Professor of History, The New School

Emily Schrader

Anchor, ILTV News

Emily Fox Kaplan

Journalist

Laura E. Adkins

Former opinion editor, the Forward

Associate vice president, Jewish Women International

Paul Ehrlich

Journalist

Dahlia Lithwick

Legal correspondent and New York Times Bestselling Author, “Lady Justice”

Yossi Klein Halevi

New York Times best-selling author, “Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor”

Zibby Owens

Best-selling author and CEO, Zibby Media

David Suissa

Publisher and editor-in-chief, Jewish Journal

Elisa Albert

Award-winning author

Susan Blumberg-Kason

Author

Josh Feldman

Journalist 

 

Rotem Alima

Academy Award-winning film and television producer

Gregory Brown

Professor of History, University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Rachel Foster

Co-founder and executive council chair,

World Without Exploitation


Sara Fruman

Founder, Soul Evolution Media

Toby Graff

President, Graff Group

Lauren Hersh 

Human rights attorney

Matthew Hiltzik

President and CEO, Hiltzik Strategies

Justin Kron

Producer, Hope in the Holy Land

Deborah Marcus

Foundation executive, Creative Artists Agency

Jane Manning

Attorney and advocate for survivors of sexual assault

John Ondrasik

Five for Fighting

Lindsay Pinchuk

Founder and CEO, Dear FoundHer

Jonah Platt

Host and creator, Being Jewish podcast

Golan Ramraz

Writer and producer, EGX Film Factory

Orly Ravid

Entertainment Lawyer / Professor

Mimi Rocah

Legal commentator and former District Attorney

for Westchester County, New York

Jay Schweid

Owner / CEO, ephelants/Village

Pamela Sherman

Board member, Jewish Women International

Stephen Smith

CEO, Memory Workers

Keetgi Kogan Steinberg

Writer and producer 

Maya Sigel

Production designer

Jasmine Stodel

Film producer and director

Ellen Stone

Marketing Executive

Vera Wagman

Producer and director

Rebecca Windsor 

Artist development consultant

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