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