A Despicable Smear: Trying to Discredit a Times   Columnist’s Reporting by Maligning His Father

By Mark Weber
May 20, 2026

Nicholas Kristof, a prominent New York Times columnist and author, has come under furious criticism from Jewish-Zionist groups and the Israeli government for a recent column, “The Silence that Meets the Rape of Palestinians,” which describes torture and sexual abuse of Palestinian prisoners by Israeli authorities. Kristof and the Times are accused of perpetrating an anti-Semitic “blood libel.”

The intense campaign to discredit Kristof’s reporting has included efforts to malign his father, who died in 2010. Ira Stoll – a prolific and influential Jewish-Zionist writer – his made his contribution with a “hit piece” that seeks to discredit the Times columnist by suggesting that his father was a “Nazi” or a “Nazi sympathizer,” or at least a man of dubious morality. Titled “Times Columnist Kristof’s Father Fought on Nazi Side in World War II”, it is published by the Washington Free Beacon. Stoll’s most damning assertion, apparently, is this: “The disclosure that Kristof’s father served in the Romanian military on the Nazi side may help to explain why Kristof would be so eager to demonize Israel in particular when prison abuse cases are plentiful worldwide, and especially in New York.” An Israeli news outlet, Israel 365 News, echoed Stoll’s charge in an item titled “The Man who wrote a blood libel against Israel had a father who fought for the Nazis”. The author, Zahava Schwartz, concludes with the words: “The apple, it seems, did not fall far from the tree.”

What Stoll and Schwartz wrote is not just unfair. In fact, the truth is nearly the opposite of what they suggest.

At the age of 22 or 23, Władysław Krzysztofowicz (or Ladislas Kristofovici) – a multi-lingual young Romanian citizen of Polish-Armenian ancestry – was drafted into the Romanian army, which fought with Germany and other European countries in World War II. He served for about two years as an interpreter and courier. There is no evidence that he ever committed any crimes, or was involved in persecution or oppression of Jews. The young man’s sympathies were actually with the Allies, and for a time he was imprisoned for spying on behalf of the Allies.

In the aftermath of the war, he fled the Soviets and found refuge in the US, where he “Americanized” his name to the much more easily understood “Ladis Kristof.” In his new homeland he first worked at a logging camp in Oregon, and then began a career as an educator and later also as a farmer.

I knew Ladis Kristof as a student at Portland State University during the 1970s. I first met him in classes he taught on the history of the Soviet Union, and on Marxism and Communism. I got to know him much better outside of class in memorable conversations at his office. I remember him as a conscientious and patient educator, and as a decent and friendly man. I have always been grateful to him as one of three PSU professors who arranged a fellowship for me as a graduate student at Indiana University.

Prof. Kristof very much admired the US of the 1950s and 1960s, which had welcomed him and where he was able to make a new and successful life. His political outlook was rather liberal. For example, he was a co-founder of the Portland chapter of Amnesty International. His disdain for Communism and Soviet rule was more than merely intellectual. The Soviets seized his family’s large estate, where he was born and grew up, when they brutally incorporated his northern Bukovina homeland into the USSR.

Attempts to discredit an accusation by attacking the character of the person making the charge, rather than by dealing with the substance of the claim itself, is universally regarded as unconvincing and unfair. In this case, attempts to counter serious accusations with malicious and meritless ad hominem attacks against someone’s dead father are more than plainly unjust – they are despicable. It’s no wonder that Israel and its supporters have been losing support across the US and around the world.