NEW YORK, NY — The writer, Jazmine Hughes, who has won awards for her work, had signed another letter of protest this year.
Jazmine Hughes, an award-winning New York Times Magazine staff writer, resigned from the publication on Friday after she violated the newsroom’s policies by signing a letter that voiced support for Palestinians and protested Israel’s siege in Gaza.
Jake Silverstein, the editor of The New York Times Magazine, announced Hughes’s resignation in an email to staff members on Friday evening.
“While I respect that she has strong convictions, this was a clear violation of The Times’s policy on public protest,” Silverstein wrote. “This policy, which I fully support, is an important part of our commitment to independence.”
Silverstein said Hughes had previously violated the policy by signing another public letter this year. That letter, which was also signed by other contributors to The Times, protested the newspaper’s reporting on transgender issues.
“She and I discussed that her desire to stake out this kind of public position and join in public protests isn’t compatible with being a journalist at The Times, and we both came to the conclusion that she should resign,” Silverstein wrote in his note on Friday.
Hughes declined to comment. A Times spokeswoman had no further comment.
Hughes joined The Times in 2015 and worked as an editor and writer for the magazine. In 2020, she won an American Society of Magazine Editors Next award for journalists under 30. This year, she won a National Magazine Award for profile writing, for articles on Viola Davis and Whoopi Goldberg.
The petition Hughes signed about the Israel-Hamas war was published online last week by a group called Writers Against the War on Gaza. The group, which describes itself as “an ad hoc coalition committed to solidarity and the horizon of liberation for the Palestinian people,” denounced what it described as Israel’s “eliminationist assault” on Palestinians as well as the deaths of journalists reporting on the war. It was signed by hundreds of people, including other well-known journalists and authors.
“We stand firmly by Gaza’s people,” the letter said.
On Friday, a contributing writer at the magazine who had also signed the letter, Jamie Lauren Keiles, said in a post on X that he would no longer contribute to the publication. He said it was “a personal decision about what kind of work I want to be able to do.”
