New York Times Puts Out Swastika-Shaped Crossword On First Night Of Hanukkah

The New York Times puts out a lot of crossword puzzles every year, but one they put out over the weekend is getting attention for all the wrong reasons.

The Times' unveiled a recent puzzle that looked startlingly like a swastika. That's bad any way you slice it. What made it mind-bogglingly worse was that it rolled out on the first day of Hanukkah.

Assuming the swastika crossword puzzle was a random occurrence it had a 1/365 chance of happening on the first day of Hanukkah. It had a 357/365 chance of avoiding Hanukkah altogether, yet somehow the Times still managed to make a massive mistake.

Plus, this is bad any day of the year. If it happened in August people would still talk about it. But to inadvertently put out a swastika-shaped puzzle during Hannukah with antisemitism very much in the news cycle is a huge mistake.

Maybe the person whose job it was to catch this sort of thing was still on strike?

Actually, he wasn't.

That person was puzzle editor Will Shortz. A puzzle editor so famous he once voiced himself on an episode of The Simpsons.

How he and Ryan McCreary — who wrote the puzzle — never noticed this is beyond me. Maybe they were so caught up in writing clues that would sail over the average person's head, that they didn't realize they had drawn one of the most infamous symbols in human history.

How Did They Not Catch A Swastika-Shaped Crossword Puzzle?

Perhaps their argument would be they didn't notice it because they weren't looking for a swastika. That's not a great argument though, because no one short of a massive psycho cracks open The New York Times crossword and searches for a swastika in the crossword.

This was was just obvious so people saw it. People like Donald Trump Jr.

Don Jr. is right that had this happened to any other publication, the New York Times would not give them the benefit of the doubt.

You've got to let rational thought prevail and accept that there's no way this was intentional.

There's a lot that can be said about the New York Times, but it's not staffed by a cadre of raging antisemites. However, that makes the fact that they made this mistake on the first night of Hannukah all the more head-scratching.

Don't expect a groveling apology like the kind woke outlets like The Times demand from others in unfortunate instances like this.

As is pretty common for individuals and organizations who champion woke ideologies, it's typically "do as I say, not as I do."

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