The journalist board of the nonprofit news site Shtetl, as seen on June 20, 2025, resigned over the site founder’s changing vision. (Screenshot)
(JTA) — The three journalists who comprised the board of a news site founded to provide accountability in Orthodox Jewish communities have resigned en masse after learning that the site’s founder had renounced the mission.
Larry Cohler-Esses, Adelle Goldenberg and Ari Goldman submitted their resignation from the board of Shtetl on Thursday in a letter to founder and CEO Naftuli Moster.
Moster is the founder of Yaffed, which stands for Young Advocates for Fair Education and pushes for stronger secular education standards at haredi Orthodox yeshivas. He left the group in 2022 and launched Shtetl, saying he believed there was a need for a “Haredi Free Press.”
But in a YouTube conversation that was released on Sunday, he revealed that he regretted both ventures, saying that he had grown distrustful of progressive politics and the motivations of some former allies, as well as concerned that his outspokenness harmed his many relatives who remain in the community.
In their resignation letter, the journalists said they had come on board because they had “admired” Moster’s work at Yaffed and shared his original vision for Shtetl but could not remain following his change of heart.
“The need for such a news source remains urgent,” they wrote. “However, now that your vision for Shtetl has changed so dramatically, we are reluctantly submitting our resignations. We hope that others, including the new leadership at Yaffed, will take up the mantle and continue the critical work of improving conditions for some of the most vulnerable members of the Haredi community.”
Cohler-Esses, a freelancer who worked for many years at The Forward, said in an email that he and the other board members had been recruited by Moster and held board meetings regularly. (Goldman is a former New York Times reporter who teaches at Columbia Journalism School and Goldenberg is a graduate student at Cornell University who grew up in a haredi community.) Writing on behalf of the group, he said they had been blindsided by Moster’s revelations, which they learned about from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency’s coverage.
“Naftuli’s change of heart, and apparently, worldview did come as a surprise. We didn’t know about this until his podcast interview with Frieda Vizel,” Cohler-Esses wrote.
“What we did know was that Shtetl confronted significant challenges to fulfilling its mission via its original business, financial and journalistic model. We held multiple board meetings with Naftuli to discuss this, and commissioned a consultant who submitted a 97-page report to us last February suggesting multiple alternative models for pursuing our mission,” he added. “We had no clue that our CEO, who proposed this consultant, no longer supported this mission.”
Moster said the resignation made sense to him. “It is entirely understandable. I don’t expect them to go along with my evolution,” he wrote in an email to JTA.
After its launch, Shtetl offered reports that pulled back the curtain on communities that can be insular, translating Yiddish-language advisories into English, revealing news about arrests and internal conflicts, and profile members who were seeking to make change. But in recent months, it all but ceased publication.
Moster said he continued to hold ambitions for the site’s future.
“I’m grateful to each of them for their investment of time and expertise to Shtetl 1.0,” Moster added about the board members. “As for Shtetl 2.0, we shall see. I hope to build it into something … positive and constructive.”
Following the publication of JTA’s article about him, Moster also offered additional insight into his change of heart, beyond the reasons he laid out on the YouTube conversation. He said Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel had also factored into his evolution.
“Anyone who follows me probably saw the major impact it had on me,” he wrote. “Seeing how progressive groups and far left individuals responded to that disgusted me and gave me the permission to speak out not only on that but also on other far left positions that I once bit my tongue about.”
He said the attacks Oct. 7, 2023 and the immediate spike of antisemitic incidents that followed gave him new insight into how Orthodox communities experienced a wave of violent attacks in 2019 and 2020, which happened at the same time that the fight over the “substantial equivalency” education rules that Yaffed sought was heating up in New York. (There was no evidence that any of the attackers was aware of or motivated by the issue.)
“In hindsight, it felt cruel that the community and their leaders had to be distracted with this while literally being slaughtered in supermarkets and synagogues,” Moster wrote. “This is where I feel the greatest regret.”
