Whenever I do a speaking engagement, it's not unusual for someone to ask me, "Why do you think they printed that article?"

"They" is invariably the New York Times, and "that article" is usually a Times piece that has addressed a Jewish topic in a way that has discomfited my interlocutor. And there have been a few doozies in the past year or so, just in The New York Times Magazine alone. There was James Traub's takedown of Anti-Defamation League chief Abe Foxman. (It suggested he looked like "a Cadillac-driving ward-heeler out of Saul Bellow" — not exactly inaccurate, but not the kind of thing you'd want said of a Major Jewish Leader.) Zev Chafets recently wrote about Israeli diamond mogul Lev Leviev, and profiled Brooklyn's (and Deal's) Syrian-Jewish community. Last month saw an ode to the disappearing kosher deli. And then there was Noah Feldman's pre-Tisha B'Av essay about his hurt and confusion at being ostracized by his former yeshiva for marrying a non-Jew.

The buzz around each of these articles (okay, maybe not the deli one) was swift and heated. Bloggers suggested they reflected animus — and even malpractice — on the part of the editors. JTA managing editor Ami Eden (who wrote about the Times at his terrific new blog and inspired this response) notes a groaner in Traub's profile of Foxman. Traub suggests that Foxman upset many of his colleagues by cozying up to the religious right in return for their support of Israel. In fact, as Eden points out, Foxman's loudest critics complain "that the ADL leader spends too much time bashing religious conservatives."

But when Eden asks, "Does the NYT Magazine have a Jewish problem?" he's not just talking about the facts, but the message. The Foxman and Feldman articles, he writes, "contained a Jews-should-get-over-it-already bias: Traub's piece was a critique of Abe Foxman's crying 'gevalt' over anti-Semitism, with the underlying message that the Jewish community in general needs to stop stifling debate on Israel…. Feldman portrayed any effort by Orthodox institutions to uphold a communal taboo against intermarriage as a primitive obstacle to 'reconciling the vastly disparate values of tradition and modernity.'"

It's a sophisticated analysis of "bias," shades more nuanced than the typical complaint that the Times' Jewish owners are "self-hating" and its writers just hating. And it forced me to think more deeply about the "Why do you think they printed that article?" question.

It is, first of all, no surprise that the Times Magazine devotes a lot of space to the Jewish Question. The magazine is writing to its audience. Had history and circumstances been different and had the nation's cultural, financial, and fashion powers set up shop in Minnesota, the country's Paper of Record would be published out of Minneapolis and obsessed with the ways of Lutherans.

Do the articles I mention suggest a "Jewish problem"? I know Chafets' two articles left some people uncomfortable. The individuals he profiled reflected traits of the Jewish community that a lot of us would prefer not be fanned out before the gentiles. Leviev, as Chafets describes him, is a largely unlettered Uzbek immigrant to Israel who made an untold fortune by breaking the back of the South African diamond cartel — only, interviewees tell Chafets, to cut his own deals with African despots. Chafets also describes how Leviev largely bankrolls the outreach activities in the former Soviet Union of Chabad, which, Chafets tells us, is "anti-abortion, regards homosexuality as a sexual perversion, and generally finds itself aligned with other fundamentalist religious groups on American domestic issues."

The article on the Syrian-Jewish community focused on the rabbinic "Edict" that prevents intermarriage — in fact, marriage even to a convert to Judaism — under threat of community ostracism. Chafets captures the deep sense of loyalty, tradition, and mutual support that animates the Syrian community but left the impression of a group seriously at odds with modernity.

In fact, if you look at all of the articles above, they focus on an Orthodox or traditionalist subculture. And, taken as a whole, they suggest a clash between authors who fully embrace liberal, Western, post-tribal values and subjects that have one foot back in the shtetl, the Levant, or, in Foxman's case, the displaced persons camp.

Publications are ultimately the creations of individuals (or as the Russian proverb has it, the fish rots from the head). And without interviewing the editors or sitting in on their editorial meetings, we can't really know their predilections and biases (and I don't mean prejudices, although they may have them too — I mean bias in the sense of enthusiasms, which give any publication a distinctive voice for good or bad).

But the articles suggest to me that the Times Magazine is a milieu of Jewish intellectuals, or non-Jews who are deep within a Jewish intellectual milieu. They have been raised in or influenced by a cultural climate that may be proudly Jewish but remains largely secular in practice and liberal in politics. They pine for the kosher deli — Jewish but not religious, cozily ethnic but with no ritual obligations, singular but not parochial.

In this the articles reflect, accurately, a fundamental trend within the Jewish world. The most intensely engaged Jews and their leaders are indeed becoming less ethnic and more religious, less broadly intellectual and more parochial in their concerns, less liberal and more conservative, less universal and more inward-focused.

And the articles seem to suggest a struggle to understand — and in some ways, withstand — this trend. We can question why "they" run them, but we shouldn't ignore the questions they are asking.