[12] In November 1937, the Gestapo (the secret police of Nazi Germany) closed JTA's Berlin bureau, charging it with "endangering public safety and order.

[14] Although designed to appear like a normal news agency, it was in fact secretly funded by the British intelligence service MI6.

[15] ONA provided press credentials to British spies, and planted fake news stories in US newspapers.

[8][12] Today, it has correspondents in Washington, DC, Jerusalem, Moscow, and 30 other cities in North and South America, Israel, Europe, Africa, and Australia.

[26][27] Lillie Shultz, later a journalist and the chief administrative officer of the American Jewish Congress, was a staff member of the JTA in the early 1930s.

[30] In January 2020, Philissa Cramer, co-founder and editor-at-large of nonprofit news organization Chalkbeat was named JTA's editor-in-chief.

Cramer replaced Andy Silow-Carroll, who took the same post at New York Jewish Week in mid-2019 after three years at the helm.

[35] In 1933, Nobel Prize winner Albert Einstein said in a speech at a dinner in his honor that the JTA was "very close to my heart", and that the JTA was keeping the public objectively informed about the lot of the Jews all countries: "in a graphic and objective manner, and in so doing it has performed an important service ..."[45] In March 1942, in connection with its 25th anniversary the JTA received congratulatory messages from U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt ("I trust through long decades to come that this medium of information will serve the world with fidelity and courage by the widest possible dissemination of the truth"), and U.S. Secretary of War Henry Stimson, British Ambassador Lord Halifax, Director of the U.S. Office of War Department of Facts and Figures Archibald MacLeish, Director of the U.S. Office of Government Reports Lowell Mellett, and Benjamin V. Cohen of the U.S. National Power Policy Committee.