THE NEW YORK TIMES has been dissing the Pharisees and Philologos calls them out on it in The Forward:

The New York Times: Ignorant and Antisemitic?

On Language

By Philologos
Published July 29, 2009, issue of August 07, 2009.

‘Pharisees on the Potomac” is the headline from a July 18 attack by New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd on what she considers to be the moral hypocrisy — “the ancient political art of Tartuffery,” as she calls it — of Republican Party leaders on Capitol Hill.

Let’s stay away from politics. Let’s even stay away from Maureen Dowd, being it’s likely that her column’s headline was written by the editors of the Times’ op-ed page rather than by the columnist herself. Headlines of newspaper and magazine articles are generally an editorial prerogative.

Let’s stick to the word “Pharisee” in its common English sense of a hypocrite who preaches morality to others without practicing it himself. Is this a usage Jews should be up in arms about? Should we be bombarding The New York Times, and others who resort to it, with our protests?

There certainly would seem to be good reasons for doing so. After all, the Pharisees were not just another ancient sect of Jews, like the Sadducees, Essenes and Zealots, who lived toward the end of the Second Temple period; they were the founders of rabbinic tradition and the direct spiritual and intellectual ancestors of the rabbis of the Mishnah and the Talmud who came after them — that is, of normative halachic Judaism as we know it. To perpetuate the English language’s equation of them with self-righteous hypocrites is to perpetuate the belief that Judaism is a self-righteous and hypocritical religion.

Philogos concludes that such usages should be challenged and I agree. One nitpick, though:

The original source of this belief is, of course, Jesus’ remarks about the Pharisees in the New Testament — remarks that owe no small part of their venom to the fact that Jesus was a maverick Pharisee himself who shared many of the Pharisees’ assumptions and values. We rebel most strongly against our own predecessors, and when Jesus is quoted as saying things like, “Now you Pharisees cleanse the outside of the cup and of the dish, but inside you are full of extortion and wickedness… you tithe mint and rue and every herb, and neglect justice and the love of God,” he is venting his anger and disappointment on those to whom he is religiously closest. A loyal Jew in his fashion, it never would have occurred to him that such statements would form the basis of rabid anti-Jewish sentiments in a new religion he had no intention of founding.

[...]

We know very little about the Pharisees: they are mentioned in the New Testament and by Josephus, both of which have their own not-entirely-reliable agendas. And we can squeeze some more information from the earliest stratum of the oral traditions of the Mishnah, but that still doesn't add up to a complete or clear picture. So it is not at all clear that Jesus was "a maverick Pharisee" or any kind of Pharisee. But the point Philologos is making is valid in a more general sense: Jesus (and also his first-generation followers who transmitted and likely augmented these sayings) was a first-century Jew who shared a great many assumptions with his opponents, who was engaged in an internal dialogue with them, and who would have been horrified at the use later made of these sayings about the Pharisees.