THE NEW YORK TIMES And the Holocaust
By NYO Staff 5/23/05 1It’s always interesting when a powerful institution takes a public look at itself. Last Sunday, The New York Times published a review of Buried by The Times: The Holocaust and America’s Most Important Newspaper, a book by journalist Laurel Leff, which details how The Times skirted the issue of the Holocaust during the early 1940′s, even as it was becoming more and more known that the Nazis were singling out Jews for mass murder. While The Times’ shameful delinquency on this front has been known and acknowledged by those within and outside the paper, the review is defensive in tone and works hard to discredit Ms. Leff’s point of view.
While the events of 60 years ago in no way implicate the current generation of Times owners and editors, the Holocaust wasn’t a proud moment in the newspaper’s history, and it’s shocking to consider, when other tragedies received careful analysis and reporting, how far off The Times’ radar screen the Holocaust remained. The publisher at the time, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, and his family were members of the “our crowd” German Jews in this country, and they didn’t want to alienate the powers that be in government and business. So questions of Jewish identity were often diluted in the paper’s pages, lest the Sulzbergers be seen as being on the “pro-Jewish” side. A conscious decision was made from the top to downplay stories which might give the impression that The Times was a “Jewish newspaper.” The editorial page mostly avoided mentioning Jews as specific victims of Nazi horrors; as reported in The Trust, a book by Susan Tifft and Alex Jones on The Times, the paper referred to those involved in the Warsaw ghetto uprising as “the Poles” and “Warsaw patriots.” Other examples: Stories in 1943 about the massacre of Jews in Italy and Austria didn’t make it on to page 1. The following summer, The Times reported that 400,000 Hungarian Jews had already been sent to their deaths and 350,000 more were about to follow them-but the story was hidden, given only four column inches on page 12. Sulzberger was also very much against the Zionist movement and opposed the creation of the state of Israel
