From The Washington Post
During World War II, most Americans didn't pay much attention to what we now call the Holocaust. Many knew that the Nazi regime was persecuting and murdering Jews in Europe, but few had an overall grasp of the scope and nature of that genocide. In Buried by the Times, Laurel Leff puts under the microscope the coverage given to the Holocaust in the New York Times during the war. She reports that while there was, on average, a Holocaust-related story every other day, only a few dozen of those stories made the front page. Moreover, Jews were often described as "among" the Nazis' victims rather than as their primary victims. By thus "burying" the Holocaust, she charges, the Times sabotaged efforts to rouse the American public -- efforts which, had they been successful, might have produced an effective rescue program.
The tone of Leff's account is one of unremitting outrage. When the Times fails to report any Holocaust-related event, she is outraged. If the paper reports on it, she's outraged that the report isn't on the front page. When a Holocaust story is on the front page, she complains that it isn't high enough on the front page. When there is no editorial on some Holocaust-related subject, she is outraged, and if there is an editorial, she's outraged that it isn't the lead editorial. She is regularly outraged when either reportage or commentary, wherever placed, mentions not Jews alone but other victims as well. When one item made clear that a majority of those killed at a certain locale were Jews, she complains that this was noted "only once" in the story. All of this is so over-the-top as to verge on self-parody.
Other writers have offered various explanations for the failure of the American press to feature the Holocaust more prominently during the war. Sources were scanty, not always reliable, and often contradictory. Americans' attention was focused on battle zones where American troops were engaged. And there was sometimes a calculated reason for deemphasizing special Jewish victimhood. Americans were far more focused on the Japanese than on the German enemy ("Remember Pearl Harbor"). That the Nazis were the enemy of the Jews was well known; the task was to portray Nazi Germany as the mortal enemy of "free men everywhere." Hence the (sometimes exaggerated) emphasis on other victims. And, given continued high levels of anti-Semitism in the United States, not emphasizing Hitler's war against the Jews was an attempt to sidestep the claim that America was engaged in a war for the Jews.
Leff notes these and other explanations but finds them inadequate. For her, the keys to the Times's failure to live up to its journalistic obligations were the character and mindset of its publisher, Arthur Hays Sulzberger. Sulzberger was a Jew of a sort now rare: a believer in the classical Reform position that Jewishness means solely religious belief -- not ethnic "peoplehood." His political loyalties were strictly American, his sensibility was liberal and universalist, and he was an opponent of the campaign for a Jewish state in Palestine. And he didn't want the Times to become -- or seem to be -- a spokesman for any parochial Jewish concern. Therefore, according to Leff, he bent over backward to deny the specificity of Jewish victimhood, refused to allow the Times to give prominent notice of the Holocaust and withheld support for rescue programs that focused on European Jewry.
This argument is not completely wrongheaded. All of us are pulled this way and that by our ways of seeing the world, and surely this was true of Sulzberger. But the great difficulty with blaming the behavior of the Times on the particularities of Sulzberger's belief system is that so many others -- Jews and gentiles, universalists and particularists, Zionists and anti-Zionists -- behaved more or less identically. Yehuda Bauer, a leading Israeli Holocaust scholar, writes that the wartime Palestinian press would "go into ecstasies about some local party-political affair, while the murder of the Jews of Europe is reported only in the inside pages." In the United States the Zionist Jewish Frontier warned against forgetting "what was done to the Czechs, the Poles, the Jews, the Russians." Universalizing the portrayal of Nazi barbarism was a common strategy to discredit the idea that the war against Nazi Germany was a war for the Jews. One can argue, as Leff does, that this concern was exaggerated, but if ever a strategy was "well meant," this was it.
Buried by the Times offers a good deal of interesting information about Times coverage of the Holocaust -- although the reader should be wary of paraphrases and truncated quotations that are sometimes tendentious. But those who would like to understand the reasons behind the Times coverage will have to await a chronicler less consumed by prosecutorial zeal.
Reviewed by Peter Novick
Copyright 2005, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.
Review
"...[an] important book..."
-New York Post
"...excellent..."
-Commentary Magazine
"Laurel Leff has written an exceptional study of one of the darkest failures of the New York Times--its non-coverage of the holocaust during World War II. How could the best newspaper in the United States, perhaps in the world, under-estimate and under-report the mass killing of more than 6,000,000 Jews? Read this book, which provides answers and in the process stands tall in scholarship, style and importance."
-Marvin Kalb, Senior Fellow at Harvard's Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy
"Laurel Leff[...]has done a fine job...[a] wonderful book..."
-New York Daily News
"...impressive..."
-The New York Times
"This is the best book yet about American media coverage of the Holocaust, as well as an extremely important contribution to our understanding of America's response to the mass murder of the Jews."
-David S. Wyman, author of The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust
"This important book answers--in a compelling fashion--some of the questions which have long been asked about the New York Times' coverage of the Holocaust. Probing far behind the headlines, Leff tells the fascinating story of how the Sulzberger family was rescuing its relatives from Germany at the same time that it was burying the story of the Holocaust in the inner recesses of the paper."
-Deborah E. Lipstadt, author of Beyond Belief: The American Press and the Coming of the Holocaust
"Laurel Leff has written an engrossing and important book about the abject failure of the world's most influential newspaper, The New York Times, to report on the Holocaust its owner and key figures knew was occurring. Her book tells us much about America at the time, the level of anti-Semitism, and the assimilationist desire of the Jewish owner of the Times to avoid stressing the unique Jewish nature of the genocide. It is part and parcel with the same mindset of the Roosevelt Administration. One can only wonder in great sorrow at how many lives might have been saved if the nation's and world's conscience had been touched by full and complete coverage by the Times of what remains the greatest crime of world history."
-Stuart E. Eizenstat, former senior official in the Clinton Administration and the Special Representative of President Clinton on Holocaust-Era Issues. Author of Imperfect Justice: Looted Assets, Slave Labor and the Unfinished Business of World War II
"...skilfully[...]written, researched, and analyzed..."
-New Haven Advocate
"A complicated important look back."
-The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
"This is a well-researched and well-written book."
-Haim Genizi, The Journal of American History
"Buried by the Times is admirably relentless."
-Ron Hollander, Montclair State University, American Jewish History
See all Editorial Reviews
by Peter Novick
by Arthur D. Morse
