Buried by the Times: The Holocaust and America's Most Important Newspaper (Hardcover)

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Key Phrases: assistant night managing editor, bullpen editors, reprisal stories, New York, Arthur Sulzberger, United States (more...)

Editorial Reviews

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

Product Details

• Hardcover: 442 pages
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press (March 21, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0521812879
• ISBN-13: 978-0521812870
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #725,085 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

32 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars It doesn't surprise me, April 28, 2005

By	David E. Levine (Peekskill , NY USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

I was turned on to this book by a friend and when I next saw him, he asked me, refering to the author Laurel Leff's revelations, "did you know that?" I answered that I didn't know that the Times had basically hidden the news of the holocaust but, on the other hand, finding this out didn't surprise me. Sulzberger was an assimilated Jew, the descendent of Rabbi Steven Wise, a renowned Reform Rabbi whose theology was very assimilationist. Thus, despite his Jewishness, the Times rarely ran a major story about what was going on in the concentration camps and the stories that were written were not positioned in a prominent place. If they made the front page, it would not be postioned as the lead story.

Incredibly, the coverage of the holocaust did not mention "Jews" specifically. By reading the Times, you would not have known the extent of the genocide nor would you have known that Jews were the major target of the Nazi extermination efforts. It is important to note that there was never a "smoking gun" uncovered, i.e., a memo or written directive from Sulzberger ordering the staff of the Times to soft pedal the events in the concentration camps. What is beyond dispute is that the Sulzberger family was secular and did not view Jews as a people. What is further beyond dispute is that the coverage by the Times was scant. Thus, whether by directive or not, the Times failed miserably in its role as "journal of record," making a mockery of its motto "all the news that's fit to print. What is particularly reprehensible is that members of the Sulzberger family were being rescued while the details of the holocaust were being quashed.

The Times, could have been influential but, tragically, it failed to exercise it's influence. Roosevelt basically looked the other way and, in sadness, we can only wonder whether he could have withstood the pressure and continued to do little if the Times had fully covered the events. Back then the Times obviously had an agenda and today, it still does. There was daily coverage of the Abu Ghraib prison abuses with one breathless headline after another. That was the more recent Times' agenda, specifically, to discredit the efforts in Iraq, particularly in an election year when the events there might have been a campaign issue. Tragically, there were no such breathless headlines during the darkest hours of the holocaust.

39 of 48 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good research but...., April 4, 2005

By	J. Adams "History buff" (Washington, DC USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This is a very good book about how the New York Times family owners purposefully avoided dealing with the issue of anti-Semitism in Europe, and particularly Nazi Germany, while at the same time the Sulzberger family did everything it could to get its relatives out before the deluge. Laurel Leff has done a masterful job of showing how the Sulzberger clan became complicit in one of the darkest chapters in human history by not using the power of the paper to expose the real nature of the evil that Nazism was. Of course she does address the fact that anti-Semitism was not just a German issue, but from my perspective she does not go into enough detail about the extent of anti-Semitism in the US, and particularly major movers and shakers such as Joseph Kennedy who hated Jews so much that he always referred to them as "kikes" and opposed any action by the Roosevelt administration to educate the American public about the threat to Western civilization, even though he was ambassador to the Court of St. James at the time.
But the problem with this book is that it focuses on the Times as if it somehow committed this sin for the first time in misleading the American public. I agree with her thesis that the Times has been hoisted as the most influential paper in the world among lazy elites, including those who have reviewed her book, but that is rapidly changing now, primarily due to the fact that the paper has failed so miserably in many areas, including the latest diversions of small change like Jason Blair. But the biggest holocaust of the last century did not occur in the ovens built by the Nazis, it was committed in the Ukraine when Stalin's forced collectivization starved far more Ukrainians to death than Hitler killed with his Zyklon-B. And the Times had a reporter, Walter Duranty, in Moscow at the time who won a Pulitzer Prize for mis-reporting this horror. Duranty was "Stalin's apologist" in many ways, dismissing honest reporters who covered the biggest holocaust as "overwrought" when they filed stories about the millions murdered by Stalin, filing stories about the "show trials" of Stalin as if they were legitimate trials that led to the deaths of millions more, and many other atrocities. Most serious scholars now have to acknowledge that the starvation of 8 million Ukrainians was not just an "unintentional consequence" of collectivization, and it really remains the NY Times most outrageous attack on the truth, the Nazi death camps notwithstanding. There are many stories in the NY Times that reveal the lie that is it's masthead of "All the news that's fit to print." The Times fought mightily to keep Duranty's prize last year when serious reporters wanted to take it away because it was gained by fraudulent means. Of course the paper has done a great job of condemning the awarding of Olympic medals by drug-enhanced athletes, but can't see the hypocrisy of its own efforts to keep Duranty's decades of duplicity being rewarded with a Pulitzer.
I recommend this book because it shows the hypocrisy of the Sulzberger clan in dealing with Hitler's "final solution" but it is not the biggest sin committed by this paper in miseducating the people it supposedly serves.

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A major contribution to Holocaust studies and to an understanding of journalism, July 1, 2005

By	Jonathan Groner (Washington, DC) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Laurel Leff has provided not only an exhaustively researched account of the New York Times' coverage of the Holocaust, but also a nuanced account of how newspapers make decisions on the placement of news items. She shows how the failure of the nation's most important newspaper to recognize the importance of the Holocaust while it was occurring was in part traceable to the fact that those making the decisions on Page One play were lower-level editors without much clout. So they simply did what had always been done, and downplayed the importance of the Jews' suffering. Her portrayal of Publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger's anti-Zionist leanings and connections also breaks new ground. This book is must reading for anyone interested in the history of America in the 1940s and for any student, professional or amateur, of American journalism. This goes far beyond the usual, cliched critique of the Times or other papers as being "biased" in one way or another. Leff also has a fine sense of style and tremendous command of her material.