Under-reporting by the New York Times on Nazi antisemitism, and the deliberate placement of such abridged stories deep inside the paper, had terrible consequences for the Jews of Europe. First, American Jews who relied on the Times for their information, in that pre-television era, had no clear idea of the extent of the antisemitic horrors being perpetrated, and how, as the Nazi war machine extended German rule over much of Europe, Jews trapped in those occupied lands were being systematically slaughtered – gassed in camps or mobile vans, shot, burned alive, worked deliberately to death — in the Endlosung, or Final Solution to the “Jewish problem.” Had they been better informed, and in a timelier fashion, American Jews — properly alarmed — would have made much greater efforts to rescue their relatives, and other Jews, too. They would have sent money, and money given to bribe the right rat in the right office might mean that life-saving visas could be acquired, both for exit and entrance. That money could also pay for transportation out of Nazi-occupied Europe, and for the services of passeurs who could smuggle Jews into such safe havens as Switzerland or Spain or Turkey. Such sums from America could prove useful for desperate Jews, too, in other ways — to pay for lodging, food, and transport – if they were on the run. Suppose that the New York Times had all through the 1930s, instead of scanting on its coverage of Jews in Germany, devoted many pages to their situation, culminating in Kristallnacht? Suppose the Times had reproduced the pages of Der Stürmer, published photographs of burned-out synagogues, reported on Jews who had been fired from their jobs, had their shops destroyed, were beaten to death on the streets of Berlin, Hamburg, Munich, Frankfurt, Nuremberg? What if the readers of the Times, the “newspaper of record,” had learned early on about the first camps that opened, at Dachau and Buchenwald? What if the Times publisher had been someone who thought the Nazi persecution and murder of Europe’s Jews was, after the world war itself, the most important story in the world, and did everything he could to make sure it was given the prominence it deserved? Between the outbreak of World War II, on September 3, 1939, and its end on September 2, 1945, there were 2,190 days. What if there had been a Times story about Europe’s Jews on every single one of those 2,190 days? Surely American Jews, and not only Jews, would have done much more, if they had been properly informed. They could have held rallies, raised money, pressured their Congressmen to open the gates to Jewish refugees – damn the peacetime quotas! — and made the rescue of Europe’s Jews, those that had not yet been killed, a central issue, a moral and political issue, a campaign issue.
Had more been known, and known earlier about the German murders, then many Jews (but not only Jews) in America would have gone all out to rally support in Washington, enlisting the aid of those who, such as Senator Robert Wagner of New York, already were aware of what was going on in Germany. The Roosevelt Administration might then have been persuaded to pressure the British, who knew they would need American aid and goodwill in the mighty contest to come, to end the their illegitimate blockade that prevented Jews from reaching Palestine. Had American Jews been better informed by the powerful New York Times, the paper they relied on, more of them might have mobilized their financial power, and found ways to send money to Jewish organizations in Europe, for distribution to those trying to escape. Some Jews might have evaded the British blockade and entered Palestine. It is too often forgotten that ships could still leave from the Rumanian port of Constanta, on the Black Sea, throughout the war. And money could ensure that harbor masters looked the other way as ships left their ports with their human cargo. Jews might then have made it, if they had the money to buy the right visas and to pay for that transport, all the way to North Africa, where Vichy French officials were not able to police the populace as easily as they did in France itself. It was possible for Jewish refugees to disappear from view in Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, where hundreds of thousands of Sephardic Jews lived and could help them. Franco’s Spain, though Fascist, was another place Jewish refugees would not be harmed, but they needed money both to buy their entry visas, and to live on while searching for work. Turkey was another possibility, a place where some Jews found refuge, and many more might have, had they had sufficient means for travel, entry visas, living expenses. The most famous German literary scholar of the 20th century, Erich Auerbach, a Jew who had fled Nazi Germany in 1935, wrote his masterpiece Mimesis while living securely in Istanbul during the war. Some Jews managed to get to Egypt, and from there they went through the Sinai Desert, by motorcar or horse or camel or even on foot, pedibus calcantibus, and made it — despite the British blockade — to Palestine.
All these conceivable avenues of escape required money, not just for transportation, and food and lodging while on the run, but always for bribes to the right rat in the right office who – for a price — could supply the right papers. Had the antisemitic attacks in Germany in the 1930s, and the first news of mass murdering of Jews in the camps, been fully reported on by the New York Times, American Jews would surely have raised huge sums and sent money to those in peril. Money could buy lives: the Cuban president, Federico Laredo Bru, who prevented the German Jews on the ship St. Louis from disembarking at Havana in May 1939, forcing the ship, with its Jewish passengers, to then try American and Canadian ports, where the ship was turned away. Ultimately the St. Louis returned to Germany, and the would-be refugees were imprisoned by the Nazis and many, of course, were then killed. The Cuban president might have changed his mind had he been offered enough money. And had the chorus of rage and pity for the refugees been heard loud enough in Washington, perhaps the St. Louis would have been permitted to dock at an American port, and its desperate human cargo permitted to disembark. But the Times did not make clear what the inexorable fate for those refugees would be; the chorus never became loud enough. Washington, shamefully, failed to act.
Second, the under-reporting of the Holocaust by the Times also affected official Washington. Few American politicians in the late 1930s realized the full extent of the antisemitic persecution by the Nazis. Had the antisemitic attacks, had Kristallnacht and then the beginning of the mass roundups for the camps been extensively covered, there might have been more calls from Congress to admit Jewish refugees. And those in the government who opposed the admission of Jewish refugees, who met with little opposition, could more effectively have been countered. Instead, the State Department’s Deputy Assistant Secretary of State, the antisemitic Breckenridge Long, who had been put in charge of all matters related to war refugees, did everything he could to prevent Jews from being admitted to the U.S. Ultimately, the effect of the immigration policies set by Long’s department was that, during American involvement in the war, ninety percent of the quota places available to immigrants from countries under German and Italian control were never filled. If they had been, an additional 190,000 people could have escaped the atrocities being committed by the Nazis. Had the New York Times reported fully and truthfully on the Nazi murders, it is even possible that political pressure from Congress would have forced the dismissal of Breckenridge Long, and thereby not just hundreds of thousands of Jews could have filled the refugee quotas for Germany and Italy that had been closed to them, but other Jews might have been helped by an American government now willing to expand its refugee program beyond the quotas set earlier, for those in the greatest peril – i.e., Jews in Europe. The American government might also have used its influence to persuade other countries in this hemisphere – Mexico, Brazil – to take in Jewish refugees. The Americans also could have used their ships to transport desperate refugees from European ports. In the Dominican Republic, where the dictator Rafael Trujillo said he would welcome Jews to the city of Sosua where, he believed, they would help build the country’s economy, only several thousand could take advantage of this offer; there were not enough vessels to transport the Jews eager to resettle.
The New York Times has never adequately examined its own role in reporting on the antisemitism of the 1930s and the mass-murdering of Jews in the 1940s known as the Holocaust. The paper has reported on Laurel Leff’s study, Buried With the Times, and recognized the truth of the indictment she presents. But that is not enough. The Times should dedicate an entire issue, or more if necessary, of its Sunday Magazine to a thorough self-study, quoting in their entirety the Times reports (and where they were placed in the paper) on the attacks on German Jews throughout the 1930s, including Kristallnacht on November 9-10, 1938, and then, it should also reprint those those articles — where there were any – which it published about the Holocaust itself. How did the Times cover the roundup of Jews at the Vel d’Hiv in Paris, of the reports by Jan Karski, who had learned in detail about the death camps in Poland, had visited the Warsaw Ghetto, and who came to Washington to inform President Roosevelt about what he had seen and heard? On July 28, 1943, Karski personally met with President Franklin Roosevelt in the Oval Office, telling him about the situation in Poland and becoming the first eyewitness to tell him about the Jewish Holocaust and the Warsaw Ghetto. During their meeting, Roosevelt asked about the condition of horses in Poland. According to Karski, Roosevelt did not ask one question about the Jews.
How was the farce of the “model camp” at Theresienstadt (the camp where the Nazis showed “happy, healthy Jews” with their orchestra, and painting classes, to visiting Red Cross personnel) presented in the pages of the Times? What did it let its readers know about the numbers of Jews being sent to the death camps of Auschwitz, Belzec, Treblinka, and what exactly happened in those camps? The Times has a duty not merely to endorse Laurel Leff’s study, but to show how badly it covered the Holocaust by reprinting what it reported at the time.
Take, for example, the story published in the paper on July 29, 1942, about the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto. The story bore the headline “Warsaw Fears Extermination” instead of “Jews in Warsaw Fear Extermination.” It was published on Page 14, and was not even a stand-alone story; it consisted of a handful of paragraphs next to an ad for Emerson spinet pianos. The Times should reprint that story in all its nauseating brevity. It should reprint the other stories in the Times – the handful of disjointed reports, a few paragraphs here or there, about the labor camps, and the death camps, about the mobile gassing vans, about the Jews burned alive, about the mass shootings of Jews on the Eastern Front. And it should list the many examples of anti-Jewish “actions” that were known at the time, but that the Times chose to ignore altogether.
In 1944, for another example of minimizing Holocaust news at the paper concerns how it reported on Hungarian Jews. The Nazi regime, in its death throes, set about deporting to the concentration camps the Jews of Hungary, the last large group of European Jews who had remained mostly untouched by Hitler’s extermination campaign. In July 1944, the Times published an article of only four column inches citing “authoritative information” that 400,000 Hungarian Jews had already been forcibly transported to their deaths and an additional 350,000 were to be killed in the next few weeks. It ran on page 12.
Only four column inches, on page 12, were devoted to the fate – the murder — of 750,000 Hungarian Jews. What if the story had been on page 1, and given not four column inches but fifty, or one hundred column inches? What if there had been photographs of Hungarian Jews, starving and exhausted, waiting to be transported to the death camps? Surely there would have been a furor in Washington, and a renewal of previous appeals for the American Air Force in Europe to bomb the rail lines to Auschwitz, to save the 350,000 Jews who had not yet been killed but soon would be? Such a suggestion, to save Jews from mass murder, had been made months before about a different group of Jews, and had been rejected by Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy as too “disruptive to the war effort.” Perhaps with more coverage of the Hungarian Jews in the Times, instead of a handful of paragraphs on page 12, McCloy would this time have been forced to agree.
Neil Lewis damningly notes:
From a journalistic standpoint, it is perplexing, if not stupefying, years later to see how the Times covered the attempted annihilation of European Jewry. The paper published many articles, several of which recounted precisely the horror of what was happening, while at the same time egregiously underplaying them—even given the context that much else was occurring because most of the world was at war. Thus, the historic horror was never meaningfully conveyed because it was reported only in unrelated bits and pieces, and relegated to inside pages.
Lewis is too mild in his criticism here. It is not true that the Times “published many articles” about the Holocaust. And certainly not the thousands the subject deserved.
It would be salutary for the New York Times to begin its inquest into its own journalistic performance with a sincere mea culpa. Something like this:: “Between 1939 and 1945, the New York Times published more than 23,000 front-page stories. Of those, 11,500 were about World War II. Twenty-six were about the Holocaust. Now we will show you exactly what was reported by the paper, and what was minimized, or downplayed, and what was ignored. And we will attempt to tell you why.”
That is the reckoning with its past that the New York Times owes to posterity.
CRUSADER says
For some progressive Jews …”Never Again” is Now….
https://www.haaretz.com/us-news/.premium-new-u-s-jewish-group-takes-never-again-into-battle-against-trump-s-migrant-policy-1.7450543
CRUSADER says
The group Never Again Action has more than 20,000 followers on Twitter, with thousands more following its Facebook and Instagram accounts. A big enemy is U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which has taken a hard line under President Donald Trump in his efforts to deport Central American migrants.
Never Again Action states its cause clearly on its website: “a mass mobilization calling for Jews to shut down ICE and hold the political establishment accountable for enabling both the deportation machine that has separated immigrant families across the United States for decades and the current crisis at the border.”
The site provides detailed instructions, strategy, talking points, memes and hashtag-slogan suggestions: #NeverAgainMeans abolish ICE, #NeverAgainMeans close the camps, and an alternative name for the group: #JewsAgainstICE.
“When Jews Say Never Again, They Mean It” is the slogan that tops the site. Using capital letters, the group writes: “As Jews, we were taught to never let anything like the Holocaust happen again.”
It adds: “We refuse to wait and see – we know from our own history what happens next. Many of our ancestors narrowly escaped from conditions like what we are seeing today in concentration camps at the border and detention centers around the country. NEVER AGAIN IS NOW.”
Instead of rejecting the Holocaust analogy by New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez when she described immigrant detention facilities in the United States as “concentration camps,” Never Again Action is leaning directly into it. And in return, the congresswoman has given them a shout-out on Twitter.
But it’s not the new group’s social media savvy that has grabbed headlines, it’s the fact that it has put hundreds of young Jewish activists onto the streets – and some into jail – in the span of a week. On Monday, 200 of them blocked the entrance to a detention facility in Elizabeth, New Jersey, and 36 were arrested. Through crowdfunding, the group has raised more than $150,000 from supporters to cover bail and court costs.
Jewish activists took action in Boston, with more than 1,000 marching from the city’s Holocaust memorial to a detention facility for migrants in the South Bay area. On Wednesday, on the other side of the continent in Orange, California, the entrance to a detention facility was blocked by another group of Jewish protesters.
On Thursday, in Philadelphia, hundreds of protesters demonstrated outside an ICE office and then marched to the city’s Fourth of July parade. More than 30 activists sat down, blocking the street, before they were arrested.
The event was livestreamed to Never Again Action’s social media channels, with the comments: “We are committed to putting ourselves and our bodies on the line, the way we wish European gentiles had done for us 70 years ago” and “we do whatever it takes to stop business as usual, to not be ‘good Germans’ who go about our daily lives while immigrants are starved in cages.”
These surges of online and real-life energy echo the activism in 2017 when Jews were among the protesters who swarmed U.S. airports to protest Trump’s travel ban targeting Muslim-majority countries.
….
CRUSADER says
….
Keeping it local —-
Never Again Action’s emergence highlights a growing trend: progressive young American Jews interested in political activism while clearly identifying themselves as Jews – in causes that have no direct link to Judaism. They wear T-shirts with Jewish slogans, sing Hebrew songs and in some cases even conduct prayer wearing kippot and tallit.
Also, the issues that energize such leftist activists have nothing to do with Israel. For them, Israel has become a topic that divides their community rather than uniting it, depleting people rather than energizing them.
By contrast, the migrant crisis, like Trump’s Muslim ban, is more immediate. The struggle for humane treatment of migrants speaks directly to Jewish American history, bound up with the experiences of parents, grandparents and great-grandparents. Fighting for undocumented immigrants directly is a way progressive Jews relate to Jewish values.
“Young progressive American Jews are both value-driven and politically astute,” says Ori Nir of Americans for Peace Now. “Trump’s immigration policy moves them ethically while granting them an opportunity to make political alliances going into a presidential election year.”
Most American Jews tend to be on the same side in this issue, and many Jewish organizations have made the immigration crisis a priority.
At the same time, Israel has become a source of division – both within the organization and in families – as liberal Zionist parents raised with a connection to Israel clash with their college-age children who are members of IfNotNow or Jewish Voice For Peace.
Some right-wing critics, like the anonymous blogger known as Elder of Ziyon, portray these young Jewish activists as well-intentioned dupes. They argue that in reality, it’s all about Israel.
Noting an overlap between activists tweeting enthusiastically about Never Again Action and participating in its demonstrations, and the anti-occupation group IfNotNow, Elder of Ziyon has argued that Never Again Action is actually hostile to Israel and leading young Jews into a trap.
“Right now, IfNotNow has a lot of publicity but not a lot of members,” Elder of Ziyon wrote Monday. “They need to recruit more Jewish youth, but most of them don’t care about Israel one way or another. These extremist anti-Israel activists are trying to get Jews involved in any liberal cause so they can then join their recruiters in their main purpose: to destroy the Jewish state by pretending to uphold Jewish values.”
Getting ready for 2020 —-
Whether or not Elder of Ziyon is correct, another key development happened as Never Again Action burst onto the scene. IfNotNow announced that it was transforming into a 501(c)(4) – a nonprofit group that is allowed to lobby and engage in political activities. Its goal: having “a major impact on the Democratic race for the White House” in order to “prod the Democratic Party leftward on the issue of Israel.”
Tactically, the two groups do seem to have a shared vision as well as similar tactics: to protest and resist not only Republican policies, but what they feel is the Democratic establishment’s failure to take sufficiently radical positions, enabling the status quo; for example, on immigration policy.
Never Again Action has called on Jews to dedicate themselves to shutting down ICE and holding “the political establishment accountable for enabling both the deportation machine that has separated immigrant families across the U.S. for decades and the current crisis at the border.”
IfNotNow has said it wants to “bring the crisis of the Israeli military Occupation over the Palestinian people to the forefront of the 2020 Campaign.”
In the past week, immigration is the fight that young progressive Jewish activists have deemed worth showing up for – and even getting arrested for. It’s not yet clear if their commitment to a just resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict runs as deep.
James Lincoln says
Much thanks for the information, CRUSADER.
mortimer says
https://njjewishnews.timesofisrael.com/with-times-under-siege-jewish-reporters-hit-back/
Outspoken critics include leading figures like Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Ron Dermer, who called The Times (i.e. NYT) “a CESSPOOL OF HOSTILITY” (towards Israel) and Rabbi Haskel Lookstein of Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun, who expressed “revulsion” at the paper and asserted it “has no place in our home or, for that matter, in any respectable home, Jewish or not.”
(Note: the above writer seems unaware that ‘The Times’ always refers to the ‘The Times’ of London. He should have written NYT for clarity.)
Well said, Rabbi Lookstein !
CRUSADER says
Elder_of_Ziyon
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elder_of_Ziyon
Angemon says
As it should have been for such a grisly piece of news.
CRUSADER says
Good thing that VISEGRAD is representative of a lasting memory,
regarding defending against genocide from happening again to Hungarians.
Circle the wagons!
“Remember! Windage and elevation!”
(Col. John Henry Thomas:
Windage and elevation, Mrs. Langdon; windage and elevation.)
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=oeIuodiPoU8
CRUSADER says
— CAVEAT :
By the way, it simply isn’t true that “The Times” only refers to TTOL.
I’ve lived in London, New York, and Los Angeles (not in that order),
and which ever city one is in, The Times is referred to generally in a
local way for the respective paper. Most people in America speak of
The Times as meaning the NYT. It’s too old hat to state London has a
monopoly on that moniker.
Now, one can question whether the NYT is old enough to be respected as
a GL, or if it’s news is fit to print anymore… but not to be able to refer to it
as The Times is a it beyond the pale for most readers! LOL ?
—————
Nicknamed “The Gray Lady,” the Times has long been regarded within the industry as a national “newspaper of record.” The paper’s motto, “All the News That’s Fit to Print”, appears in the upper left-hand corner of the front page.
The Times is the first newspaper to have borne that name, lending it to numerous other papers around the world, such as The Times of India and The New York Times. In countries where these other titles are popular, the newspaper is often referred to as The London Times or The Times of London, although the newspaper is of national scope and distribution.
David Longfellow says
The NYT is merely a mouthpiece of the democratic party. There is where the real Jew hatred finds its source.
Rarely says
Interesting theory…but incorrect.
CRUSADER says
Sure seems to spoon feed many pundits who support dhimmirat party platforms and also NYT reporting provides basis for many of their policies. So, it does seem there is ample evidence the NYT is a major mouthpiece for DNC.
762x51FMJ says
All the news that’s fit to wrap a fish.
James Lincoln says
The New York Times is a little bit like Wikipedia.
They get their facts straight regarding sports scores, DJIA, etc., but anything that has any political aspect at all is put together by leftist writers and editors.
In other words, if you read it at all – read with extreme caution.
CRUSADER says
These days even the sports and financials have political spins !
gravenimage says
The New York Times Has a Jewish Problem (Part 2)
…………….
Yes–this virulent antisemitism goes way back at the NYT, and was especially appalling during WWII.
And this of course continues today.
Mr. Cohen says
Matthew Continetti
[editor-in-chief of The Washington Free Beacon] said:
“Throw a dart, and it will land on a publication or media company
whose feelings toward Israel are, in a word, bellicose.
The Independent, the Guardian, the Economist,
the BBC, the Washington Post, the New Yorker,
the Atlantic Monthly, Vox, NPR, PBS, CNN, MSNBC,
Time, Newsweek, the Lancet — they all portray
Israel as rapacious and the Palestinians as helpless victims of Jewish sadism.
Their fixation on Israel becomes a fixation on Jews that
creates a noxious climate of opinion, breeding conspiracy theories,
accusations of dual loyalties, intimidation, even violence.”
SOURCE: Where Do New York Times Editors Think
Anti-Semitism Comes From? The Sky?, 2014 Nov 3
http://MosaicMagazine.com/picks/2014/11/where-do-new-york-times-editors-think-anti-semitism-comes-from-the-sky/