On The New York
Times and Jews in Danger
Yonatan Silverman
On November 14, 2001, The New York Times
went so far as to publish not just its normal section of corrections but a page
length apology for something the newspaper had done 60 years earlier, during
World War II. No one was threatening the paper with a libel suit or demanding a
retraction or any apology. Such criticism might also manifest itself in a Letter
to the Editor or a protest advertisement for example. But publication by any
newspaper of an entire page of editorial mea culpa is a truly remarkable
phenomenon. When the newspaper is the venerable The New York Times, it is
remarkable by a factor of ten.
This apology was indeed a special case. The
occasion for the remarkable gesture was the newspaper’s 150th anniversary
supplement. In the scope of this supplement the paper sought to review the
landmarks in its history, take stock and look ahead. In this context, The New
York Times columnist Max Frankel examined a very painful and problematic
issue; namely, the failure of The New York Times to report adequately on
the Nazi annihilation of European Jewry.
In his famous study, The Abandonment of
the Jews, about how the US turned its back on the Nazi genocide, David
Wyman, writes:
The New York Times
printed considerable extermination-related information during late November
and December 1942. But except for a front page report on the UN Declaration it
relegated that news to inside pages. Moreover, during the five Sundays of late
November and December the paper’s weekly ten-page News of the Week in
Review section included only one brief notice about the European Jewish
tragedy. Yet The Times provided by far the most complete American
coverage of Holocaust events.
Here is a sample of actual articles printed in The New
York Times during November and December, 1942:
Thursday, November 12, 1942, page 7:
Peril to Refugees in
France Growing
The article cites “concern over the future of approximately
200,000 Jews” in occupied France. This was counterbalanced by the “hope that
the occupation of French North Africa would gradually ameliorate the lot of
more than 300,000 Jews there.”
Thursday, November 12, 1942, page 9:
Mufti Pleads for Axis
Haj Amin el Husseini flies the flag for the Nazis in a broadcast from Italy.
Among other things, he declared that “if England and America win the war, the
Jews will dominate the world. If on the other hand the victory is carried off
by the Axis, the Arab world will be freed. The Axis is befriending us. Fight
for its victory.”
Tuesday, November 17, 1942, page 23:
1,521 Sign Appeal
for Jewish Army
Prominent Americans Join in Proclamation for Stateless and Palestinian Jews:
A proclamation was published here yesterday over the signatures of 1,521
outstanding Americans declaring the moral right of the stateless Jews of
Europe and of the Jews of Palestine “to fight as they ask to fight under the
ancient banner of David the King as the Jewish Army”. Governors, mayors,
members of Congress, other officials, industrialists, labor leaders,
clergymen, authors and artists addressed the proclamation “to our valiant
Allies the British Commonwealth of Nations, to the free people everywhere in
the world as well as to our godless enemies.” They renewed the appeal that had
been made ineffectively in the past 18 months against Arab opposition, for the
separate arming of 200,000 Jews or more in the Middle East.
Early the following month the Committee for a Jewish Army
published a half page advertisement in The New York Times:
Saturday, December 5, 1942, page 16:
Committee for a Jewish Army
To the Conscience of America
In that
hallowed hour on Thanksgiving Day when Pres. Roosevelt recited those words
from the 23rd Psalm to the nation, 7,000 children of the people who first sang
that Psalm were led out of the ghetto of Warsaw to be slaughtered.
The day before and the day before that, the day thereafter and the day after
that, the same harrowing thing occurred: more thousands of Jews were
massacred. For Hitler is not merely boasting that the Europe he has conquered
will be made Judenrein, he is feverishly at work translating into
reality his threats to exterminate the Jewish people root and branch wherever
they may be found...1
November 18, 1942, page 3:
2,000 Jews in Brussels Seized:
The Germans forced their way into Jewish homes and forcibly thrust men, women,
and children, many in their night clothes into trucks which drove them away to
an unknown destination.”
November 19, 1942, page 12:
Forced Labor for Jews
Berlin Radio Says Hungary Calls Up All From 18 to 27 Years Old
The article cites a Berlin radio broadcast quoting a Budapest dispatch saying
that “all Jews in Hungary between 18 and 27 years would be called up for
compulsory labor in the near future.”
The dispatch said a change in classifying Jews by determining that a person
with two Jewish grandparents be regarded as a Jew “will increase considerably”
the number liable to be called. It was believed that there are about 1,000,000
who will be reclassified under the new system. The Berlin radio also broadcast
a dispatch from Oslo that Jews in Norway must register with the authorities.2
Wednesday, December 9, 1942, page 8:
To Protest Nazi Murders,
Latin American Workers to Halt Work for 15 Minutes Friday
A small inconspicuous article datelined Mexico City, 8 December, states that
“a fifteen minute stoppage by workers in Central and South America will take
place on Friday to protest against Adolf Hitler’s mass murder of Jews in
Germany and the European countries subjugated by Germany.”
The demonstration was scheduled to start at 1PM, “in Mexico, Cuba, Puerto
Rico, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Panama, Colombia, Ecuador, Chile, Peru, Bolivia,
Argentina, Venezuela, Uruguay. According to today’s press, it has been
organized by the Confederation of Latin American Workers.”
Last but not least, The New York Times did publish a
front page story on the United Nations “Joint Declaration of Protest on ‘Cold-Blooded Extermination’”.
December 18, 1942 front page:
11 Allies Condemn Nazi War on Jews
The article
begins: “A joint declaration by members of the United Nations was issued today
condemning Germany’s ‘bestial policy of cold-blooded extermination’ of Jews
and declaring that ‘such events can only strengthen the resolve of all
freedom-loving people to overthrow the barbarous Hitlerite tyranny.’”
The article goes on to cite statements by
President Roosevelt, expressing concern for the “persecution of innocent
people”, and also one in which the president advocated a United Nations
Commission for the Investigation of War Crimes. In the president’s statement he
calls on the UN to “mete out just and sure punishment to the ringleaders
responsible for the organized murder of thousands of innocent persons and the
commission of atrocities which have violated every tenet of the Christian
faith.”
The news about the UN Declaration was
accompanied in that same issue by an editorial:
Hitler’s Terror
The editorial begins: “Despite all that has been written about Nazi
persecution of the Jews...” This begs the question of precisely who has
written what and where were the writings published of course. There is
something disingenuous, to say the least, about this editorial statement. The
editorial goes on to express awe over the fact that the UN Declaration is not
“a special plea, subject to doubt”, but “an official indictment of the Nazi
rulers”, and it is “the pledge of the United Nations that just retribution
shall be visited upon all those responsible for what one member of the British
Parliament rightly calls the “greatest single horror in all history”. The
editorial concludes: “The most tragic aspect of the situation is the world’s
helplessness to stop the horror while the war is going on. The most it can do
is to denounce the perpetrators and promise them individual and separate
retribution.” The call of the Committee for a Jewish Army made no impression
on The New York Times’ editorial board. Succumbing to “the world’s
helplessness” was a self-fulfilling prophecy for The New York Times.
In The Abandonment of the Jews, Wyman
goes on to explain that since other newspapers recognized the superior foreign
reporting resources of The Times, they looked to it for guidance on
foreign news policy. It is possible, Wyman says, that since the Jewish owned
Times did not stress the massive killing of Jews, other papers followed suit,
and also neglected to stress the story properly.
There is also a possibility, according to
Wyman, that since President Roosevelt failed, until March 1944, to mention the
extermination of the Jews in his press conferences, this also may have led
editors to conclude that the issue was not important. Note that in Roosevelt’s
statement cited above, his concern is for “the persecution of innocent people”
in general – not Jewish people in particular.3
Wyman writes:
One reason ordinary Americans were not more responsive to the
plight of the European Jews was that very many (probably a majority) were
unaware of Hitler’s extermination program until well into 1944 or later. The
information was not readily available to the public, because the mass media
treated the systematic murder of millions of Jews as though it were minor
news.
Mass circulation magazines, like Time,
Newsweek and Life, “all but ignored” the Holocaust, according to
Wyman. Radio coverage of Holocaust news was “sparse”, he says. “Those who wrote
the newscasts and commentary programs seem hardly to have noticed the slaughter
of the Jews.” “And filmmakers,” says Wyman,
avoided the subject of the Jewish catastrophe. Although during
the war, Hollywood released numerous feature films on refugees and on Nazi
atrocities, “none dealt with the Holocaust.
Most newspapers printed very little about the Holocaust, even though extensive
information on it reached their desks from the news services (AP, UP and
others) and from their own correspondents. In New York, the Jewish-owned
Post reported extermination news and rescue matters fairly adequately.
PM’s coverage was also more complete than that of most American papers. The
Times, Jewish owned, but anxious not to be seen as Jewish-oriented, was
the premier American newspaper of the era. It printed a substantial amount of
information on Holocaust related events but almost always buried it on inner
pages.
“To note one typical example,” writes
Wyman, “The Times, on July 2, 1944, published “authoritative information”
that 400,000 Hungarian Jews had been deported to their deaths so far and 350,000
more were to be killed in the next three weeks. This news (which was basically
accurate) received four column inches on page 12. The Times found room on
the front page that day to analyze the problem of New York holiday crowds on the
move.”
Another example Wyman cites is the Jewish
tragedy in France in the summer of 1942. He says that American newspaper readers
could follow “the general configuration” of these events, since most
metropolitan dailies provided fairly thorough coverage of the mass arrests that
took place in Paris in mid-July. However, he points out, almost none reported
the barbaric way 4,000 children were stuffed into boxcars for shipment across
the Continent with no provisions and no supervision.
Much of the French deportation story appeared in the American
press. But it was almost never featured. For instance, The New York Times
published some 25 items but placed only two on the front page. Those reports
reached page one apparently because they involved leaders of the Catholic
Church. Even so, each story received only a few inches of type at the foot of
the page. One told very little, the other nothing, about what was actually
happening to the Jews. Other major newspapers generally conformed to the same
pattern. They printed considerable information, but almost always on inner
pages, and even then it was often barely noticeable.
Remarkably, Max Frankel’s lengthy editorial apology echoes
important elements of Wyman’s analysis.
For example, the caption for the article’s central
illustration reads:
Dead and Buried
On April 20, 1943, a page one article about a conference on the “refugee
problem” said nothing about Jews and asserted, inside, that refugees were
being considered part of “a broad group” regardless of their religion. The
execution of two million Jews was reported in an appended article of five
paragraphs.
Frankel leads off with an earnest assessment of what
happened:
The annihilation of six million Jews would not for many years
become distinctively known as the Holocaust. But its essence became knowable
fast enough, from ominous Nazi threats and undisputed eyewitness reports
collected by American correspondents, agents and informants. Indeed, a large
number of those reports appeared in The Times. But they were mostly
buried inside its gray and stolid pages, never featured analyzed or rendered
truly comprehensible.
While a few publications-newspapers like The Post (then liberal) and
PM in New York and magazines like The Nation and The New
Republic – showed more conspicuous concern, The Times’ coverage
generally took the view that the atrocities, inflicted upon Europe’s Jews,
while horrific, were not significantly different from those visited upon tens
of millions of other war victims, nor more noteworthy.
No less remarkably, Frankel addresses the
influence of the idiosyncratic Jewishness of the Sulzbergers, the family that
owns The Times. “Papers owned by Jewish families, like The Times,
were plainly afraid to have a society that was still widely anti-Semitic misread
their passionate opposition to Hitler as a merely parochial cause.”
According to Frankel, Sulzberger’s brand of
Jewishness had a deep effect on the paper’s editorial psychology:
At The Times, the reluctance to highlight the systematic
slaughter of Jews was also undoubtedly influenced by the views of the
publisher, Arthur Hays Sulzberger. He believed strongly and publicly that
Judaism was a religion, not a race or nationality – that Jews should be
separate only in the way they worshipped. He thought they needed no state or
political and social institutions of their own. He went to great lengths to
avoid having The Times branded a “Jewish newspaper”. He resented other
publications for emphasizing the Jewishness of people in the news.
In her recently published book Buried by
The Times: The Holocaust and America’s Most Important Newspaper,
Laurel Leff examines the Jewish personality of The New York Times
publisher Sulzberger in depth. Among other things, she writes:
In the case of Times’ publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger,
concerns about special pleading and dual loyalties were not purely a pragmatic
calculation. They also reflected a deeply felt religious and philosophical
belief that made Sulzberger resistant to changing his views in the light of
changing circumstances. Being Jewish was solely a religious not a racial or
ethnic orientation, he maintained, that carried with it no special obligation
to help fellow Jews...American Jews who helped other Jews because they were
Jews threatened to undercut their position as Americans, Sulzberger believed.
The Times publisher thus was philosophically opposed to emphasizing the
unique plight of the Jews in occupied Europe a conviction that at least
partially explains The Times’ tendency to place stories about Jews
inside the paper and to universalize their plight in editorials and front page
stories.
She adds:
Sulzberger always maintained that being a Jew and being a
journalist had nothing to do with one another.4
At least on some level, Sulzberger worried that if The Times was
perceived as a Jewish newspaper it might alienate the Protestant establishment
that had embraced the newspaper for its thoroughness and dispassion, or that a
Jewish Times might aggravate anti-Semitism by serving as a reminder of
Jews’ power in American society.
These personal attitudes and perspectives had grave
repercussions as Leff points out:
Scholars looking into the role of bystanders to the Holocaust –
those who knew of but were not directly involved in the extermination of the
Jews – have identified a gap between the information that was available to
witnessing nations and groups, and their response to that information. The
general apathy and inaction that greeted the news suggests that bystanders
encountered the facts but did not fully grasp their meaning. The way the press
in general and The Times in particular presented the facts played an
important role in creating the gap between information and action. The
Times supplied the information in isolated inside stories but did almost
nothing to help readers understand its importance.
She goes on:
Times’
editorials never emphasized the Jewish side of the question... Times’
editorials maintained throughout the 1930s that the refugee crisis was not
particularly a Jewish problem. The problem posed by the German refugees
constitutes a test of civilization itself a July 22, 1939 editorial explained.
“It has nothing to do with race or creed. It is not a Jewish problem or a
Gentile problem. It does not belong to Europe or to America. It is the problem
of mankind.”
She cites the following statistics about The Times’
coverage of the Holocaust in 1944:
Just 13 editorials mentioned the Jews’ fate, out of nearly
3,000 published that year. None of the editorials was the lead and several
editorials still talked about refugees or a persecuted people, not Jews. Too
many important stories were buried inside, including all Joseph Levy’s stories
about the destruction of Hungarian Jewry. Only one of the 12 front page
stories addressed the plight of Hungary’s Jews, and then only in anticipation
of what was to come, not in reaction to what did occur. In fact, of those 12
front page stories, only one...identified the primary victims as Jews. The
others either did not mention Jews at all on the front – referring, for
example to “refugees from Italy”...or “persons from every country in
Europe...or mentioned Jews but only in conjunction with other persecuted
minorities.”
Leff states plainly that:
The Times
never acknowledged that the mass murder of Jews because they were Jews
was something its readers needed to know. The Times never treated the
news of the Holocaust as important...
How widely was The Times read during World War II?
Laurel Leff cites these figures:
Every weekday, The Times reached 485,000 people, carried
37,000 lines of advertising, and printed more than 100,000 words in news copy.
On Sundays, those numbers nearly doubled.
According to Leff, Arthur Hays Sulzberger’s Jewish
personality was indeed one motivation for his flawed editorial approach:
If Judaism was his faith, assimilation was Sulzberger’s
religion. Like most American Jews whose families had emigrated to the United
States from Germany before the twentieth century, he was a Reform Jew. This
meant he continued to worship as a Jew but without obeying many of the faith’s
demanding commandments, such as observance of the Sabbath or the Kosher laws.
He also was willing to celebrate Christmas and skip a Passover seder or
two...Sulzberger approached Jews’ integration into American life with
missionary zeal. For that he owed not the family he was born into, but the one
he married into – that of the celebrated rabbi, Isaac M. Wise.
Sulzberger’s wife Iphigene Ochs was Wise’s
granddaughter.5
Wise, of course, is considered the
architect of Reform Judaism’s institutions in the US. He founded the Union of
American Hebrew Congregations, for example, as well as Hebrew Union College.
A principle tenet of Wise’s Jewish
philosophy was that the Jews are not a people. According to him, following the
destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE and the dispersal of the Jews
throughout the world, they ceased to be a nation. He believed that Jews could
become just like the people they found themselves living among. His concept of
the Jewish mission in the world was to champion the principles of the
Enlightenment. For Wise, Zionism was both “foolish and dangerous”. Leff adds:
“If Jews were not a people, it was folly to believe they could constitute a
state.”
Even though the adherents of Reform Judaism
in the US began to change their ideas in the early 20th century, according to
Leff: “Wise’s family and most prominently his grandson-in-law remained true to
his principles.”
Among those beliefs was anti-Zionism, and Leff quotes Sulzberger expressing this precise philosophy:
I am a non-Zionist because the Jew, in seeking a homeland of
his own, seems to me to be giving up something of infinitely greater value to
the world...I look askance at any movement which assists in making the
peacemaker among nations merely a national warrior.
In addition, writes Leff:
For Sulzberger, the drive against Jewish nationalism – against
conceiving of Jews as a people, against a Jewish homeland in Palestine,
against the leaders who advocated those stances – overshadowed every other
issue, even Hitler’s plan to make Jewish nationalism an irrelevancy.
As Leff quotes from a Sulzberger letter: “My job is to show
all and sundry that I do not subscribe to the thesis that ‘all Jews are brothers’”.
Leff concludes:
Sulzberger’s belief that he was acting out of principle, not
pragmatism, had its own consequences. It led him to take extreme positions,
and less willing to shake them, as catastrophe enveloped the Jews.
Accordingly, when the British government issued its “White
Paper” in 1939, drastically limiting Jewish immigration to Palestine to 15,000
per year over five years, The New York Times endorsed it.
The Times
highlighted British plans to provide a haven for Jews in Guinea – which never
came to be – and played down the new limits on Palestine immigration. On the
editorial page, The Times applauded the restrictions: “The pressure on
Palestine is now so great that immigration has to be strictly regulated to
save the homeland itself from overpopulation as well as from an increasingly
violent resistance on the part of the Arabs,” The Times wrote.
Leff also notes that Sulzberger’s
newspaper:
...never condemned the French concentration camps in an
editorial. In fact, The Times’ only editorial comment was to support
the State Department’s decision to refuse a French offer to let interned
Jewish refugees immigrate to the United States... The Times’
correspondents wrote story after story rationalizing the French government’s
anti-Semitic legislation and excusing the deplorable conditions in the French
camps.
One particularly striking example Leff
cites of how The Times buried news of the Holocaust relates to news it barely
published about Nazi crimes in the Soviet territories:
All told, an estimated 1.5 million Jews were murdered in the
Soviet territories between June 1941 and the end of 1942. Only 17 stories
appeared in The Times soon after the massacres occurred, and just five
of those specifically mentioned Jews as being among the victims. For most
mainstream newspapers and particularly for The Times, the
Einsatzgruppen’s killing spree was the least reported event of the Holocaust.
According to Max Frankel, the middle of the
road principle of employing the least common editorial denominator also seems to
have played a role in Sulzberger’s downplaying the Holocaust: “It was his policy
on most questions,” Frankel writes, “to steer The Times toward the
centrist values of America’s governmental and intellectual elites. Because his
editorial page, like the American government and other leading media refused to
dwell on the Jews’ singular victimization, it was cool to all measures that
might have singled them out for rescue or even special attention.”
Laurel Leff quotes from a Sulzberger
letter: “Of course, something must be done for the poor fellows who are Jews,
but it seems to me that you and I should work for that as Americans and
humanitarians and not as Jews.”
Frankel also, after some paragraphs citing
occasions on which The Times did place an adequate stress on relevant
news or editorials about the extermination of Europe’s Jews, candidly assesses:
No article about the Jews’ plight ever qualified as The
Times leading story of the day or as a major event of a week or year. The
ordinary reader of its pages could hardly be blamed for failing to comprehend
the enormity of the Nazi’s crimes.
The following, which Laurel Leff cites,
does offer a word of fitting disbelief and moral outrage:
In the February 1942 New Frontier, William Cohen wrote
that The Times, which was the most completely respected and reliable
daily newspaper in the world, possessed “feet of clay” when it came to news of
general Jewish interest and of Zionism.
He placed the blame squarely on the
publisher, “who suffers from the Jewish maladies of self-hate and
self-effacement”, and thus, “has not the desire to inform his readers about
barbaric atrocities committed on Jews in Russia or Poland”.
According to Frankel, the defeat of Nazi
Germany and the emergence of the unspeakable truths from the liberated death
camps, motivated considerable soul searching and changes of heart at the
newspaper’s highest levels. Frankel even says, for example, that Iphigene Ochs
Sulzberger changed her own mind about the need for a Jewish state and then
influenced her husband Arthur, to accept the idea of Israel. According to
Frankel: “The Times shed its sensitivity about its Jewish roots, allowed
Jews to ascend to the editor’s chair and warmly supported Israel in many
editorials...”
According to
Leff, however,
Although the press documented the scope and
depth of Nazi depravity more fully than it had before the liberation of the
death camps in 1945, it continued to downplay its Jewish dimensions...The
unique tragedy of the Jews did not emerge from the ashes of the liberated
camps...Even when Jews were mentioned, the reason they were imprisoned and
murdered – because they were Jews – was not. So the nascent notion of
genocide, of an attempt to destroy an entire religious, ethnic or racial
group, in this case a Jewish genocide, did not take hold.
Frankel’s apology for The Times
leaves the positive impression that the paper actually did have a change of
heart. According to Frankel, after the War, the newspaper’s owners went so far
as to change their whole personal orientation to Judaism. And this change
presumably filtered into the newspaper’s editorial policies on the Jewish world
across the board.
Laurel Leff contradicts this positive
impression, and with particular reference to Sulzberger personally:
Arthur Sulzberger did not ever express regrets about The
Times coverage of what would come to be known as the Holocaust. He did not
reconsider the philosophical stance that led him and his paper to downplay the
extermination of the Jews. If anything, he came away from his postwar trips to
Germany more convinced that he had been right...
Leff quotes from a 1946 Sulzberger speech
in a Tennessee synagogue that his wife’s grandfather founded:
It is my judgment that thousands now dead might be alive and in
Palestine as well, had there been through the past 50 years more emphasis upon
George Washington’s great conception of religious tolerance and less on
statehood... By putting statehood first and refuge last the Zionists, in my
judgment, have jeopardized both...
Years later, in August 1991, The Times
again failed dismally in its reporting about Jews in danger during the Crown
Heights riots.
The riots in Crown Heights, Brooklyn
started after a Hasidic Jewish man accidentally swerved his car onto a sidewalk
and fatally injured a black youngster. Claiming that the Jews were receiving
preferential medical treatment at the scene of the accident, residents of the
neighboring black community started to riot. According to The Times, for
example, “the racial melee erupted after rumors spread among blacks that a
private Hasidic ambulance had carried off three Hasidic men but had ignored the
black child and his severely injured cousin.” The same day, as a result of the
rioting, a black mob attacked and killed 29 year old Hasidic scholar Yankel
Rosenbaum. This, according to The Times, “was an apparent retaliation for
the death of seven year old Gavin Cato who was struck by a car driven by a
Hasid.”
Regarding Yankel Rosenbaum’s murder,
William McGowan observes in a 1993 article:
The treatment columnists and editorialists gave Rosenbaum’s
killing stood in stark contrast with their response to the racially motivated
murder of Yusuf Hawkins, a black teenager, in Bensonhurst Brooklyn two years
earlier. This double standard was best illustrated by The Times
editorial page, which published an editorial entitled “Racism, Accomplice to
Murder” six days after Hawkins was killed. It was not until 14 months after
Rosenbaum’s murder, when suspect Lemrick Nelson was acquitted, that The
Times got around to expressing “Shame and Alarm over Anti-Semitic Violence
that reflected the pogroms of czarist Russia and Eastern Europe.”
McGowan goes on to say that the news
coverage “left little doubt” that the basic story of Crown Heights was one of
black mobs attacking Jews in retaliation of Gavin Cato’s death. But says McGowan
“the focus on allegations of favoritism obscured the raw anti-Semitism that
fueled the riots.”
At the funeral of Gavin Cato, for example
“banners commemorating the accident victim shared space with others that said
things like “Hitler did not do the job” while Al Sharpton caricatured Jews as
“diamond dealers”. In general, says McGowan, the inflammatory statements of Sharpton and the Rev. Herbert Daughtry were downplayed.
One key point, as McGowan points out, is
that in Crown Heights, “reporters analyzed events as a culture clash, a long
running feud between two groups equally at fault”.
And indeed, The Times repeatedly
equated the murder of the Jew, Yankel Rosenbaum by blacks with the killing of
black Gavin Cato by a Jew, as though one was essentially in retaliation for the
other. But the fact is there was no such equation, and the riots by the Crown
Heights black community were poisonously anti-Semitic at heart.
According to McGowan, the editorial policy
of The Times had a particular agenda, which explains its misreporting of
the Crown Heights riots. That agenda essentially is the way the paper placed a
stress on editorial “diversity”, or the increasing openness and orientation of
newsrooms and editorial boards to ethnic minorities (i.e. Afro-Americans) and
their particular concerns.
“The diversity agenda”, McGowan writes,
“seems to have encouraged the press to follow a preconceived script – one that
turned out to be at odds with the facts and out of touch with the realities of a
fractious multiethnic New York.”
On that score, although after the War
The Times may have reoriented and sensitized itself to issues vital to world
Jewry, in 1990s New York the picture had changed.
“Under the rubric of racial and gender
‘diversity’ a (liberal) uniformity of opinion was being enforced on the press”
states a National Review editorial from August 1993.
“Diversity driven reporting,” McGowan
concludes, “has created a pattern of intellectual dishonesty and double
standards that can only poison the well of public trust that true tolerance, as
opposed to enforced diversity, requires to flourish.”
But the ultimate proof of how badly The
Times missed the mark on the Crown Heights story is not journalistic or
racial in character, but legal.
On Thursday, April 2, 1998, the City of New
York announced a settlement, approved by a United States District Judge, of the
federal civil rights lawsuit brought by the Estate of Yankel Rosenbaum and
others against the City of New York and ex-Mayor David Dinkins. As the Mayor’s
office press release states “That lawsuit concerned the violent anti-Semitic
rioting that occurred for three days in August 1991.” The amount of the
settlement was $1.1 million.
The press release also quotes the report of
Richard Girgenti to ex-Governor Cuomo released in 1993.
The rioting represented the most extensive racial unrest in New
York City in over 20 years. It differed from most other disturbances
throughout the turbulent 1960s...as the violence was directed at one segment
of the population.
The week began with Gavin Cato’s tragic death in an automobile accident and
the senseless and reprehensible murder of Yankel Rosenbaum on Monday night and
continued with intense anti-Semitic violence against the people of Crown
Heights throughout that night and over the next several days.
A corollary to the story of the
anti-Semitic character of the Crown Heights riots which The Times did not
report, is the story of how an insufficient number of police were ordered into
Crown Heights to keep the peace.
This begs the question of whether there is
a cause and effect relationship between the two. In other words, if The Times
had not followed its politically correct editorial agenda and actually reported
the facts; if it had not created a false and ultimately harmful equation between
black and Jewish behavior, perhaps it would have been clear to Mayor Dinkins and
other key staff in the city administration that there was indeed a case of black
mob violence against Jews in Crown Heights and the needed ranks of police would
have been sent in.
Expansive apologies such as Frankel’s
notwithstanding, The New York Times, reporting on Crown Heights proves
that it is not favorably disposed toward Jews. In terms of the big picture, the
Jews are, after all, a tiny minority. Other more populous minorities have flexed
their muscles and exerted their influence in society, in politics, in commerce,
and in journalism to a greater measure than Jews have. That’s how the process of
“diversity” works after all. In the final analysis, The Times decision to
report the Crown Heights riots as falsely as it did was Darwinian. The Times
essentially followed a process of journalistic natural selection with
preferential treatment for the aggressors while acquiescing to the dictates of
“diversity”. But however “ethically” The Times may have believed it was
reporting the events in Crown Heights, the fact is the Girgenti report to
ex-Governor Cuomo and the federal district court had the last word. In the
matter of the Crown Heights riots, rigorous legal standards of evidence and
truth ultimately prevailed over the blurred and subjective journalistic ones
The Times used. So, even if the events did not pan out as originally
reported in the country’s “newspaper of record”, at least the truth finally came
out.
The problem The New York Times’
editorial policy represents for Jews does not stop there. Just as the “newspaper of
record” exhibited a tragic trend of neglect and disinterest regarding the fate
of European Jewry during World War II, its editorial trend relating to Israel
continues to be an insult to fairness and reason.
The media watchdog CAMERA (Committee for
Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America) maintains a long list of articles
on its website critical of the way The New York Times has depicted
Israel. A careful review of only a small sample of these critiques yields a
painfully clear picture of the continuing anti-Jewish and anti-Israeli editorial
positions The Times embodies.
The long list of CAMERA critiques of The
New York Times reporting begins:
The
New York Times,
one of the most influential
newspapers in the world, affects not only its readership’s perception of world
events (daily circulation is about 1.6 million),but also has significant
impact on the news judgment and editorial perspective of other media. The
caliber of accuracy, balance and thoroughness in this publication are,
therefore, of particular importance.
The question of The New York Times
reporting on comparative casualty figures during the Intifada is the focus of
one CAMERA article by Gilead Ini, who points out:
...NYT readers are informed that more Palestinians than
Israelis have died, but are not told that most of the Israeli victims were
non-combatants targeted by Palestinians, whereas Palestinian fatalities were
overwhelmingly combatants or Palestinians killed by other Palestinians. (May
13, 2005, “Study of The New York Times Coverage Severely Flawed”,
http://www.camera.org/index.asp?x_context=2&x_outlet=35.
Another article in the CAMERA list states:
...the single greatest failure of The New York Times
in its reporting since the beginning of Oslo has been the omission of
anti-Israel hate-indoctrination purveyed via Palestinian schools, mosques,
television, radio, newspapers, summer camps, public rallies, political
pronouncements and more. Beyond all other forces that have contributed to a
breakdown of negotiations and reconciliation between Israel and the
Palestinians, the socialization of the Palestinian public to reject Israel as
alien and illegitimate rather than as a neighbor nation is paramount. (Daniel
Okrent’s “False Symmetry”, April 27, 2005).
Another critique points out:
Who can forget the notorious June 9, 1981 editorial blunder,
ranting against Israel for taking out Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor? “Israel’s
sneak attack on a French-built nuclear reactor near Baghdad was an act of
inexcusable and short-sighted aggression,” The Times’ editorial
thundered. (The Wall Street Journal, on the other hand, wrote that the
world owed Israel a vote of thanks for protecting against future nuclear
aggression.) (Ricki Hollander, “The New York Times Knee Jerk Editorial
Bias”, January 16, 2005.)
And concludes:
The Times
editorialists’ disregard for the facts – even those reported by the
newspaper’s own foreign correspondents – underscores their penchant for
hectoring and blaming Israel whatever the circumstances.
CAMERA aims its critiques repeatedly at the
anti-Israel editorial bias of The New York Times even while acknowledging
that the paper’s nuts and bolts reporting on Israel has improved:
Indeed, reporting by the new bureau chief in Jerusalem, Steve
Erlanger, has been admirably fair and attentive to the facts generally.
Likewise, his predecessor, James Bennet, was for the most part careful to
present information with precision and balanced attention to the views of the
parties. The work of these two correspondents has been a dramatic improvement
over previous reporters Deborah Sontag and Serge Schmemann. (From Daniel
Okrent’s “False Symmetry”.)
The Worst of Times, by Andrea Levin,
January 13, 2005, strikingly illustrates the problem in The New York Times
editorial bias against Israel. It begins:
Israel’s right to exist is now debatable, according to Op-ed
page editors at The New York Times, where, it seems, no column
excoriating Israel is too extreme or factually flawed to pass muster.
The focus of this critique is an
op-ed
piece by PLO legal adviser Michael Tarazi entitled “Two Peoples, One State”. As
Levin states, this article which called for the dissolution of the Jewish state,
“was particularly shrill and mendacious”.
The problem is that the argument relies on patently false
assertions. In a publication that claims to be committed to accuracy, not only
in its news coverage but on its opinion pages as well, falsehoods should never
have gotten by editors – and would not normally do so.
The premise of Tarazi’s article, which is
oft repeated, is that,
Israel is a racist country that oppresses non-Jews, blocking
them from citizenship rights, and as such is morally illegitimate and should
be done away with and transformed into a bi-national state. There, presumably
all people would be treated equitably.
According to Levin, the comparison to South
Africa “is a standard trope among European Israel-bashers and radical campus
agitators...” However the emergence of the phenomenon in opinion writing in
The New York Times, and other major US papers is disturbing.
Levin points out that comparing Israel to
South Africa is ludicrous, among other reasons because 23% of the country’s
citizens are non-Jewish, mainly Muslims and Christians. Moreover “...they are
the freest ‘non-Jews’ of the Middle East and members of these communities serve
in the Israeli parliament, the armed forces and the Supreme Court.”
Tarazi, on the other hand, attempts to
persuade the reader that:
More than 400,000 Israelis live illegally in more than 150
colonies, many of which are atop Palestinian water sources.
The lies in Tarazi’s article compound
themselves, and Levin addresses them one by one.
Beginning with the first “colony” of course is another modern
curse word implying an alien community established in foreign territory by an
imperial power. None of this applies historically, legally, or logically to
the Israeli presence. Yet The Times apparently believes it does, and
concurs that the Old City of Jerusalem – including the ancient Jewish Quarter,
the Western Wall and the Temple Mount, as well as the Mount of Olives, Hebrew
University and Hadassah Hospital on Mt. Scopus – are part of illegal Israeli
“colonies”, for all are in areas of eastern Jerusalem whose residents are
encompassed in Tarazi’s reference to 400,000 Israelis living in illegal
“colonies”.
Michael Tarazi’s op-ed piece accuses Israel
of other actions amounting to “apartheid”. But according to Levin, the nub of
his charge “is the claim that Palestinians of the West Bank live in a “de facto”
state with Jews yet, “as non-Jews cannot vote and receive citizens’ benefits”.
Levin sagely answers this charge:
Of course, they are denied these rights not because of their
religion or ethnicity but because they are not citizens. The territory on
which West Bank Palestinians live remains in dispute pending negotiations and
agreement on “secure and recognized boundaries” under the terms of UN Security
Council Resolution 242. Extending citizenship to the Palestinians would
constitute annexation of the territory.
Levin’s article also examines the manner in
which The Times reacted to reader response to its printing of Tarazi’s
“Two Peoples, One State”.
...notwithstanding the gravity and falsity of Tarazi’s
accusations, his ultimately genocidal prescription for the Jews of Israel, and
the many letters sent to The Times’ editor, expressing outrage, the
paper initially ran only four replies. Of these, just one brief letter
rebutted Tarazi while the others were laudatory or non-responsive to the
errors, half-truths and distortions in the piece.
Levin herself attempted to correct the lies
and distortions in Michael Tarazi’s op-ed piece with a letter to the editor of
her own, but was given the third degree by The Times’ editors. Even
though her letter was printed, the editors of The Times remained
antagonistic. And from Levin’s perspective the reason is all too obvious,
especially in light of The Times’ readiness to publish other op-eds that
are similar in their false and slanderous approach to Israel:
Noam Chomsky’s tirade against Israel in February 2004 flung the
apartheid charge... Although Chomsky has long been favored in radical circles,
his appearance in The Times is a troubling barometer of anti-Israel
extremism on the opinion pages.
Levin credits The Times with
publishing columns by “Israel’s defenders and former officials” such as Benjamin
Netanyahu. But, she notes, “none of these were venomous and fallacious”.
There can be no claim that accurate commentary in defense of
Israel “balances” propagandistic and false commentary assailing that nation.
Levin concludes:
The pattern is obvious; The Times has chosen to suspend
the norms of fact-checking in op-eds attacking Israel, and in doing so has all
too often allowed its editorial pages to be used as a crude anti-Israel
propaganda sheet.6
Endnotes
|
1 |
The Committee for a Jewish Army
was the brainchild of Peter Bergson (aka Hillel Kook). Bergson led a
public campaign during World War II to press the Roosevelt administration
for direct action to save European Jews. His activities in this regard
were opposed by Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, who represented the mainstream
American Jewish leadership. Wise regarded Bergson as a hothead likely to
provoke a public and government backlash. It is possible that part of the
problem was that Bergson’s mentor was right-wing Zionist opposition leader
Vladimir Jabotinsky. In 1943, the Committee for a Jewish Army reorganized
as the Emergency Committee to Save the Jewish People of Europe, which
struggled to maintain a campaign for Jewish rescue. In a 1973 interview
with David Wyman, Bergson stated:
we
felt that the Hebrew nation was a belligerent in the war. Germany was
fighting — if Germany won the war, we would be obliterated, not in the
sense of the Holocaust, which we didn’t foresee, but Germany was more
our enemy than the enemy of the British, let’s say. And we felt that it
was our moral duty and practical survival necessity to fight the
Germans. We felt that an army — it was a purely political thing — an
army should consist of the Jews of Palestine. You see, Palestine was
neutral under law. A mandated territory is neutral. Jews in Palestine
could volunteer, they couldn’t be drafted.
|
|
2 |
The concept of “forced labor” hardly
encompasses what the Nazis had in store for Hungarian Jewry. On May 15,
1944, the deportation of Jews from Hungary to Auschwitz began. By May 24,
under the personal supervision of Eichmann, an estimated 100,000 Jews were
gassed. Between May 16 and May 31, the SS reported collecting 88 pounds of
gold and white metal from the teeth of those gassed. By the end of June,
361,661 persons, half of the Jews in Hungary arrived at Auschwitz.
According to the official information - and the newly erected monument in
Oslo commemorating the Jews deported from Norway – there was a total of
767 Norwegian Jews deported to the concentrations camps. Only 30 survived
and 230 families were wiped out. |
|
3 |
Laurel Leff, in Buried by The Times states “The sources journalists
relied on for information about the extermination campaign might also have
figured in the editors’ calculations...In fact, 20 of the 44 stories that
appeared on The New York Times’ front page about the Jews
originated with Allied governments or individual Allied officials...The
press had enough information, even without Allied government statements,
to play the Holocaust as a front page story. It did not because its
judgment of newsworthiness coincided with that of the government. |
|
4 |
Laurel Leff quotes from a 1948 Sulzberger letter in which he indicates
that his whole attachment to being Jewish had faded: “I know of no
difference in my way of life than in that of any Unitarian.” |
|
5 |
Arthur Sulzberger’s nephew, foreign correspondent Cy Sulzberger, became a
New York Times staffer in 1939. Before that he reported from
Austria for several London papers and was based there during the Anschluss
when Nazi Germany annexed Austria. Laurel Leff observes:
As Sulzberger recollects this period in his voluminous memoirs, two
things stand out, which would mark his wartime coverage for The Times
as well: his insistence upon having the best possible time amidst the
horrors of war and his discomfort with reporting on the fate of the Jews
in the countries he covered. As he described in a paragraph or two that
included the expropriation of Jewish-owned businesses in Austria, the
Jewish corpses that filled the Danube, and the 12,000 terrified Jews who
showed up daily at the soup kitchen run by the “Israelite community”, he
noted that he somehow managed to have a good time. “I still had gay
moments for a reason of singular cruelty: Vienna contained many
attractive women who knew they were ultimately doomed,” he wrote. “Some
of these poor creatures attached themselves to any American and often
proposed marriage. They suffered the sad illusion that a wedding
certificate automatically entailed a United States passport. Others,
wiser or deprived of hope, merely wished to be carefree while awaiting
the Brown Death.”
|
|
6 |
CAMERA’s Mission: Accurate, balanced, and complete media
coverage of Israel and the Middle East is vital to public understanding of
events in that important region and ultimately to sound policymaking. A
national media-monitoring research and membership organization, CAMERA
works to foster sound reporting while educating news consumers about
Middle East issues and the critical role of the media (http://www.camera.org/). |
Addendum
In the April 19th issue of The New Yorker, Susan E.
Tifft and Alex S. Jones take a long term look at how the attitudes of two German
Jewish families, the Ochses and the Sulzbergers, have been reflected in The New
York Times. Among other things:
Ms. Tifft and Mr. Jones report on a 1969 trip that the younger
Sulzberger made to Israel on which a senior official of the Israeli government
suggested that, no matter what happened in the world, everyone around the table
would always have a homeland in Israel. “Excuse me, but I’m an Episcopalian! Is
this still my country?” Arthur Jr. said loudly. Thirty years later, he continues
to regard the Israeli’s comment as racist.
