The New York Times and the Holocaust: An Uneasy Relationship

The question still lingers eighty years later: why did the American public ignore the Jewish Holocaust as it unfolded? And how is it that an institution like the New York Times, owned by a Jewish family, did it not catalyze public opinion into a collective outrage that forced the American government to get involved sooner by stopping the genocide? Only once between 1939 and 1945 did the publisher mention the mass murders, to say that the Jews were "the first to suffer" from Hitler's delusional desires but that other races and religions would follow. The year was 1942, and it was estimated that two million people had already died in the extermination camps. During the entire period, the newspaper published a thousand articles on the subject, but always on inside pages, as just another dispatch in the exhaustive diary it strove to publish.all news that's fit to printSome researchers note that the editor, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, went to great lengths to prevent the Timeswas considered a Jewish newspaper, knowing that this could harm it in an American society still steeped in many layers of antisemitism. If it made the issue the front page—it only appeared on the front page six times, never as the lead story—it might appear that the newspaper was joining the cause.

This timidity, and that of much of the press that was not avowedly pro-Jewish, is what explains why a massive Gallup Institute poll in January 1943 showed that only 48% of the population believed that the Nazi death machine had indeed liquidated two million. It seems to me an opportune case study for reflecting on how the attempt to appear neutral or aseptic establishes an involuntary complicity—if I may use the oxymoron. And, of course, other, much more recent examples come to mind.