THE ONLY THING NECESSARY FOR THE TRIUMPH OF EVIL IS FOR POWERFUL MEN TO DO NOTHING
WHEN JEWS WERE OBSESSED TO BE GERMANS…
Many times I wrote about the problem of conceiving Judaism as a “religion”, instead of understanding it as the legacy that unites the Jewish people: the Jewish People’s Laws, history, and land.
This may seem like a simple and superfluous game of words: are we a nation or a religious group? But when we understand the origin of this distinction; and even more so, the terrible consequences of taking away the National Aspect from Judaism, we can better appreciate the magnitude of this nuance.
The division between “the Jewish people” and “the Jewish religion” began in the early 19th century in Western Europe, when stimulated by the idea of emancipation, the first reformer Jews deliberately renounced any values and ideas that could connect them to the land of Israel, a fundamental element of our Tora. The reform religious leaders explicitly declared that they renounced the Messiah who would take them back to Israel and rebuild the Bet haMikdash. They also renounced praying for their return to Jerusalem and mourning its destruction. All these elements, which constitute the “national” aspect of Judaism were deliberately eliminated from the prayer books and from the new Reform ritual. The message stood very clear: These European Jews saw and showed themselves as “patriotic” French or Germans, an integral part of their homeland’s heroic history and destiny. And as an act of loyalty to their “mother country,” they openly and explicitly renounced everything that could be perceived as an expression of “double loyalty”. The early reformers proudly called themselves French or Germans professing “the Mosaic religion” (they tried to use the word “Jew” or “Jewish religion” as little as possible). They sought to compare themselves with other religious groups, such as Catholics or Protestants who had no other alternative allegiance, national or geographic.
I’M NOT MY BROTHER’S KEEPER
The terrible consequences of this seemingly innocent paradigm shift were not long in coming. For example: In 1840 there was a blood libel in Damascus, Syria. The Jewish community of that city was falsely accused of killing a Christian child to use his blood in the Matzot of Pesah (sic!). Several community leaders were imprisoned, tortured and forced to “confess” to this ridicule accusation. The Jewish leaders of Europe (like Sir Moises Montefiore of London, Adolphe Crémieux of France, Eliyahu Picciotto of Austria and many others) moved heaven and earth to help free these poor Jews, and managed to get them out of prison after an inexhaustible struggle. There was an exception to these efforts: Abraham Geiger, one of the most prominent leaders of the Jewish community in Germany. Geiger, considered by many historians as the “founder of the reform movement”, refused to help because he claimed to have nothing in common with those “Arabs” as he called them. This has nothing to do with Sephardi/Ashkenazi distinctions. Rather, Geiger saw himself as belonging exclusively to the German people, and for him, consequently, there was no national (or emotional) link with any other Jew outside of Germany. The fact that these “Syrians” practiced the same creed as him, was totally circumstantial and unimportant. Geiger, loyal to the new ideology that he was first and foremost German, owed them nothing. Surely, Geiger was not the first Jew who refused to help other Jews. But as far as I know, he was the first Jew to use this new argument; renouncing the idea of a “Jewish people” to disassociate himself from “Israel”- the land and the nation And in this way, justifying his lack of action, his apathy and his indifference towards other Jews. All this was done, with extremely naive imagination, in pursuit of being perceived by the gentiles as an exemplary and patriotic German citizen, and being accepted as equal in the illuminated German society (the rest of the story need not be told…).
ALL THAT YOU NEED FOR THE TRIUMPH OF EVIL
But what does this have to do with the Shoah and the New York Times?
Unfortunately, very much. As painful as it is to talk about this matter, it teaches us a very important lesson, extremely relevant to our days. Between 1939 and 1945 there were about 5 million Jews living in the US. Many of them were very influential in the government and in American culture. However, there was very little that the American Jews actually did to influence president Roosevelt and try to save their brothers and sisters in Europe when they needed it most. European Jews were desperately asking the Americans to bomb the railroad tracks that led millions of Jews to death. Or to bomb the concentration camps. And as we know, none of this was done … not until after six million Jewish lives were taken.
But why? One of the reasons to explain this lack of action and this deafening silence responding to the endless cries is that the vast majority of American Jews (and non-Jews) DID NOT KNOW what was happening: they had no idea of the magnitude of the massacre that was taking place in European soil … How did this happen? A book called “Buried by The Times” by Laurel Leff, explains this enigma. Leff concludes that the man responsible for this deliberate misinformation was one of the most influential men in the USA at that time: Arthur Hays Sulzberger, editor in chief and owner of the New York Times (his family still owns this newspaper), the most important newspaper in the world. In the 1940s the New York Times, especially, was not only the most important newspaper in the world but also the “leading” newspaper; in the sense that thousands of other newspapers and newscasts in the US and around the world got their information from the Times and followed its leadership (this, obviously, is changing in the modern news-media-world).
Let’s see some examples that illustrate the biased attitude of the New York Times in reporting the atrocities occurring in Europe.
YOUR BROTHER’S BLOOD CRIES OUT TO ME FROM THE ASHES
A New York Times article of July 2, 1942, reports the killing of 700,000 Jews, one-fifth of the entire Jewish population of Poland. The article does mention concentration camps and gas chambers. The article also says: “Children in orphanages, elderly in hospices, sick in hospitals, and women were killed in the streets. In many places, Jews were detained and deported to undisclosed destinations or massacred in nearby forests ” The article continues to list how many Jews had been killed in each province, and then says that “the massacre still continues in Lwow.” However, the American public was largely unaware of the magnitude of what was happening. And this is why. These news stories were deliberately buried in the middle of the newspaper. The article of July 2, 1942 appeared on page 6 under a small subtitle reserved for insignificant material.
Another article of June 27, 1942 that describes the same massacre as “probably the biggest mass slaughter in history”, was on page 5 and had no title! This horrific downpayment of the Shoah did not occur because the front page of the newspaper was full of momentous news. The day this horrific story appeared in the New York Times, the front page featured articles about tennis shoes and canned fruit.
How did this happen?
Because Arthur Sulzberger, who was Jewish felt no connection at all to the threatened mass of European Jews. On the contrary, he did everything he could to ignore them. To disconnect from them. Because he was an American, of mosaic relgion.
Sulzberger wrote the following: “There is no common denominator between the poor and unfortunate Jew led [to death] in Poland and I. Certainly, in Poland, this Jew is part of a persecuted minority. … fortunately, I’m not in that category. “
WHEN WE DON’T SEE OURSELVES AS A UNITED NATION
According to Leslie Leff Sulzberger’s silence and minimization of the information on the Shoah and his lack of empathy towards European Jews were due to his reformist ideology. Sulzberger’s political grandfather, Isaac Wise, was the founder of the Jewish reform movement in the US, who continued promoting the idea that Jews are not a nation, but simply followers of a creed. Sulzberger was an assimilationist Jew. For him, Jews are not a people, in the same way, that Catholics or Protestants are not a people. In December 1942, in a note to the staff of the New York Times he wrote: “I have been trying to instruct the people of my newspaper on the subject of the word ‘Jews’; that they are not a race or a people.… “
Former New York Times journalist Ari Goldman, in his review of Leff’s book, writes:” There is no doubt that Sulzberger’s views on Judaism influenced what he did in his newspaper. “
Again and again, the views of Sulzberger are reflected in the editorials of the New York Times- in which the difficult situation of the Jews is not mentioned, rather it is deliberately ignored.
On the German refugee children, almost all of them Jews, the New York Times generalized: “[those children] are of any race and faith.”
On the Hitler regime, the New York Times wrote: “It is decency and justice that are being persecuted [by Hitler], not a race, nor a nationality, nor a faith.”
On the millions of Jewish refugees, the New York Times said: “They have nothing to do with a specific race or creed. It is not a Jewish or a Gentile problem. “
And notably, in an editorial on the Warsaw Ghetto uprising in 1943, the New York Times did not mention Jews at all.
Leff concludes: Sulzberger’s bias was shared by other Jewish staffers who decided to minimize, bury and downplay the news about the killings of Jews: “…the imperiled Jews of Europe had no advocate in the NYT’s newsroom.”
WATCH
How the NYT ignored the Holocaust
LISTEN TO THIS AMAZING AUDIO
Downplaying the Holocaust — Sulzberger & NY Times TED Talk by Anna Blech .mp3
