The New York Times Has a Jewish Problem by Hugh Fitzgerald
POSTED By unanimous vote,MIL-ED editorial advisory board
An editor at the New York Times has recently apologized for having written several anti-Semitic and racist tweets. Tom Wright-Piersanti is a senior staff editor at the Times. In the years 2008-2010, Wright-Piersanti wrote several offensive tweets, which were uncovered by the website Breitbart.
On New Years’ Day 2010, Wright-Piersanti tweeted, “I was going to say ‘Crappy Jew Year,’ but one of my resolutions is to be less anti-Semitic. So… HAPPY Jew Year. You Jews.”
The previous month, during the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah, Wright-Piersanti shared a picture of a car with a lit menorah on its roof and wrote, “Who called the Jew-police?”
“I have deleted tweets from a decade ago that are offensive,” Wright-Piersanti tweeted after the Breitbart article was published. “I am deeply sorry.”
He also mocked Native Americans, and Afro-Americans, for which no doubt he is also “deeply sorry.”
Amazing how “deeply sorry” people are about so many things the minute they are found out, but not one minute earlier. Perhaps he is “deeply sorry” only because those tweets came to light. They were not just “offensive,” but disgusting. In any event, Wright-Piersanti apparently needn’t worry about his job. As of this writing, he’s still at the New York Times, a paper that has a Jewish, and latterly an Israeli, problem.
It recently published two antisemitic cartoons in its international edition. The more offensive of the two depicted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a guide dog (a dachshund) wearing a Star of David collar and leading President Donald Trump, who is wearing a black kippah. Anyone of sense would have seen this cartoon as antisemitic, save apparently the editor at the Times who approved the cartoon.
And the Times, just like Wright-Piersanti, said it was “deeply sorry.” Yes, it was “deeply sorry for the publication of an anti-Semitic political cartoon” that appeared in its international print edition. And the Times has decided to stop publishing cartoons from non-staff members. It has also said that it will also overhaul its bias training to have an emphasis on antisemitism, according to an internal note from the Times’s publisher, A.G. Sulzberger. What about training on how to bring a modicum of fairness to reporting on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? Or would that be asking too much?
The Times has had a “Jewish problem” ever since Hitler came to power in 1933. So let’s go back to the 1930s and 1940s, before there was even an Israel for the Times to be anti-Israel about, to see how, and to ask why, the most influential paper in the world, owned by Jews, paid so little attention to the murderous threat of Hitler and the Nazis as it grew throughout the 1930s.
It was precisely because the paper was owned by Jews, who were determined not to have their paper be thought of as an organ of special pleading about Jewish suffering, that the New York Times failed so miserably, in its under-reporting of the Holocaust and the antisemitic crimes during the 1930s that led up to its final, murderous efflorescence. In her brilliant Buried by the Times: The Holocaust and America’s Most Important Newspaper, Laurel Leff notes that Arthur Hays Sulzberger, who became the publisher in 1936 (though he was effectively the publisher from 1933, because of the illness of the previous publisher, Adolph Ochs) and continued in that post until 1961, at the most critical period for the Jews of Europe, had studiously refrained from having anything to do with Jewish organizations or causes.
He (Arthur Sulzberger, the publisher of the Times) refused to donate to the United Jewish Appeal or the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. He wrote in 1934, “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 of the world. … I look askance at any movement which assists in making the peacemaker among nations merely a national Distribution Committee, favoring instead the National Missions of the Presbyterian Church.” In 1948, he wrote, “I know of no difference in my way of life than in that of any Unitarian.”
Sulzberger was committed to an odd definition of journalistic balance. The Times refused to run letters to the editor that attacked the rise of antisemitism in Germany, so that it would not also have to offer space to those supporting antisemitism.
Instead of speaking of Jewish refugees, Times editorials tended to speak of German refugees. Arthur Hays Sulzberger refused to intervene with American officials to get a visa for a cousin, Fritz Sulzberger, advising him in 1938 to stay in Germany. So indifferent was he to what was going on in Germany, apparently, that he thought as late as 1938 that Jews should remain in Germany and ride out the storm. His misreading of reality was astonishing. By that year, it should have been clear that staying in Germany amounted to a death sentence.
In 1933, Jews had been discharged from all universities, and then from all civil service jobs. Long before Kristallnacht, there were boycotts of Jewish shops, Jews were attacked, even beaten to death, on the street, Nazi rallies were held where Jews were hysterically denounced; a phrase from a 19th-century antisemite, Heinrich Treitschke, was recycled for use by the Nazis: “Die Juden sind unser Unglück!“(“The Jews are our misfortune”).
Yet in 1938, the publisher of the New York Times was advising a relative to remain in Germany. A. H. Sulzberger didn’t want to hear about all the atrocities German Jews were enduring. And he didn’t want his paper to make too much of such things either.
The threat to Jews was always minimized by the Times. Early in the war, the Times ran a campaign of nine editorials and three front-page stories that urged Congress to allow British families to send their children to safety in America, but made no such campaign on behalf of the Jews. Those British children might have been in danger from V-2 rockets, if they lived in the East End of London, but the Jews in Nazi-occupied countries faced certain death if they were not brought to America. The New York Times – under Arthur Hays Sulzberger – didn’t care enough to call for their admission.
Nor did the Times think helping Jews find refuge from the Nazis outside of America was a cause to promote in its editorials. When the British issued the White Paper of 1939, restricting Jewish immigration to Palestine to 15,000 a year for five years, the Times ran an editorial praising the move as necessary “to save the homeland itself from overpopulation as well as from an increasingly violent resistance on the part of the Arabs.”
That White Paper effectively kept hundreds of thousands of Jews, who might have escaped from Europe in time, from being admitted to Mandatory Palestine. Churchill thundered against it as unjust and cruel. But not according to the New York Times; its editors thought the White Paper was perfectly correct in permitting no more than 15,000 Jews a year to find refuge in Palestine from the Nazis. Otherwise, the editorial absurdly claimed, Mandatory Palestine would be “overpopulated.”
On what basis did the Times editors make that claim? Israel now has a population that is six times the population of Mandatory Palestine in 1939, and it is still not overpopulated. And the Times actually thought that it was preferable in 1939 to keep Jews in Europe, where they were almost certain to be killed, in order not to anger the Arabs in Palestine. The Mandate for Palestine’s provisions, that required Great Britain, as the Mandatory authority, to “facilitate” Jewish immigration and “encourage close settlement by Jews on the land,” were to be ignored so as not to upset the local Arabs.
Arthur Hays Sulzberger lived among, and wanted to be accepted by, other people of great wealth, including many non-Jews, and he did not wish to be thought of as caring too much for the fate of Europe’s or Palestine’s — Jews. In that he succeeded, and for that he deserves endless obloquy in the history books. Assimilated and anti-Zionist, he instructed his editors to downplay news about the suffering of Europe’s Jews so that the newspaper would not appear to be too concerned with Jewish matters. He was a horrible man.
There was very little reporting in the Times on the rising antisemitism in Nazi Germany all through the 1930s. Atrocities against Jews in Germany, which began in the streets soon after Hitler took power in 1933, were mentioned intermittently, almost always in a few paragraphs deep inside the paper.
Even Kristallnacht, November 9-10, 1938, when Jewish homes, hospitals and schools were demolished by Nazi attackers using sledgehammers, received less treatment in the New York Times than it did in many other newspapers around the world. The rioters destroyed 267 synagogues throughout Germany and Austria and the Sudetenland. Over 7,000 Jewish businesses were damaged or destroyed; 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and sent to concentration camps. Hundreds of Jews were murdered, often beaten to death by mobs.
This had no visible effect on the editorial and reporting policies set down by Arthur Hays Sulzberger.
Why did this underreporting at the Times matter so much? It mattered because it had a direct effect on the sense of urgency among American Jews, and on the attitude in the government about rescuing Jews from the Nazis.
When the Holocaust began in earnest, and news about the roundups of Jews sent to concentration camps – labor and death camps were distinguished, though in the “labor camps” the inmates were often worked to death — managed to filter out, the New York Times continued to give such reports a few paragraphs deep within the paper. It did the same with reports from the Eastern Front, about the gassing of Jews in the mobile gas vans, about the mass shootings right on the edge of open pits into which those killed would topple.
The paper never connected the dots of the Nazi efforts to exterminate the Jews of Europe, never presented it as part of a comprehensive genocidal plan. Its coverage of the murders of six million Jews was absurdly small, given the world-shattering size of the atrocity; this “Jewish news” from Europe was most often covered in a few paragraphs in the back; more attention was given in the Times to business, movies, golf championships, and racing news than to the Holocaust.
Sulzberger, the publisher, was not haunted by what was going on in Europe. He gave his own attention to such pleasures as vacationing at Knollwood on Saranac Lake, in the Adirondacks. Knollwood was an enclave consisting of seven or eight luxurious “rustic cottages” that belonged to leading members of “Our Crowd,” that is, the assimilated and rich German Jews of New York, members of the Harmonie Club, families who had arrived in the 19th century from Germany and looked down on the recent Jewish arrivals from Eastern Europe. They were glad to host a celebrity refugee from Germany – Einstein went twice to Knollwood, and his photograph is still on display in one of the “cottages” – but didn’t want to be unduly bothered with unpleasant news from Europe. And Sulzberger was one of them.
That failure by the New York Times to report adequately throughout the 1930s on the growing danger to Germany’s Jews was not without consequences, as shall be discussed tomorrow.
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