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UN-SHINING HOUR Sulzberger and His Jewish Problem BURIED BY THE TIMES: The Holocaust and America's Most Important Newspaper by Laurel Leff Cambridge University Press 432 pp., $29
Which American newspaper greeted Hitler's diplomatic victory at Munich with a recommendation that the world place its hopes in the Kellogg Briand Peace Pact? And when, in 1940, the great Jewish journalist and Zionist prophet Vladimir Jabotinsky gave his famous speech in New York calling for an emergency rescue to take the 6 million Jews of Europe to Palestine before they were killed, which newspaper ran a long denunciation of the idea, signed by its editor? And, once the Nazis' destruction of European Jewry was under way, which newspaper made it a policy to keep the particulars off the front page?
The answer to the first question is the newspaper that, during the cold war, turned out to have taken most deeply to heart the lesson of the appeasement of the Nazis, The Wall Street Journal. The answer to the second question is the newspaper that, once the killing began, cried out most passionately about the Holocaust, the Jewish Daily Forward. And the answer to the third is the newspaper that may well have carried more stories on the HoIocaust than any other English-language daily, The New York Times.
In other words, Hitler's war against the Jews confounded a lot of newspapers, a point to keep in mind when reading Laurel Leff's Burled by the Times: The Holocaust and America's Most Important Newspaper. Leff, a former reporter at The Wall Street Journal who is now a professor at Northeastern University, reckons the Timers default is worthy of an extended study because it was the leading newspaper of its day and because its defaults stemmed from the views - the inner conflicts, even - of its publisher, Arthur Hays Sulzberger. Her account is a brilliant history, one whose insights offer much for editors to think about today when a new war is under way in which an Islamist foe seeks the destruction of the state in which the remnant of European Jewry found redemption.
Leff opens her stoiy on March 2, 1944, when The Neiv York Times issued, on page four, amid thirteen other stories, a five-paragraph item from...