Buried by the Times: The Holocaust and America’s Most Important Newspaper Book Review

When opening a newspaper or turning on the television to watch the local news, the hope is that the journalists are doing their jobs by just reporting the news. It is up to the viewer or the reader to decide how to react.

Unfortunately, as in many things, hope often springs eternal.

In the 2006 book, Buried by the Times: The Holocaust and America’s Most Important Newspaper, journalist Laurel Leff examines how during World War II, the editors of the New York Times and the paper’s Jewish publisher, Arthur Hayes Sulzberger, either minimized or ignored the mass slaughter of Jews in Europe by the Nazis.

This book is a slow read. Normally I would say that books that are slow are not worth the time it takes to read the book. However, this book is. It should be a slow read because by the time I finished the book, I was angry. I was angry because, the New York Times, then and now, is one of the most influential papers in the country. Instead of using their influence to help their fellow human beings (and their fellow Jews), they decided to save their own skins.

I kept thinking while I was reading this book that if Mr. Sulzberger and his Jewish staff had been in Europe and not the United States, they might have suffered the same fate as the six million.

I recommend it.

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Flashback Friday-Yours, Mine & Ours (2005)

These days, divorce, re-marriage and blended families are completely normal. But that does not guarantee that these new blended families will get along.

In the 2005 film, Yours, Mine & Ours (a reboot of the 1968 Lucille Ball and Henry Fonda film, Yours, Mine and Ours) Admiral Frank Beardsley (Dennis Quaid) is a widower with ten children. His military lifestyle has extended to his home life, using it as a way to keep order in his large and busy household. Helen North (Rene Russo) is a widowed artist with an equally large household, though her children live a much freer lifestyle than Frank’s children.

Former high school sweethearts, Frank and Helen reunite after decades of separation. They quickly decide to get married, which does not sit well with their respective children. Though Frank and Helen are in the throes of love, their children are not so in love with the additions to their family and make a plan to end the marriage.

As movies go, this movie hovers somewhere between mildly charming and harmless. It’s not the most cerebral of films, but it is also the kind of film that one can watch on a rainy weekend afternoon and not feel like one has wasted two hours of their time.

Do I recommend it? Maybe.