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.

Advertisement