E-Mail This Article to a Friend TIMES PAST Did the New York Times downplay the Holocaust? BY MIKE MILIARD

Between 1939 and 1945, the New York Times ran 1186 stories about the horrors being wrought upon the Jews in Europe. Only 26 times did one of those articles appear on the front page, and in just six of those were Jews identified as the primary victims of the Third Reich’s depredations. Why would a paper whose motto is "All the News That’s Fit To Print" gloss over one of the most significant events of the 20th century? In her new book, Buried by the Times: The Holocaust and America’s Most Important Newspaper (Cambridge University Press), Northeastern journalism professor Laurel Leff looks for answers. She spoke with the Phoenix about what she discovered.

Q: Many people assume the true magnitude of the Holocaust wasn’t apparent until the camps were liberated. But you show that many reporters knew what was happening. Why wasn’t it reported?

A: You have to look at the media in general, and then at the Times specifically. I think for the media in general, they felt as if the deaths of European Jews was something that their readers would not be interested in. America was fighting a world war, and their sons were dying; a group of foreigners that were a minority in the US was worth putting on page 17, but not the front page. For the Times, the reasons were more complicated. Half the Jews in America lived in the paper’s circulation area at the time. And half of them were foreign born, which meant that it was their relatives who were being marched into the gas chambers. This was not some distant group that their readers couldn’t identify with. And, of course, the owners of the Times were Jews themselves. They were very concerned about appearing to be a "Jewish" newspaper, or appearing to be pleading on behalf of Jews. They were desperately seeking a position of neutrality.

Q: Talk about Arthur Hays Sulzberger’s ambivalence.

A: Sulzberger’s grandfather-in-law, Isaac Wise, had been one of the founders of Reform Judaism in the United States. One of his precepts was that Judaism was solely a religion; it wasn’t a people, it wasn’t a nation, it wasn’t an ethnicity, it was just a religion. Sulzberger strongly believed in maintaining this view of Judaism. And it almost became stronger in the face of Hitler’s insistence that Judaism is biologically based, and that it was a race. He almost saw not identifying Jews by race as a way of defying Hitler. That partly explains his attempt to blur the specific persecution of Jews. So his Jewishness, instead of making him more sympathetic, made him more concerned about how it would be perceived, and put him as an antagonist. It seems Sulzberger’s conflicted feelings about being Jewish really dictated the way the entire news organization covered this story.

Q: How did the European bureaus play into all this?

A: One of the most interesting, and certainly the bureau that was initially on the front lines, was the Berlin bureau. The bureau chief had been in Germany for over 30 years when Hitler came to power, and he was extremely pro-German. I’d even go so far as to say pro-Nazi. The Times had one pro-Nazi bureau chief and two very inexperienced reporters there. So they left most of the handling of this to the wire services, which led to downplaying a lot of that information.

Q: What might have happened if the Times had been more explicit?

A: You have to be very careful when you start engaging in too many what-ifs. Having said that, the way the Times put the stories on the inside pages did mean that the American public in some ways just didn’t know. These stories were very hard to find. Many American Jewish groups were trying very hard to get the Roosevelt administration to take some kind of action — whether it meant loosening up visa requirements or getting more food to ghettos in Poland or allowing more Jews to escape to Palestine — but they couldn’t get any traction. One reason for that was the way the press treated it, and the Times had a disproportional influence. For other journalists, I think, the idea that the "Jewish" New York Times didn’t consider this to be an important story had to affect the way they covered it.

Q: What lessons can we learn from this? Have things improved?

A: When you look at any of the more contemporary genocides — Cambodia or Rwanda or Bosnia or Darfur — I think you will find lots, lots more front-page stories about those events than there were about the Holocaust. And certainly many more editorials. I also think journalists are much more willing to tell the kind of personalized stories that enable people to care about someone who seems different from themselves.

Laurel Leff reads from Buried by the Times at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, May 18, at the Harvard Coop, 1400 Mass Ave, in Cambridge; call (617) 499-2000.