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| July 11, 2005 |
REVIEW: Buried by the Times: The Holocaust and America's Most Important Newspaper
Laurel Leff's lengthy and well-research indictment of the New York Times wastes little time in getting to the indictment part. The introduction relays a throw away paragraph from a page 4 story in a 1944 edition of the Times in which the Jewish National Committee in Poland estimates a quarter-million Jews will die in the coming weeks and issues a wrenching appeal for help, "perhaps our last voice from the abyss."
 A buried paragraph in a page 4 story.
"The journalists at the New York Times did not respond to that anguished cry - not the London correspondent who filed it, or the cable editor who read it, or the copy reader who edited it, or the night news editor who determined its placement, or the managing editor who signed off on it, or the publisher who had ultimate responsibility for the newspaper in which it appeared," writes Leff in the third paragraph of the book.
Leff continues for another 358 pages (plus appendices and endnotes) outlining just how unresponsive the Times was during the Holocaust. Leff argues, a host of factors caused the most well-known publication in America to downplay (consciously or not) the mass genocide occurring in Europe, and the Times' status as America's premiere newspaper didn't help the story get much play in other publications either.
And as resonating as that story is in and of itself, it has a particular resonance in our current, media-saturated universe where genocides regularly get less attention than they deserve while Paris Hilton's latest escapades make the front page. Leff even says as much, writing "it serves as a case study of how difficult it is for a group the press has identified as 'the other' ... to receive adequate media attention no matter the extent of the catastrophe."
All of which, in addition to Leff's exhaustive research and well-crafted prose, makes Buried by the Times a stand-out in a very crowded field of Holocaust-related titles. There are so many at this point that we often give them little more than a passing glance. What is left to read of such an exhaustively chronicled subject? What more is there to learn?
Plenty, and the best books are the ones that make those lessons explicit to our current world. Leff does that quite successfully here, and we'd be remiss if we didn't make it front page news that you should read it.
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