Jews during the Holocaust
Photo: GPO
U.S. journalists urged to apologize to Jews
More than 70 leading American journalists sign petition urging Newspaper Association of America to acknowledge failure of U.S. journalists to aid Jewish refugee journalists trying to flee Nazi regime in 1930s
More than 70 of the United States' leading journalists signed a petition urging the Newspaper Association of America to apologize for failing to aid Jewish journalists who escaped the Nazi regime at the end of the 1930s.
The journalists based their petition on a study conducted by Laurel Leff, a journalist professor from Northeastern University and author of the book "Buried By The Times: The Holocaust and America's Most Important Newspaper," in which she studied the New York Times' coverage of the Holocaust.
In her research, Leff described how American journalists, professors and newspaper publishers refused to aid Jewish journalists fleeing Germany's Nazi regime. As opposed to doctors and lawyers, who established committees in a bid to assist their oppressed colleagues, Jewish journalists from Europe were ignored.
'Decisions influenced by anti-Semitism'
The journalism schools did not add even one working position for European refugees and rejected requests to receive foreign journalists, sometimes by presenting scathing anti-Semitic reasons, Leff charged.
There is no doubt that these decisions were influenced by anti-Semitism, she added.
The petition states that "just as various governments, industries, and institutions have in recent years faced up to the wrongs that they committed during the Hitler era, so too should the journalism community acknowledge what its leaders did, and did not do, during those years."
The signatories include famous journalists such as Marvin Kalb, former chief diplomatic correspondent for CBS News and NBC News; Nicholas Lemann, dean of the Columbia University School of Journalism; and Leon Wieseltier, literary editor of The New Republic.
