Nadene Goldfoot
Many Western democracies ignored the Nazis' antisemitism that was growing in Germany as a bad feature of people who otherwise could be lived with. Arthur Hays Sulzberger was one of them. He became the New York Times's publisher in 1935. Sulzberger was in name only, a Jew, who felt that the threat of Nazi antisemitism was being used by some Jews to arouse pro-Zionist feelings. He regarded himself as an anti-Zionist and let everyone know it.
His great-great-grandfather was Benjamin Seixas, brother of the famous rabbi of Congregation Shearith Israel for 50 years, and American Revolutionary Gershom Mendes Seixas (1745-1816) in Portugal of Congregation Shearith Israel, who was one of the founders of the New York Stock Exchange. His great-grandfather, Dr. Daniel Levy Maduro Peixotto, was a prominent physician, director of Columbia University's Medical College and a member of the Philolexian Society. His great-granduncle was the Jacob Hays, the High Constable of New York's Jewish supercop from 1801 to 1850.
Sulzberger graduated from the Horace Mann School in 1909 and graduated from Columbia College in 1913, and married Iphigene Bertha Ochs in 1917. In 1918 he began working at the Times, and became publisher when his father-in-law, Adolph Ochs, the previous Times publisher, died in 1935. Ochs was born to a Jewish family in Cincinnati, Ohio, on March 12, 1858. His parents, Julius Ochs and Bertha Levy, were both German immigrants.
The New York Times is owned by The New York Times Company, which is publicly traded. It has been governed by the Sulzberger family since 1896, through a dual-class share structure after its shares became publicly traded. A. G. Sulzberger and his father, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr.—the paper's publisher and the company's chairman, respectively—are the fifth and fourth generation of the family to head the paper.
Before Sulzberger's appointment as publisher, the paper had instituted a ban on letters-to-the-editor concerning Hitler. This was in the 30's when the Nazis were coming to power), out of fear that the Times, widely known to be owned by the Ochs and Sulzberger families, would be perceived as being a "Jewish newspaper." Thus, the Times's policy during the Nazi era-a policy for which the paper has since apologized, was to underplay Hitler's and the Nazi's antisemitism.
As a publisher of a newspaper, he instructed his city editor not to give "too much space" to the efforts of groups such as the American Jewish Committee (AJC) to aid the Jews of Europe.
She grew up in Montreal, Canada and earned her MA from Columbia University, and in 1969 her PhD from McGill University. She is the sister of David Roskies, professor of Yiddish and Jewish literature at the Jewish Theological Seminary.
"Harvard professor, Ruth R.Wisse, PhD,b: 1936 Romania, author of JEWS AND POWER, wrote on the extraordinarily damaging effects of such a policy. What might have happened, she speculates, if Sulzberger had acted truly without bias. The New York Times would then have responded to Hitler's virulent anti-Semitism as signaling a broader danger to everything precious to themselves and to America. They would have assiduously gathered information about Hitler's program of re-armament, as Winston Churchill tried to do once he became convinced that Hitler was planning to attack the West. They would have drawn daily attention to Germany's abuses of democratic freedom, its perversions of law, its abrogation of civil liberties. They would have registered the way that Nazi anti-Semitism cloaked darker and their anti-democratic purposes were behind an enmity directed against the Jews alone."
She wrote, "There is no such thing as an Arab-Israel conflict, ... there is an Arab war against Israel, there is an Arab war against the Jewish people's right to a state.
According to one critic, Wisse's work has been characterized "by the sharpness of her insight, by her unwillingness to retreat from a skirmish and by the inability of even those who disagree with her to deny her brilliance." She won the 1988 Itzik Manger Prize for Yiddish literature. She received one of the 2007 National Humanities Medals. The award cited her for "scholarship and teaching that have illuminated Jewish literary traditions. Her insightful writings have enriched our understanding of Yiddish literature and Jewish culture in the modern world."
Israel's most prominent writer, Amos Oz, appeared in the New York Times to accuse Likud for engendering an atmosphere of "religious, chauvinistic egoism" that benefited from Arab violence and replicated its extremism." I would say that Oz was on the liberal side. Oz described himself as an "atheist of the book", stating from a secular perspective that his Jewish heritage "contains first and foremost books [and] texts". His parents were not religious growing up, though Oz attended the community religious school, Tachkemoni, since the only alternative was a socialist school affiliated with the Labor movement, to which his family was even more opposed.
"Oz was one of the first Israelis to advocate a two-state solution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict after the Six-Day War."
"In a June 2010 editorial in The New York Times, he wrote: "Hamas is not just a terrorist organization. Hamas is an idea, a desperate and fanatical idea that grew out of the desolation and frustration of many Palestinians. No idea has ever been defeated by force... To defeat an idea, you have to offer a better idea, a more attractive and acceptable one... Israel has to sign a peace agreement with President Mahmoud Abbas and his Fatah government in the West Bank."
"The editorial pages of The New York Times are typically liberal in their position. The New York Times has not endorsed a Republican Party member for president since Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1956; since 1960, it has endorsed the Democratic Party nominee in every presidential election (see New York Times presidential endorsements). The New York Times did endorse incumbent moderate Republican mayors of New York City Rudy Giuliani in 1997, and Michael Bloomberg in 2005 and 2009. The Times also endorsed Republican New York state governor George Pataki for re-election in 2002."
One should realize that every newspaper takes a certain slant, just like Fox News on TV does. The New York Times was no different and has maintained this position of liberalism. They all need to be very careful to give their readers facts. We read with our own opinions. Facts will clarify our opinions.
Resource:
The Reason For Antisemitism...WHY THE JEWS?, by Dennis Prager & Joseph Telushkin, p. 195
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Hays_Sulzberger
https://forward.com/culture/425415/high-constable-jacob-hays-new-yorks-forgotten-jewish-super-cop/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_York_Times
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolph_Ochs#cite_note-nyt-3
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amos_Oz
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