Leff provides a necessary look at how the most influential newspaper in America dealt with the Nazi regime before and during the Second World War.

It seems to me that given the very important strength of anti-semitism in America during the first half of the 20th Century, the amazing thing is that the American Jews were not persecuted and interned on some pretext, that the US supported the creation of the State of Israel -- and just barely did so despite the opposition of the State Department -- and that American Jews have reached a position unequaled anywhere. It all might have been different and in the days of Father Coughlin and Charles Lindburgh and Joseph Kennedy it certainly looked like it would be different.

Ms. Leff has meant well and has made a contribution. Moral outrage in this case is less useful than a calm assessment of the real forces at work in America concerning the Jews and how best to prosecute the war.

The real outrage should be saved for the role of Christianity for fifteen hundred years or more in victimizing the Jews -- to the extent that only a small percentage of Christians could avoid the ever-present temptation of Jew hatred.

Laurel Leff has given us a nicely detailed description of how the New York Times, then as now the most eminent newspaper in the country, failed to appreciate the historical significance of the Holocaust while it was under way in Europe.

This was not a matter of suppression of news. Whatever news was available was published in the Times, but it was buried in back pages. The Nazis' systematic killings of Jews, when news of them reached the West, were not accorded the front-page status that, in hindsight, these events warranted. And here lies the fundamental weakness of the book as I see it. The author's vision is ahistorical, anachronistic; it applies what we know now to a judgement of what was done then.

Nevertheless, Leff's book cannot help but be of importance to anyone interested in the period. Her strongest point is the role of Arthur Hays Sulzberger, publisher of the Times from 1935 to 1945. Scion of a wealthy family of German Jews, living in a period in which Jews were still excluded from many positions of influence and were strictly limited in the prestige universities, Sulzberger felt uneasy about his Jewish identify. He was, in the language of those days, an assimilationist. He was very much worried that the public might consider him a Jew before it recognized him as a newspaper man. Leff's description of his role in the anti-Zionist American Council for Judaism is most enlightening. But, as Leff also points out, the Reform Judaism of his day was also largely anti-Zionist. Sulzberger was not the only, nor the most rabid of the anti-Zionists among prominent American Jews. In any case, as Leff indicates, he was also basically fair-minded and was not given to suppressing news.

The extent to which Sulzberger's personal values may have influenced the Times's coverage of the Holocaust is not clear. This question, as well as the larger question of how unique the Times was in its Holocaust treatment, can only be explored by a comparative treatment. How did the Times compare with other news outlets ? How much better could it have done, given the limitations in the world's understanding of the significance of the Holocaust while it was in progress ? Leff suggests that the Times was not unique, but she gives no particulars. She is not interested in making comparisons with other papers, either here or abroad.

The New York Yiddish press of those days was still very important and very vibrant. There were several Yiddish dailies, with the Morning Journal and the Forward probably the most important. There was also the Tug (Day), and the Freiheit, the Communist Yiddish daily. Leff takes scant interest in any of these. She certainly does not do what would be required to understand the Times's treatment of the Holocaust, viz. a detailed comparative analysis of the Yiddish press accounts in relationship to those of the Times.

We are left with a description of what happened at the Times only, and this description is both enlightening and thorough. But we are not told whether, with all of Sulberger's qualms and other institutional peculiarities of the Times, that newspaper could have given us a sustained, balanced, meaningful treatment of the Holocaust as it was unfolding, given the fact that the world simply could not grasp the horror and the novelty of the Nazi crime.

I was a newspaper reader in those days, not only of the Times, but also of a variety of Jewish sources (but not of the Yiddish press). I read all the little facts. But I had no inkling of what was really happening, of the magnitude of the Holocaust. That came to me, as it did to the rest of the world, only some years after the war.