Flash: NAA To Atone For Nazi-Era Snub Of Jewish Journos

By: Mark Fitzgerald In 1939, the American Newspaper Publishers Association would not give Harvard University Professor Carl Friedrich 10 minutes to speak about the plight of Jewish journalists trapped in Nazi Germany. At its annual convention next month, the renamed Newspaper Association of America (NAA) will discuss at length the industry's failure to help the journalists, President and CEO John Sturm pledged in a letter released Friday.

The NAA response was the latest fallout from research by Northeastern University Professor Laurel Leff showing that journalism schools and newspapers in the 1930s not only ignored the German Jewish journalists facing persecution--they sometimes reacted to requests for help with anti-Semitic responses. The research was first received widespread attention following an article in the February issue of Editor & Publisher.

Former New York Times reporter Laurence Zuckerman and the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies in Washington, D.C. organized a petition--ultimately signed by more than 80 journalists and journalism educators--that asked the NAA to acknowledge the industry's failures then, and to invite Leff to speak at its upcoming convention in Chicago.

In the letter dated March 3, Sturm acknowledged and expressed "regret" for ANPA's snub of Friedrich in 1939. The association had previously said an extensive search of its archives failed to find any mention of the incident.

An NAA spokesperson told E&P the association confirmed the incident through references in correspondence between Friedrich and an ANPA member publisher.

"We regret that the ANPA did not give Professor Friedrich the opportunity to speak to its 1939 convention, particularly since newspapers have played a crucial role in telling stories of the oppressed, and providing a voice to those whose stories would not be told otherwise," he wrote in the letter, and in a statement later released to E&P.

Sturm invited Leff and Friedrich's son, Paul Friedrich, to address the NAA board of directors meeting April 1 during the convention.

In addition, Sturm said that NAA chairman Jay R. Smith, president of Cox Newspapers, will speak about "the work of Prof. Friedrich, and the issues raised in Prof. Leff's paper," in his keynote address on April 3.

Sturm also said he had asked Leff to write an article on her research for the May issue of the association's magazine Presstime.

"We strongly commend John Sturm and the NAA for facing up to the failure of U.S. journalists and publishers to aid Jewish refugee journalists, just as other public figures, corporations, and governments have in recent years faced up to their own failures during the Holocaust," Rafael Medoff, director of the Wyman Institute, said:. "Acknowledging and regretting past mistakes is the first step in ensuring that they will never be repeated."

Leff said in a statement she was "pleased to have the opportunity to address the NAA board of directors, and write for the NAA's magazine, about this troubling but important chapter in the history of American journalism.?

In her research of Friedrich's papers, former Wall Street Journal reporter Leff discovered that he contacted journalism schools, newspapers and the ANPA urging them to help bring German Jewish journalists under special immigration waivers to work in the United States. Many other professions such as lawyers and doctors formed committees and networks to rescue Jewish colleagues from impending German persecution.

The newspaper industry, however, was not only indifferent to their plight, journalists and educators occasionally expressed hostility to the idea of bring German Jews into the industry, Leff writes in her research paper, "Rebuffing Refugee Journalists: The Profession's Failure to Help Jews Persecuted By Nazi Germany."

For instance, Lawrence Murphy, then director of the University of Illinois School of Journalism is quoted as responding: "The minute that Jews show up in numbers they become a threat to the others as they reveal that they would occupy all the jobs there are, and that they are quite likely to work together in filling the jobs...It is simply the case that we must hurt them to help them. We must keep them from being too prominent and assertive, and from threatening to take over all the white collar jobs."

While other professions saved colleagues, it appears the newspapers and j-schools did not assist a single German Jewish journalist.

The findings disturbed many journalists who responded with the petition to the NAA.

Among the signatories were former New York Times reporter Bernard Weintraub; former Wall Street Journal reporter Robert S. Greenberger; film critic Judith Crist; former Washington Post reporter Bill McAllister; Neil Hickey and Russ Baker, contributing editors of the Columbia Journalism Review; PBS talk show host Ben Wattenberg; New York Observer columnist Ron Rosenbaum; syndicated columnist Jeff Jacoby; and Edward I. Koch, former mayor of New York City, and now a newspaper columnist and Bloomberg radio commentator.