Prominent Journalists Raise Concerns About 'The Jewish Question'

By: Mark Fitzgerald A letter circulating among journalism academics and professionals is demanding the Newspaper Association of America (NAA) take actions to acknowledge American journalists' indifference and even hostility to the plight of Jewish journalists trapped in Nazi-era Germany.

The "letter of concern," written and circulated by former New York Times reporter Laurence Zuckerman and Rafael Medoff, director of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, cites the "Shoptalk" article in the current issue of Editor & Publisher that reported on research by Laurel Leff, a professor at Northeastern University.

Leff, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, found that in the late 1930s as Hitler's persecution of Jews accelerated, other professions in America were working hard to bring German Jewish refugees into the country under special immigration waivers, but American journalism schools, newspapers, and the NAA, then known as the American Newspaper Publishers Association (ANPA), were not only indifferent to their plight--they occasionally expressed hostility in clearly anti-Semitic terms.

For instance, Leff's paper, "Rebuffing Refugee Journalists: The Profession's Failure to Help Jews Persecuted By Nazi Germany," quotes Lawrence Murphy, then director of the University of Illinois School of Journalism as saying: "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."

The specific incident prompting the letter to NAA President John Sturm occurred in 1939. According to Leff?s research, the ANPA refused to allow the prominent Harvard University professor Carl Friedrich ten minutes to ask publishers to help refugee Jewish journalists. The letter asks Sturm to invite Leff to speak on her research at the NAA's upcoming annual convention April in Chicago.

"We think you will agree that these actions by the leaders of American journalism were, as Editor & Publisher puts it, 'shameful,'" Zuckerman and Medoff write in the "Dear Colleague" letter being circulated among journalists and academics.

In two telephone interviews, Medoff said the letter had not yet been sent to NAA's Sturm and would be sent first as a "private communication." He declined to talk further about the letter on the record, except to suggest that some 60 to 70 prominent journalists and j-school academics had agreed to sign it.

Neither the e-mail soliciting signatures nor the proposed letter to Sturm carry any suggestion it is a private communication. "And please feel free to share this e-mail with your colleagues," reads the last line of the solicitation.

The proposed letter to Strum notes the ANPA's refusal to aid the refugee journalists or to allow Friedrich to address the 1939 convention. "Since the ANPA later merged into the Newspaper Association of America," the letter reads, "we turn to you to address the terrible wrong that was committed in 1939. We believe that the Newspaper Association of America should publicly acknowledge that the ANPA was wrong to turn its back on Jewish refugee journalists fleeing Hitler. In addition, we ask you to invite Prof. Leff to address the April 2006 convention, in Chicago, of the Newspaper Association of America, concerning her important research."

In a statement in response to E&P?s questions, NAA?s Sturm said that after a detailed review of ANPA archives from 1938, 1939 and 1940, ?NAA is unable to find any record of Professor Carl Friedrich's request to speak at the ANPA 1939 convention about the plight of German Jewish journalists, or any record of any discussion of this issue in the recorded minutes of the ANPA Board meetings held during that time period.?

Sturm said the association has tried without success to get more information from Leff. ?NAA would welcome the opportunity to address Professor Leff's research in a constructive manner,? Sturm said.

?The allegation she makes is one we take seriously, particularly since newspapers have played a crucial role in telling stories of the oppressed, and providing a voice to those whose stories would not otherwise be told,? Sturm said.

He added that NAA has not received the letter being circulated among journalists and academics, ?but will respond to it if and when we do.?

The letter notes that "various governments, corporations, and institutions have acknowledged the wrongs they committed during the Hitler era by publicly apologizing, paying reparations, or taking other appropriate steps to face up to their past," and says the NAA also should "squarely face up to the mistakes made by the journalistic community during those terrible years."

The copy seen by E&P is signed by several well-known journalists including former TV network reporter Marvin Kalb, now at Harvard's Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy; former New York Times reporters Zuckerman and Bernard Weinraub; Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby; and New York Observer columnist Ron Rosenbaum.

In a telephone interview, Marvin Kalb said he readily agreed to sign the letter, and noted that he had done research similar to Leff's into how The New York Times essentially buried coverage of the Holocaust during the Nazi era. In her 2003 book "Buried By The Times: The Holocaust and America's Most Important Newspaper," Leff studied how the newspaper downplayed reports of mass atrocities against Jews.

"She did a much more in-depth study," Kalb said, "but essentially we ended up in the same place, that is, for a variety of reasons--some economic, some emotional and fairly complicated, some personally having to do with the Sulzberger who was the publisher a that time."