Allow me to preface my article wherein I quote Professor Jerold S. Auerbach from the May 8, 2019 interview with Rafael Medoff in Ami Magazine. The subject of said article concerns Adolph Ochs, who purchased The New York Times in 1896, and used his purchase as a forum for what he detested most: Jews. Observant (frum) Jews.. As such, Ochs's bearing was a more Bedouin mindset than Brooks Brothers. And, if today's Sulzberger family ever decided to sell their calling card, I've no doubt that if Hamas offered a bid, it might be considered.
In the article, Professor Auerbach lays bare the mindset of Adolph Ochs concerning Jews of the non-Reform variety: "Customs and politics made assimilated Jews like Ochs uncomfortable. The New York Times became the journalistic reflexion of the assimilated's anxiety about dual loyalty.
Impoverished, Yiddish-speaking, evidently foreigh and conspicuously Jewish people, left Ochs worried he would be associated with them in the eyes of non-Jews. Thus, his newspaper reflected the views of assimilated Reform Jews predominantly of Jewish origin, determined to remold Judaism to appear more compatible with American National identity and loyalty."
Professor Auerbach continues, "Joseph M. Levy was hired in 1928 as a reporter, who, along with Judah Magnes an American Reform Rabbi, guided their Anti-Zionist views into the paper which embraced their claim that Jewish development of the country (Israel) was to blame for the conflict with the Arabs. Ochs and Levy didn't want the Jewish state, it would upset the Arabs and they didn't want those Jews in America, either, because they thought their presence here would provoke Anti-Semitism here."
Dr. Rafael Medoff, as interviewer, asks: "So where were Jews fleeing Hitler supposed to go?" According to Professor Auerbach, "Ochs was dismissive of the looming threat to Jews in Germany. Upon Och's death, his son in-law Arthur Hays Sulzberger became publisher, also a Reform Jew who insisted the paper not identify Jews as a distinctive group.
In my estimation, the paper Ochs left is a slaveship, where any pro-Israel reporters go about their professional lives harboring such in secret, while playing the part of supplicant as to the mindset of Ochs and his heirs.
Instead, the paper defended restrictive American immigration quotas refusing to identify the refugee problem as a Jewish problem. They muted their coverage of the Holocaust, opposing the identification of Jews as the primary victims of Nazi extermination, lest the paper be identified as a Jewish newspaper. The paper's reportage reflects decades of intense discomfort with the idea and eventual reality of the Jewish people rebuilding and returning to their historic Jewish homeland. This is the basic attitude implanted by Adolph Ochs which remains at the core of the paper's editorial judgement."
With regard to Ochs keeping news of The Holocaust at a bare minimum, it is quite apparent he hadn't any moral compass. While owning and publishing a newspaper doesn't qualify one as a Journalist, in Och's case, that he did his level best to keep his newspaper free of any dispatches regarding The Holocaust, was a sin in and of itself in that he owned the paper. In essence, considering that and his negative attitude to that where those Jews who survived the Shoah would find a home in Israel, their biblical homeland, really amounts to Och's paper having devolved into no more than an Arabist pamphlet then and now.
How did Ochs propose to 'remold' Judaism? Was he all in to remake Abraham as a White Anglo Saxon Plantagenet?
That Ochs only sought to make 'Minsk Meat' out of the Jews from Eastern Europe's desires to move to America, shows how inhumane the man was. He wanted no part of extending brotherhood, no cameraderie, His self-invoked humiliation was a disability, the projection enabled him to disable any news of the Holocaust for his readers. Ochs should have been forced to undergo the same deracination as the German people after WWII.
In my estimation, the paper Ochs left is a slaveship, where any pro-Israel reporters go about their professional lives harboring such in secret, while playing the part of supplicant as to the mindset of Ochs and his heirs.
Ochs would have made a fine member of the Neteurei Karta had he only been observant.. Unfortunately, that sect has chosen to show the world their preference for more than a 'six degree separation' from Z|ionist Jews. As such, I've no doubt, Ochs would have made their leader Editor of his paper.
L. Charm Tenenbaum is an ardent Zionist and populist on the cusp of finishing her first book (Historical Fiction) where Tudor England converges with the modern American White House.