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When the Media Was Blind
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11604 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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9 / 1986 |
2,723 Words |
| Author
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Cynthia Grenier
Cynthia Grenier is contributing editor to the Arts section of
The World & I. |
BEYOND BELIEF
The American Press and the Coming
of the Holocaust 1933-1945
Deborah E. Lipstadt
New York: The Free Press, 1986
370 pp., $19.95
The subtitle of Deborah Lipstadt's important book, Beyond Belief, by its very matter-of-factness - The American Press & the Coming of the Holocaust 1933-1945- hardly prepares the reader for the appalling record that follows.
Methodically, almost dispassionately, Lipstadt has documented the coverage given by the American press to Jews first in Hitler's Germany, and then in Hitler's Europe, from 1933 through the Final Solution. It does not make for comfortable reading. With the rarest exceptions, the American media, including all the most distinguished and high minded publications of the day, seem to us with historical hindsight, to have displayed an almost willful blindness as to what was going on virtually before their eyes.
Two recent works - The Terrible Secret by Walter Laquer and The Abandonment of the Jews by David Wyman - have set forth in abundant and shaming detail the actions of the U.S. State Department and the British Foreign Office on the question of Hitler's Jews. "Polite” anti-Semitism was the accepted of the time, many of whose members peopled our State Department and the British Foreign Office. The British also had to consider the fact that Palestine was a British protectorate, and that any large influx of Jewish refuges might endanger the
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