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The News the Jews Thought Fit to Print
Al Ellenberg
 ADOLPH SIMON OCHS: He made the Times, but his achievement was shadowed by two major bouts of depression, both tinged by his struggle with his Jewish identity |
(May 22, 2000) The 100-year-old dirty little secret of America's finest newspaper
WHEN I WAS A BOY OF about 8 or 9, in the mid-1940s, I found myself ambling down Fifth Avenue in Manhattan holding my father�s hand. I recollect the excursion as idyllic, perhaps because it was so rare: My father was a garment-district worker, and 60-plus-hour weeks were the norm. As we were walking through the 60s, we passed an imposing edifice on the eastern side of the avenue. "What�s that?" I asked. "That�s where the Times goes to shul," he replied. "It doesn�t look like a shul," I said, "It looks like Saint Anne�s," referring to the Roman Catholic church on Bainbridge Avenue, a block away from our Bronx apartment house. "That�s the idea," my father said.
The structure, of course, was Temple Emanu-El which, I later came to understand, held the kind of centrality for America�s Reform Jews that Saint Patrick�s Cathedral, a short saunter south, held for America�s Irish Catholics - an assertion of arrival.
That I remember this exchange so vividly is at least partly attributable to the resonance of The New York Times in our household. My father devoured the Times daily. After he arrived in the U.S. from Poland at the age of 17, he rigorously taught himself English by reading the paper. A college friend once remarked to me that my father talked like a New York Times editorial with a Yiddish accent.
There was also a touch of pride. Even though this "shul" looked like a very big church, my father did after all call it a shul, which meant there was something Jewish about the Times. But what was it that I detected in my father�s voice, what distance, what pained irony?
Well, over the years, the broad answers became evident to me. Those answers encompassed the gulf between the assimilationist Jews of German origin who invented the Reform movement in America and the rough-edged Jews from Eastern Europe, my father�s kind. And, specifically in the case of the Times, the answers included the early reluctance to acknowledge that Jews were explicit targets of Hitler�s death machine; the answers also included the early editorial opposition of the Times to a Zionist state in Palestine. My father was not only a Zionist, he was a Zionist in the Jabotinsky mold.
I have spent pretty much all of my working life in the newspaper business and, to borrow a suspect self-exculpation, some of my best friends work at the Times, but as much as I find the daily appearance of this publication vital to my psychic well-being (particularly the crossword puzzle), I have always felt a bit of an inherited chill about the institution of the Times. It was never my family.
But, of course, The New York Times is a family, one of the most powerfully dynastic in American history, up there with the Cabots and Lodges, Rockefellers and Kennedys. The Ochses and Sulzbergers have owned the Times enterprise, now a multi-billion dollar operation, for more than a hundred years, and in all that time the family has maintained day-to-day control of this most prestigious of all daily newspapers.
Susan E. Tifft and Alex S. Jones have chronicled this family with extraordinary detail and historical perspective, fleshing out a clan almost Biblical in its persuasion of its own destiny as stewards of The New York Times.
First came the patriarch. Adolph Simon Ochs, a Cincinnati-born son of Bavarian Jewish immigrants, dropped out of school and went to work as an office boy for the Knoxville Chronicle in Tennessee at the age of 11. When he was 20, in 1878, he bought the comatose Chattanooga Times with a borrowed $250. Operating instinctively, he transformed the paper into a pioneer of journalistic evenhandedness. But, the authors suggest, that objectivity was born of Ochs�s desire to reduce his visibility as a Jew, the same desire that was to haunt The New York Times�s sense of its own identity for decades to come.
Ochs�s journalistic achievement was much greater than his financial one. In 1896, burdened with almost insuperable debt, Ochs did what any desperate poker player would do, he upped the ante. "Bluffing about the true nature of his finances," Tifft and Jones write, he bought The New York Times for a patchworked $75,000 by conning its stockholders into believing that he had the money and the expertise to revive the 45-year-old paper.
"Now for the supremacy of gall for a country newspaperman burdened with debt," he confided to his wife Effie. Effie herself was a rather extreme embodiment of Germanic Jewish American anomalies. She was the seventh of 10 children of the Cincinnati-based, Bohemia-born Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise and his first wife, Theresa Bloch. Wise, generally regarded as the prime architect of Reform Judaism in America, is described by Tifft and Jones as a "disorderly intellectual" who, "dissatisfied with the local girl�s academy ... sent Effie to a Catholic convent school."
OCHS REVIVED THE TIMES through a shrewd strategy of upgrading the tone of the paper and reducing its price to one cent from three, substantially enlarging its readership base and thus its advertising revenue. He also provided handsomely for other members of the growing family, prompting one of his sisters to describe him as her "Christ" and her "God."
Through World War I and the Great Depression, the Times secured its position as the country�s most esteemed newspaper. Ochs himself, though self-conscious about his lack of education, became a peer not only among the "Our Crowd" caste but also among the Protestant aristocrats who were his Westchester neighbors.
But Ochs�s achievements were shadowed by two major sieges of depression, both tinged by his struggle with his Jewish identity. The first was set off by the appalling case of Leo Frank in 1914; the second was occasioned by the rise of Adolf Hitler in 1933.
Frank, a Brooklyn Jew who was working as the manager of an Atlanta pencil factory, had been found guilty of the sexual murder of a 13-year-old girl who worked in his plant. The trial had been conducted in a feverish climate of anti-Semitism, and many legal observers to this day regarded it as a farce. Ochs, always reluctant to play the role of crusader, particularly on behalf of Jews, was persuaded to rally to Frank�s defense, having become equally convinced of his innocence and that his conviction and death sentence had nothing to do with anti-Semitism in his beloved South. The Times endorsed fruitless appeals all the way to the Supreme Court, but managed, we�re told, only to persuade Georgia�s governor to commute the death sentence to life imprisonment. Two months later, a mob dragged Frank from a state prison and lynched him. A trusted Times reporter confirmed that the mob had been motivated by hatred of Jews. One Georgia newspaper wired Ochs that it was the "outside interference of the Jews," particularly the "offensive propaganda" in the Times, that had "made it necessary to lynch Frank."
Ochs was overwhelmed with gloom. "Not only had the influence of The New York Times been found to be �as a straw upon the tides of human wrath,�" Tifft and Jones recount, "but Adolph had unwittingly encouraged a perception of the paper as �Jewish,� - something he had vowed never to do."
When Hitler became chancellor in 1933, Ochs told his wife: "This will lead to a second world war." Publicly, though, the Times assured readers that Hitler�s ascension was "no warrant for immediate alarm." But by April 1, the Times correspondent in Berlin reported that the boycott of Jewish businesses "was official, not spontaneous as the Nazis had asserted." Ochs then went into a depressed seclusion that he never fully emerged from. When a sister-in-law tried to comfort him with the thought that what was happening in Germany could never happen in the United States, he replied: "Thirty years ago I was sure it couldn�t take place in Germany."
AFTER OCHS�S DEATH, IN 1935, he was succeeded by his son-in-law, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, who was married to the Ochses� only child, Iphigene. Sulzberger was the scion of a wealthy merchandising family with both German and Sephardi roots; his mother, in fact, was extremely proud of the fact that her Sephardi ancestors, themselves descended from Iberian Jews who fled to Holland in 1492 and then immigrated to the New World in the early 1700s, had fought in the American Revolution. Arthur�s father Cyrus was very active on behalf of Jewish causes and had served as president of United Hebrew Charities.
These credentials failed to inoculate Sulzberger against the same kind of identity turmoil experienced by Ochs. "Like his late father-in-law," write Tifft and Jones, "he did not want the Times to be viewed as a �Jewish paper.� But in his single-minded effort to achieve that end, he missed an opportunity to use the considerable power of the Times to focus a spotlight on one of the greatest crimes the world has ever known."
The authors are talking, of course, about the Times�s strangely muted coverage of major Holocaust revelations. They give this example: "A July 2, 1944, dispatch citing �authoritative information� that 400,000 Hungarian Jews had already been deported to their deaths and an additional 350,000 were to be killed in the next three weeks received only four column inches on page twelve, while the same day a story about Fourth of July holiday crowds ran on the front page."
In addition, Sulz-berger was outspoken in his rejection of a Zionist state in Palestine, supporting instead proposals to settle Jews in Australia and Africa. He was branded a self-hating Jew, and Zionist leader Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver accused him of using the paper as a "transmission belt for anti-Zionist propaganda."
Under subsequent publishers, the Times�s policy toward Israel has become considerably more accepting and its coverage of Jewish matters far less tentative. Most significantly, the last three executive editors of the paper have been overtly and unapologetically Jewish, a development that Ochs himself would likely have found rankling. The question of Jewish ownership is, for now at least, somewhat moot. The current publisher, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, has formally adopted the Episcopal faith of his mother.
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