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Letters They Wouldn't Publish
January 23, 2006
Letters to the Editor
New York Times
Dear Editor:
Your January 23 feature about the demise of The New Leader noted that after breaking with socialism in the 1930s, the magazine became "a powerful and outspoken voice [for] liberal anti-Communists."
Less well known is that during the Holocaust, The New Leader also published unusually powerful and outspoken criticism of the Roosevelt administration for failing to rescue Jewish refugees from Hitler. Especially memorable was an extraordinary J'Accuse authored by The New Leader's literary editor, Melvin J. Lasky, in the October 23, 1943 edition, titled “The Shame of a World.” Lasky condemned the Allies’ response to the Nazi genocide as “sympathetic mumbo-jumbo and do-nothingism.” Millions of Jews were being murdered, and the most they could expect was “obituary notices” from “eloquent and self-righteous” Allied political leaders, who were motivated “partly out of fear and ignorance, out of weary everyday conservatism, and out of a disgraceful moral emptiness.”
“The [European] continent has become a vast cemetery for a whole people,” Lasky wrote. “Relatives and friends will cry and mourn and remember, [but] for the rest, the terrible of a shame of a world will be forgotten.” He was mistaken. It will not be forgotten--thanks to the courageous few who spoke out, and the handful of periodicals that gave them a platform.
Cordially,
Rafael Medoff
Director
The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies
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Letters:
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Yes, Let's Be Candid About the Mideast
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Brandeis and the White Paper
November 14, 2006
Iran and Germany
November 13, 2006
Rescue Was Possible
September 25, 2006
The Jews in Iran
September 13, 2006
The Failure to Bomb Auschwitz
September 3, 2006
Mel Gibson's Critics
August 28, 2006
Jo Davidson: Sculptor and Activist
July 31, 2006
Nazi War Criminals in Arab Countries
May 10, 2006
Israel and Auschwitz
May 9, 2006
William Safire and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
April 22, 2006
Suppressing Holocaust News
April 7, 2006
Betty Friedan and the Nazis
March 13, 2006
Civil Liberties, in Nazi Germany and the U.S.
February 17, 2006
Paul McCloskey and the Deniers
February 11, 2006
Holocaust Denial is Bigotry
February 3, 2006
Not Just "Following Orders"
January 30, 2006
Melvin Lasky and the Holocaust
January 23, 2006
Saudi Arabian Holocaust-Denial
December 15, 2005
Iranian Holocaust Denial
December 10, 2005
Anti-Semitism in Jordan
November 13, 2005
Culture of Hatred in Jordan
November 10, 2005
German Jewish Refugee Children
October 24, 2005
An Earlier Black-Jewish Alliance
October 21, 2005
Treatment of Illegal Aliens Not Similar to Holocaust
September 4, 2005
Hollywood and the Nazi Filmmaker
September 4, 2005
Patton's Antisemitism
August 14, 2005
Sudan, Congress, and the Holocaust
July 25, 2005
Harvard and the Nazis
June 29, 2005
The New York Times and the Holocaust
June 27, 2005
Should the U.S. Have Bombed Auschwitz?
January 29, 2005
Bigotry and Culture
January 26, 2005
Susan Sontag and the Nazi Filmmaker
December 30, 2004
How Moss Hart Alerted America About the Holocaust
November 2, 2004
The Quotas That Kept Out the Refugees
October 22, 2004
Lindbergh and Antisemitism - Then and Now
September 26, 2004
Rationalizing Stalin's Pact with Hitler
September 20, 2004
Turning a Blind Eye to Hitler
September 20, 2004
Truman and the Holocaust
September 1, 2004
FDR and the Warsaw Uprising
August 7, 2004
More on the Nazi Olympics
July 18, 2004
Avery Brundage and the 1936 Olympics
July 07, 2004
Genocide, Then and Now
June 27, 2004
Sudan and the Holocaust
June 22, 2004
Why did the United States turn its back on the Jews of Europe?
June 18, 2004
A Boxer Who Fought for His People
June 17, 2004
A Voice for Rescue
June 11, 2004
Morris Brafman, Soviet Jewry, and the Holocaust
May 28, 2004
An Unsung Hero of the Struggle for Jewish Freedom
May 28, 2004
FDR & the Holocaust: New Evidence
April 23, 2004
Mel Gibson and the Holocaust
April 18, 2004
Was Rescue Possible?
April 11, 2004
A Play That Smashed Racism
April 3, 2004
Hitler's Filmmaker
March 20, 2004
New Biography Wrong About FDR
February 29, 2004
Mel Gibson's Holocaust Problem
February 27, 2004
A Principal Who Stood Up for a Principle
February 8, 2004
Truman's Antisemitism
February 6, 2004
Inappropriate Hitler Analogy
December 18, 2003
George Marshall, Racism, and the Holocaust
November 13, 2003
The Failure to Bomb Auschwitz
December 24, 2002
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