The Jewish Press and the Holocaust, 1939-1945: Palestine, Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union by Yosef Gorny (review)

Yosef Gorny's new book on Jewish press response to the Holocaust is an important addition to the literature. First, Gorny's comparative approach illuminates how widely and compassionately the Holocaust was reported in Jewish newspapers in Mandatory Palestine, Britain, the U.S., and the USSR: "The press . . . reported what was being done to the Jews in occupied countries almost each and every day: lootings and murders, ghettoization, starvation of the ghetto populations, mortality rates, massacres in the Nazi-occupied western reaches of the Soviet Union and the Germans' intention of making Europe judenrein" (p. 269). Second, the work is a fine illustration of the current historiographical trend that tries to understand and contextualize the Free World's responses (or lack thereof) to the Holocaust rather than to apportion guilt.

The book is organized into three main parts. The first two chronicle how the Jewish press reported the plight of European Jewry between 1939 and 1942—when the general outline was recognized but many doubts remained—and then from 1942 to 1945, when the systematic destruction of the Jews was no longer in doubt. The third part investigates the ways in which a number of individuals such as Yitzhak Gruenbaum (chair of the Committee for the Jews of Occupied Europe), Hannah Arendt, Cecil Roth, and others confronted the horror. The inclusion of intellectual discussions of the Holocaust as well as of non-Jewish press reportage as separate categories sets Gorny's study apart. Including the non-Jewish voices has the effect of casting Gorny's Jewish press in a new and favorable light. In general, the book establishes the extent to which the Holocaust was in fact discussed in the news.

The book revolves around two main premises. First, Gorny introduces us to "transnational community," meaning that despite the various ideological orientations (for example Zionist, anti-Zionist, Revisionist, Bundist) and political contexts (Yishuv, Britain, the USSR, the U.S.) in which the Jewish press operated, it nevertheless displayed "communal transnational ethnic feelings of collective and existential angst" (p. 2). Second, the key thesis that Gorny puts forward is that throughout the Jewish press the wartime discourse turned on the axis of powerlessness. Indeed the "collective and existential angst" manifested precisely the shared idea of "national powerlessness." In the original Hebrew, this powerlessness was embedded into the title "A Cry in the Wilderness" (Kriya bein onim), literally "an impotent cry."

Gorny backs up his argument with citations that are well-chosen, illuminating, and often lengthy enough for the reader to grasp the emotional investment that the writers put into their words; many passages reflect the broader worldviews of the writers or the papers under investigation. At times Gorny's constant interpretation of selected passages as a discourse of national powerlessness seems more like a personal plea than a research result (indeed, the author himself acknowledges that the idea of national powerlessness derives partially from his own childhood memories). Given this emphasis, the work could have benefitted from a more explicit discussion of the idea.

No doubt, Gorny has succeeded in his chosen comparative approach. One important result—which still should be emphasized—proving Gorny's success can be evinced from a good contextualization of the press. As he writes, "even as it mirrored the state of emergency created by the war and its backdrop of oppression and extermination," the press "continually reflected the mundane realities of daily life," for instance, "community life, internal politics, and education" (p. 15). This type of contextualization is worth reiterating, as it goes beyond the moralistic approach and illustrates a more recent historiographical approach to using newspapers as source material.¹

Although convincing, Gorny's comparisons encounter the same problems as all comparativist approaches: how much national context should be included. For instance, where to draw the line between in-depth national context and...