Ellie Silverman Blog Post 4

Media coverage of the Holocaust, influence on globalization


Over the summer I traveled with this university’s Hillel on a trip to Poland to learn about the past, present and future of Jewish life. We walked around the area that used to host the Warsaw Ghetto, the largest of all the Jewish ghettos in Nazi-occupied Europe where over 4000,000 Jews resided in the 4.3km area. Many of these people were sent to the Treblinka extermination camp in 1942 where they faced a certain death. We also walked the grounds of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the German concentration camp that became the largest site for the mass extermination of Jews. More than 1,100,000 lives were lost there.

Learning about the mass extermination of a group or “race” of people is one thing. But traveling to Poland, seeing the places you read about in texts books and visiting the nearby towns that were once largely occupied by Jews and now have no Jewish residents – well that’s something else. I could not comprehend how those people, who were not Jewish, living in these towns, could idly stand by why this injustice was occurring. Moreover, I could not understand how a camp as large as Auschwitz-Birkenau continued to exist for so long without international intervention. In past lectures we have discussed the concept of globalization and how it includes the flow and spread of ideas across nations. This can be applied to how anti-Semitism was spread during World War II and other times throughout history. The New York Times, one of the most widely read and respected papers, did not help in spreading accurate news during this time.


Among “all the news that’s fit to print” on the front page of one of the most widely and influential newspapers in the U.S. on July 2, 1942 the only stories on World War II involve British fleets in Alexandria, conflicts in Egypt and the Nazi’s capture of Russia’s Black Sea naval base. Buried on page six is a story on a proposal that reported the “slaughter of 700,000 Jews in German-occupied territories.” This is one-fifth of the entire Jewish population of Poland, the story reported. The article highlighted certain aspects of the report, including that “children in orphanages, old persons in almshouses, the sick in hospitals and women were slain in the streets.” At the very bottom of the story on page six, it is reported that gas chambers were being used to murder Jews and that about 35,000 Jews were gassed daily in Lodz between Jan. 2 and Jan. 9. The fact that the Nazi’s are mass exterminating people in camps and gas chambers should have been the headline on the front-page of the New York Times and every media outlet across the country.


Reading the New York Times in 1942 would not have given Americans the information they needed to realize the Holocaust was taking place. Yes, information regarding the mass extermination of Jews was in the paper, but it was buried in a side column on page six. News outlets are supposed to be gatekeepers and agenda-setters as well as framing a story to correctly portray its newsworthiness to readers, viewers or listeners. Placing this story on page six diminished its importance and did not follow any of the following roles the New York Times is supposed to fulfill.


Even after World War II, the founding of Israel and the spread of Jews to countries outside of Europe, Foer points out that Jews never fully became accepted within globalization. When looking at this one case study, it does not surprise me that Foer said that anti-Semitism is still prevalent in today’s society stating that is as “pervasive as it has ever been,” (Foer, 71).

Journalism is just one median to spread ideas, but it is still a powerful one that can influence the effects of globalization in terms of sharing ideas and promoting positive interactions.