This chapter probes the response of the American and British Jewish press to the attitude of the general press in these countries toward the Holocaust as the tragedy unfolded.

The discussion begins on the “seam” between two periods – the middle of 1942 – and ends in 1944, when non-Jewish American journalists became eyewitnesses to the mass-murder actions. Thus, it mulls the tragic events in “real time,” much unlike the critical studies that American historians, most of them Jewish, have produced in the past twenty years about the general press’ treatment of the Holocaust.

By comparing two critical approaches to one phenomenon at different times, we illuminate a cultural and existential difference between them. Journalistic criticism is at once publicistic and sensitive; basic academic research transcends real time. The Jewish journalists discussed in this chapter were intellectuals of East European origin, whose language of culture was Yiddish; the historians are American- or British-born, and their language is English. The Jewish papers printed the remarks of former-immigrant intellectuals who were flush with gratitude to their democratic countries of residence, which had given them the civil status of free men and women; the historians are natives of these countries, who take their equal status for granted and not as a generous gift from a host society.

It is also worth bearing in mind that during the war years – especially the first two years, 1939–1941, before the United States joined the anti-Nazi struggle – manifestations of organized political antisemitism had appeared in the United States and indications of social antisemitism were not lacking in Britain. The journalists wrote against the background of a state of war that had engulfed the democracies, as Britain even fought for its existence. The contemporaneous academic criticism, in contrast, is produced in the placid environment of a democratic, liberal, and tolerant society, in which this type of research is predominant.