ABSTRACT
Although much has been written about the responses of the American Jewish community to the destruction of European Jewry, there has been no systematic effort to determine what information was available in the American, Yiddish, and Anglo-Jewish press about this catastrophe. Important American Jewish leaders were privy to confidential organizational reports and sometimes to classified State Department documents, but for the average American Jew the main source of news was the press. Many contemporary Jews maintain that they knew little or nothing about what was transpiring in Europe during the Holocaust because the press in the United States did not or could not provide reports of these events. The purpose of this paper is to ascertain exactly what was known from September 1, 1939, when the war in Europe began until December 17, 1942, the day the Allies condemned the Nazis for exterminating the Jews. After determining what information was available, we will examine how it was perceived by American Jewry as reflected in the press. These were crucial years during which Jews were herded into ghettos, forced into the Lublin Reservation, systematically gunned down by the Einsatzgruppen, and sent to concentration camps to die of starvation, hard labor, disease, or ultimately in the gas chambers.
