Acknowledging Their Mistakes
Facing up to the mistakes made in the 1930s and 1940s is a crucial step in the process of learning lessons from the past. Just weeks after the Wyman Institute was launched, England’s largest publisher, IPC, ignited a controversy by prohibiting a journalist’s website from reprinting a puff-piece about Adolf Hitler’s summer home that its Home & Gardens magazine published in 1938.
“The Fuhrer has a passion about cut flowers in his home, as well as for music,” the article gushed. It was a prime example of how the media soft-pedaled Hitler in the 1930s. The Wyman Institute threw down the gauntlet, posting the article on its own site and organizing a petition by 70 Holocaust scholars. IPC backed down and apologized for trying to suppress the article.
Three years later, American publishers were the ones in the docket. Northeastern University professor Laurel Leff, a member of the Wyman Institute’s Academic Council, uncovered documents showing that in the 1930s U.S. journalism schools refused to hire German Jewish refugee journalists and the American Newspaper Publishers Association refused to give a Harvard professor ten minutes at their convention to speak about the refugee journalists.
A petition organized by the Wyman Institute asked the newspaper publishers to acknowledge their moral failure in the 1930s. It was signed by 80 leading journalists and editors, including New Republic editor-in-chief Martin Peretz, Marvin Kalb of “Meet the Press” and Columbia Journalism School dean Nicholas Lemann. The newspaper publishers publicly apologized for their actions in the 1930s and invited Prof. Leff to address their board of directors.
The Power Of Petitions
The Wyman Institute has taken the old-fashioned concept of a petition and revamped it into an educational tool with considerable impact.
In 2004, the State Department blocked legislation by Congressman Tom Lantos to appoint a U.S. envoy to monitor anti-Semitism around the world. A Wyman Institute petition signed by more than 100 public figures – including former ambassador Jeanne Kirkpatrick and 1996 Republican vice-presidential nominee Jack Kemp – charged that State was repeating its behavior of the 1930s, when it tried to play down the danger of worldwide anti-Semitism. Embarrassed by the publicity from the petition, the State Department backed down and the Lantos bill passed.
A 2005 Wyman petition signed by over 600 scholars persuaded CSPAN to cancel a planned broadcast of a lecture by Holocaust denier David Irving. The following year, a Wyman petition signed by 30 rabbis who had recently met with King Abdullah of Jordan convinced the Jordanian government to cancel an anti-Semitic, Holocaust-denying television series.
More recently, a series of Wyman petitions – by Holocaust scholars, Jewish leaders, clergy members, and other constituencies – have drawn attention to the international community’s failure to act against Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir, who has been indicted by the International Criminal Court for genocide against non-Arab tribes in Darfur. The protests have unexpectedly made the Wyman Institute one of the best-known advocates on issues related to Darfur.
That may not have been precisely what was on the agenda when the Institute was first established ten years ago but it’s very much consistent with the Institute’s ultimate raison d’être: teaching the lessons from America’s response to the Holocaust, so that the tragic silence of that era will never be repeated.
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WYMAN DINNER IN NYC
The Wyman Institute’s
10th anniversary dinner, honoring
philanthropist and activist
Sigmund A. Rolat, will be held on
Monday, November 18
at the Museum of Jewish Heritage
in New York City.
Call 202-434-8994 for details.
