Debate Over Catholic Church’s View of Jews

Those inclined to handicap this fall’s publishing season already are giving long odds that the year’s most controversial nonfiction book will be historian Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s “A Moral Reckoning: The Catholic Church During the Holocaust and Today,” which landed on his editor’s desk this week.

The essential points of Goldhagen’s 400-page manuscript were made in an extraordinary 27,000-word essay recently published in the New Republic magazine--”What Would Jesus Have Done? Pope Pius XII, the Catholic Church and the Holocaust.”

In it, Goldhagen alleges that the church’s basic theology and essential symbols have always been and remain to this day fundamentally anti-Semitic. He charges, among other things, that Popes Pius XI and Pius XII were active anti-Semites and that the latter “must be classified as a Nazi collaborator,” along with “Quisling in Norway, Petain and Laval in Vichy.”

Goldhagen describes the Roman Catholic Church as “this pan-European institution of world-hegemonic aspirations,” and alleges that “it tacitly and sometimes materially aided [Hitler] in mass murder.”

A former Harvard professor, Goldhagen also is the author of “Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust,” a 1996 bestseller arguing that “eliminationist” anti-Semitism was inextricably interwoven into the very fabric of German culture. As a consequence, Goldhagen believes, average Germans at all levels of society were not only willing, but also enthusiastic participants in Adolf Hitler’s attempt to murder Europe’s Jews.

“Hitler’s Willing Executioners,” an expansion of his 1994 doctoral thesis, was praised by such Harvard historians as Stanley Hoffman and Simon Schama, as well as by many younger German scholars. The response of many Holocaust specialists and German cultural historians, by contrast, ranged from reserved to frankly critical.

Reaction to his New Republic essay was more intense. Andrew Sullivan, the New Republic’s former editor (anti-Goldhagen), and Leon Wieseltier, the magazine’s longtime literary editor (pro-Goldhagen), engaged in an unusually sharp exchange on their publication’s Diary page. The Forward, America’s oldest Jewish newspaper, published a front page news story about the controversy.

The Forward reported that clerics and scholars engaged in Jewish-Catholic dialogue had “found a rare point of agreement in their criticism” of the essay. Rabbi David Rosen, international director of interreligious affairs for the American Jewish Committee, alleged that Goldhagen “has an unconcealed antagonism against the Catholic Church, and it shows.”

Goldhagen does not intend to comment publicly until his entire book is published. However, at least some scholarly and critical reaction is likely to be influenced by the book’s unusual genesis and by the rapidity of its composition. According to Carol Janeway, Goldhagen’s editor at Alfred A. Knopf, he did not begin work on his history until “last April or May,” when he was commissioned by Wieseltier and Martin Peretz, the New Republic’s editor in chief and chairman, to review 10 books on the subject, including such recent titles as “Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews” by James Carroll, “Hitler’s Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII” by John Cornwell and Gary Wills’ “Papal Sin: the Structures of Deceit.”

“Martin and Leon asked Danny if he would consider doing a long review and essay on different aspects of this issue,” Janeway said this week. “At the time, he was deeply enmeshed in a book on genocide for [Knopf], but he agreed to set it aside and to engage this because they offered a proper amount of space. The more Danny read and thought about the issue, the more strongly he began to feel something considerably longer was required. We said he could set aside the genocide project for now, because this question mattered so much to him.”

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The Future Online

Michael Kinsley, who stepped down last month as editor of Slate, Microsoft’s still-unprofitable online magazine, rather poignantly compared himself to Moses, who glimpsed the promised land but was unable to enter.

At the moment neither Slate nor its major competitor, Salon, has ever turned a profit, though Kinsley said his former publication is close. Many online magazines of the future, he predicted, “will be subsidized. Their small, steady losses will be made up by some rich person, as occurs now with the New Republic or the Weekly Standard. But there also will be profitable publications.”

The imminent arrival of new “tablet” handheld PCs, he said, will make “the distinction between online and print magazines disappear. You’ll be able to take it to the john or on an airplane, just as you do a paper magazine today.” Time and Newsweek will be available on tablet shortly and Slate has elaborate plans for a print-out version.

Meanwhile, Kinsley believes that online journalism’s greatest failure continues to be an insufficient application of multimedia technology to cultural news and criticism. “If you’re writing about a book, you quote from it,” Kinsley said. “The Internet makes it possible to quote directly in the same way from the music, film or art about you’re writing. We don’t do that now and it’s everyone’s failure. Another way to think about it is to imagine what percentage of the words in a music review are given over to haltingly describing the music itself, when the Internet lets you quote rather than describe” without the necessity of links. “The main reason it hasn’t happened,” Kinsley said, “is that smart cultural writers weren’t interested in integrating quotations of this sort into their texts and resisted using multimedia in the way we could use it. Unfortunately, some writers think that what makes them serious is their austerity about these things.”

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Championing ‘Real’ News

Though only recently published and spottily reviewed, “News About the News: American Journalism In Peril” by Leonard Downey Jr. and Robert Kaiser, who are respectively executive editor and associate editor of the Washington Post, went into its second printing this week. As the title suggests, the book takes a dim view of large swaths of the contemporary journalistic landscape, including the television networks and all-news cable channels, increasingly given over to chat shows populated by empty nattering heads. The big newspaper chains also come in for withering criticism for putting profits ahead of quality. “Obviously, I’m biased,” said Jonathan Segal of Alfred A. Knopf, the book’s editor. “But I think that in this post-9/11 world, the reception this book has received is particularly important because the authors’ argument is not only that real news matters, but also that serious news standards matter.”