This book proves that The Times not only knew about the Holocaust but printed many of the horrific details. In the six years of the war, just 26 pieces made the front page, half of them in 1944, when most of the Jews were dead. And only a half-dozen mentioned that Jews were the victims.

The author, Laurel Leff, a professor of journalism and a former reporter for TheWall Street Journal, has done a fine job of research in the archives of the paper of record. Others could have done that, but nobody has. More important, she has brilliantly analyzed the reasons Arthur Hays Sulzberger, the German-Jewish publisher of The Times, brought Jewish self-hatred to a head long before the rubric gained popularity.

The weltanschauung and mission of The New York Times ..can be traced back to the anti-religious zealotry of publisher Arthur O. Sulzberger's ancestors and, in turn, to a remarkably successful religious "reform" movement that began in late-18th century Gemany. The movement's objective was to effect the complete assimilation of Jews into German society by casting off the yoke of normative religious practice and renouncing the belief in G-d's promise that the Jewish people would some day return to Zion. (The historic context of this flying leap into self-abnegation is discussed in Michael A. Meyer's The Origins of the Modern Jew.) The ideology of the reformers would culminate a century later in the campaign of Arthur H. Sulzberger against the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine in the 20's and 30's and his effective cover-up of the Holocaust story in the US during World War II. It is arguably due to its owner's anti-Biblical zealotry and the paper's power and influence in 20th century America that today's Democratic Party is not only home to secularists but also to anti-Zionists. In Ochsian secularism the two go hand in hand.

Rather than taking inspiration from the particularist practices refined over centuries that enabled closeness to G-d, or identifying with the divinely promised return of Israel's children to their homeland, Reformism (as invented by Abraham Geiger in Hamburg and brought to New York by then publisher Adolph Och's father-in-law, Isaac Mayer Wise) turned its hopes instead toward "high-culture." Seen in this light it should come as no surprise that The Times frequently runs stories about "miraculous" events taking place at the Metropolitan Opera but finds the only actual miracle taking place in broad view today - the return home of the Jewish people to worship G-d on His holy mountain - to be a non-story.

When The Times defines the battle-lines of the American culture war as "normative us" versus "fundamentalist them", it is worth remembering the evangelical reformist origins of this ostensible norm, and that the oxymoron constructed by grafting Jewish identity to the denial of the divinely revealed nature of The Bible was invented out of whole cloth.

Perhaps it is because they come as a matched set in Ochsian secularism that our religiously oriented President has no tolerance for moral relativism or anti-Zionism. Traditional Zionism as embodied in the writings of Yehuda Halevi and the Psalmist is the ultimate expression of America's "Judeo-Christian" tradition where the rules of existence find their source above.

While American secularism can hardly be blamed on the German reform movement (its roots are multiple and span centuries of European history), because of its influence on the owners of The Times one has to wonder if the first shot of today's culture war wasn't fired in Hamburg, and whether in the final analysis, the war is only important to the extent that it impacts the future of Zion. The battle to separate society from G-d will continue to be waged by the descendants of Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise and their "newspaper of record", and in the fateful years to come, Americans will continue to ponder whether they are for G-d and Zion, or The New York Times. Jewish-Americans, however, will be choosing between secularism and survival.