As former Wall Street Journal reporter Laura Leff documented in her recent history "Buried By The Times" (Cambridge University Press, 2006) and as Harvard University's Marvin Kalb has lectured, it was during America's lengthy debate about going to war with Nazi Germany that then New York Times owner-editor Arthur Hays Sulzberger, descendant of America's foremost advocate for Jewish assimilation - Isaac Mayer Weiss, used the power and influence of his newspaper (especially its influence on other American news organizations) to cover-up the systematic mass murder of millions of Jews - most of them religious and impoverished - then underway across Europe. According to these scholars, it was by "burying" news of the Holocaust and preventing the fate of Europe's Jews from entering the American war equation that Sulzberger hoped to protect the privileged position of wealthy, long-assimilated, religiously uneducated, American Jews like himself within the inner sanctums of American power. As Daniel Johnson wrote in his Commentary review of Leff's book: "Assimilation, for Sulzberger, was a prize for which he was prepared to let other Jews make any sacrifice." We may never read about it in The New York Times, but the evidence seems to support the contention that The New York Times covered-up the Holocaust.

Yoram Hazony in "The Jewish State" (Basic/New Republic Books, 2000) writes that the Times publisher subsequently led an effort in the war's aftermath, behind David Ben Gurion's back, to prevent the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine in favor of an entity that would have a "bi-national", Arab-Jewish character, presumably along the lines of Lebanon.

Nor did the apparent hostility of this powerful family toward Jewish survival emerge with the Nazis. As far back as 1922, New York Times founder and Isaac Mayer Weiss son-in-law, Adolph Ochs, rejected the idea of a Jewish nation declaring that "the Jews are not a nation, they share only a religion." As in other areas, Ochs and his father-in-law were at odds with the Bible.

In light of the Ochs-Sulzberger's apparent efforts, stretching out over a century, in opposition to the Jewish nation and, as in the case of Arthur Hays Sulzberger, its willingness to use the family's control of The New York Times to censor issues of existential import to the Jews from the American national agenda (thus rejecting the philo-Hebraism of the founders and the Restorationist fervor of the American public; see Michael Oren's new history, "Power, Faith and Fantasy", Norton, 2007) it should not surprise anyone that the present owner and publisher, who has identified himself as an Episcopalian, would take up the family cause.

James Traub's screed may thus be reasonably be viewed as the latest manifestation of the Ochs-Sulzberger family's historic anti-Judaism, and possibly the opening salvo of the family's final-solution to its own past.

Notwithstanding the Ochs-Sulzberger's undeniable contributions to American journalism, the complete lack of scrutiny on the part of their media industry peers (why didn't Ms. Leff's newsworthy book inspire a 60 Minutes segment?) or public comment on this issue by the family itself necessitates one asking about the present publisher's intent toward the Jewish nation today - toward the State of Israel.

With Iran's oft-repeated plans for judeocide in the Middle East temporarily bogged down by the challenges of nuclear weapons development, the "task at hand" for a similarly-motivated Sulzberger Jr. would seem to pale next to the one that faced his cowardly forebear. Forget about bombing the German concentration camps, derailing today's rescue of the Jews could well be as simple as donating Times newsprint to anyone like Traub who will minimize Ahmadinejad's threats of genocide, demonize pro-Zionist Jewish-American leaders like Foxman, and join with Britain's Guardian Newspaper in ridiculing their pleas for American intervention.

As for the risks involved, the moral legitimacy of Western civilization does not appear to be on the newspaper's radar, nor is the potential blow-back from the allegedly powerful and mostly Democratic, American Jews.

The present Mr. Sulzberger seems to believe that when it comes to "the Israel issue" his erstwhile Jewish-American family was actually ahead of its time. Yes, the present generation of Jewish-Americans may be dimly aware of the Biblical polity that America's Puritan founders lovingly called "The First Hebrew Republic" (envisioning America as "The Second.."), but unlike their more traditional forebears they neither mourn its loss nor rejoice in its arguable rebirth as the modern State of Israel. According to Sulzberger Jr.'s calculus, today's Jewish-Americans are more likely to seek redemption through the return to power of the Democratic Party and the protection of the Alaskan caraboo.

Indeed, with Jewish intermarriage rates in the US soaring past seventy percent among the non-Orthodox, young Jewish-Americans finding their remaining loyalties to Israel under relentless attack on campus, and the most pro-Israel president in history unable to push his share of the Jewish vote past twenty-five percent, there may be more Jewish-Americans like Arthur Hays Sulzberger than ever before - Jews who are willing to sacrifice their politically incorrect brethren overseas in order to vouchsafe their continued acceptance in the American establishment.

If Sulzberger's analysis is correct (as Stephen Cohen and Ari Kelman's recent survey of non-Orthodox American Jews seems to confirm) then neither the newspaper's fragile circulation nor the sums of Jewish-American money in Democratic Party coffers will suffer from the launch of a campaign against Jewish-American Zionists.

The Times has subsequently published numerous respectful articles about the new Mearsheimer and Walt book, "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007.) Illustrating the power of America's newspaper of record to legitimize a point of view, The Times reported that the chief opponent of Mearsheimer and Walt's "controversial" viewpoint was Abe Foxman - the very individual that the newspaper had tried to discredit. In the event the reader was unfamiliar with Foxman, the online version of two of the articles included a link to the Traub screed. So much for a balanced presentation of the facts.

The Traub article's unabashed malevolence was, in fact, typical of overseas judeophobic literature. While slowly decapitating Foxman, Traub parroted Europe's hypocritical mantra that anti-Semitism itself was all but dead and would have remained so (rim shot please) were it not for cabals of overly influential, ugly Jews like Abe Foxman who cynically took advantage of the world's guilty conscience about the Holocaust to aggressively promote Israel's foreign policy objectives. The descriptives "tortured" and "transparent" were surely invented for this kind of logic. Such sophistry also recalls the adage about there being a way when there's a will.

In the final analysis, the will here may be to suppress Judaism itself. Europeans have long regarded it as an inalienable right, Muslims are marinated in it, while Jewish ultra-assimilationists like the Ochs-Sulzbergers have historically manned the front lines against their erstwhile brethren. Since Ochs' purchase of The New York Times in 1896, the family's way has been to champion European secularism while simultaneously conflating America's indigenous pseudo-Hebraic heritage and normative Judaism with intellectual backwardness. The public bludgeoning of Abe Foxman was only the latest expression of the paper's apparent mission of shilling for an alien and now fading world order. This time, the spectacle the paper presented was so ruthless, so fully beyond the limits of reasonable public discourse, that it brought Sulzberger's motivations under scrutiny.

There are some five and a half million Jews living in Delaware-sized, Israel today. Another Sulzberger "success" in removing judeocide - in the present case nuclear judeocide - from the realm of America's vital interests would thus yield about the same number of dead Jews as perished in the Holocaust. Will Americans embrace the Left's emerging campaign against Zionists or will they send Sulzberger and the New Cabal Watchers scurrying for the nearest sewer? Will Jewish-Americans finally abandon the Democratic Party en masse, or will they split according to privilege and character? We'll soon know.

(Less than a year after the literary assassination of Abe Foxman in The New York Times, the US intelligence establishment published findings that derailed international efforts to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon.)