Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr.

From Philosopedia

Sulzberger, Arthur [“Punch”] Ochs Jr. (22 September 1951 - )

After studying at Tufts and Harvard, Sulzberger worked as a reporter for The Raleigh (North Carolina) Times, a correspondent in London for the Associated Press (1976-1978), and then had a series of jobs on the newspaper that was founded by his grandfather in 1896. Lazarus Ochsenhorn, a prosperous diamond merchant and Talmudic scholar in Bavaria, emigrated to America in 1845 to escape the oppressive laws that restricted Jewish marriages and professions, according to a seven-year study of the noted journalistic family by Susan E. Tifft and Alex S. Jones (The New Yorker 19 April 1999). His son Julius (1858-1935) shortened the name to Ochs; married Iphigenia Miriam Wise, daughter of the Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise who was instrumental in the formation of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations and of Hebrew Union College, and is generally considered the founder of Reform Judaism in America; and used the Wise connection to his advantage to acquire the failing New-York Times by forming a new company, the New York Times Company.

Tifft and Jones describe how William Randolph Hearst attacked Ochs as an “oily little commercial gentleman with . . . obsequiously curved shoulders” who took orders from Jewish banker August Belmont and passed them along to his editor. Ochs, however, was so rattled by this Shylock-like portrait of himself that he bent over backwards to downplay any Jewish slant to stories in the newspaper. Upon his death, his son-in-law, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, who had been acting as the effective publisher for two years, became controlling owner of the Times.

Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, like his father-in-law, “was skittish about showcasing Jewish talent in the paper,” Tifft and Jones found in their research. Called “Punch” by his family members, he rejected the idea that Jews were members of a “race” and vehemently opposed the use of collective phrases such as “the Jewish people”; instead, he instructed editors to use “people of the Jewish faith,” or simply “Jews” - expressions that he felt subtly conveyed the notion that being Jewish “was something one could freely choose, like being a Methodist or a Presbyterian.” His daughter Judy told the two researchers, “Deep down, my father probably would just as soon not have been Jewish.”

Like his father, he became a strong opponent of Zionism, suggesting that as an alternative to a Jewish Palestine a “great state” carved out of several nations in the Holy Land should be created, one that would “welcome all who wish to come,” Jews and non-Jews alike.” He was attacked for being a “self-hating Jew” and a “Jewish Bourbon.” As the result of the attacks, he became an anti-Zionist. He also became what is called an “assimilated Jew,” marrying outside the Jewish heritage.

Sulzberger remained editor from 1963 to 1992, at which time his son, Arthur Jr., became editor. Arthur Jr.’s mother, Barbara Grant, was not Jewish. Shortly after her divorce from “Punch” in 1956, she became an Episcopalian.

Arthur Jr. and his sister Karen were confirmed at Manhattan’s St. James Episcopal Church, and although Arthur (“Pinch”) read books about Judaism and erratically attended Jewish services he told Tifft and Jones that in London as an Associated Press reporter during the 1970s he held a Passover seder in his flat. His grandmother Iphigene, who happened to be in Britain, came as an honored - and somewhat nonplussed - guest. "I consider myself Jewish. No one else would, but I do," Arthur Jr. told an oral historian for the American Jewish Committee several years later.

The Trust (2000), by Susan Tifft and Alex Jones, includes the gossip that in the 1950s Sulzberger fathered an illegitimate child with a widowed reporter and that in the 1980s then-executive editor Abe Rosenthal had an affair with “a young Times secretary” whom he later promoted “to an executive position.” In 1994, two years after Sulzberger became publisher, Tifft and Jones asked him to describe his personal faith. His freethinking became clearly evident in his unhesitant reply:

I have the Times. That’s my religion. That’s what I believe in, and it’s a hell of a thing to hold on to.