Christopher Donovan: Why 'J'Accuse' Stays in the Present Tense

Christopher Donovan: Joseph Sobran once reportedly joked that the New York Times should change its name to “The Holocaust Update”.  Not for nothing — barely a day passes when Hitler or the Holocaust isn’t mentioned in its pages.  The phenomenon includes even pre-World War II events, as described in this Sunday Book Review article on the Dreyfus affair.  (It’s a biggie to Jews because the intellectual founder of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, was supposedly convinced of the need for a homeland for Jews while covering the Drefyus affair as a journalist.)

I know nothing about the veracity of the allegations against Dreyfus, but like any other accusation leveled at a Jew — Leo Frank, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, and so on — Jews seize upon the accusation itself, presume the Jew was wrongly accused in a climate of fevered anti-Semitism, and regurgitate the episode endlessly as another example of the moral purity and snowy innocence of Jews in a dangerous world of bloodthirsty gentiles.

The truth is a bit more complicated, but the New York Times won’t be getting into that.