Reporting on the Holocaust Museum’s Retracted Genocide Study
A short story, in numbers
September 18, 2017
Creative Commons
Number of dead in Syria since the beginning of the war: 500,000.
Number of days since the Obama administration has been in power: 241.
Number of pages in a controversial United States Holocaust Museum report on Obama’s decision not to intervene to stop the genocide in Syria: 193.
Number of days it took the museum to pull the report: Eight.
Number of museum board members contacted by The New York Times: 63.
Number of them who commented on the record: 0.
Number of lawmakers who are museum trustees: Eight.
Number of them who would comment: 1 (“Of all the monuments and symbols in our nation’s capital, none has a more important message than the Holocaust museum,” [Orrin] Hatch said in a statement. “It would be a tragedy for that message to be even slightly diminished by partisan politics.”)
Number of words in the New York Times piece about it: 1,358.
Number of those words that are “Jew” or “Jewish”: 0.
Liel Leibovitz is editor-at-large for Tablet Magazine and a host of its weekly culture podcast Unorthodox and daily Talmud podcast Take One. He is the editor of Zionism: The Tablet Guide.
