Dorothy Thompson and American Zionism

Abstract

“If only one could say, and dismiss it with that, ‘These people are savages.’ They are—but they are a new and terrifying kind of savage. The twentieth century and the white civilized world produced this savage.”1 –Dorothy Thompson, “The Lessons of Dachau,” Ladies Home Journal, September 1945 When the readers of the Ladies Home Journal turned to Thompson’s article, after paging through columns offering housekeeping and beauty advice, they faced a somber shift in tone in the journalist’s descriptions of the Dachau concentration camp. Thompson’s problematic language about civilization, race, and savagery echoed the themes of a novel by one of her favorite authors, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, which described another genocidal atrocity at the hands of white Belgians in the Congo. In 1941 she had lamented the shortcomings of journalism to fully represent the war and expressed hope that it would produce “a Victor Hugo,...