As a young journalist in 1943, Melvin J. Lasky (1920-2004) authored an unusually stinging critique of the Allies’ response to the Holocaust.

Writing in the pages of The New Leader (of which he was literary editor) on October 23, 1943, Lasky authored a J’Accuse titled “The Shame of a World.” He condemned the Allies’ response to the Nazi genocide as “sympathetic mumbo-jumbo and do-nothingism.” Millions of Jews were being murdered, and the most they could expect was “obituary notices” from “eloquent and self-righteous” Allied political leaders, who were motivated “partly out of fear and ignorance, out of weary everyday conservatism, and out of a disgraceful moral emptiness.” He concluded: “The continent has become a vast cemetery for a whole people. Relatives and friends will cry and mourn and remember, [but] for the rest, the terrible shame of a world will be forgotten.”

Lasky later gained fame as the longtime editor of the influential liberal anticommunist journals Encounter and Der Monat.

Sources: Medoff, Militant Zionism in America, p. 103.