Ochs' concerns about the way Jews were perceived in American society. His apprehensions about judgement were manifested positively by his strong fidelity to the United States. At the same time, within the pages of The New York Times, Sulzberger refused to bring attention to Jews, including the refusal to identify Jews as major victims of Nazi genocide. Instead, many reports of Nazi-ordered slaughter identified Jewish victims as "persons." The Times even opposed the rescue of Jewish refugees. On November 14, 2001, in The New York Times 150th-anniversary issue, in an article entitled "Turning Away From the Holocaust," former executive editor Max Frankel wrote: And then there was failure: none greater than the staggering, staining failure of The New York Times to depict Hitler's methodical extermination of the Jews of Europe as a horror beyond all other horrors in World War II – a Nazi war within the war crying out for illumination. According to Frankel, harsh judges of The New York Times "have blamed 'self-hating Jews' and 'anti-Zionists' among the paper's owners and staff." Frankel responded to this criticism by describing the fragile sensibilities of the Jewish owners of The New York Times: Then, too, papers owned by Jewish families, like The Times, were plainly afraid to have a society that was still widely anti-Semitic misread their passionate opposition to Hitler as a merely parochial cause. Even some leading Jewish groups hedged their appeals for rescue lest they be accused of wanting to divert wartime energies. At The Times, the reluctance to highlight the systematic slaughter of Jews was undoubtedly influenced by the views of the publisher, Arthur Hays Sulzberger. He believed strongly and publicly that Judaism was a religion, not a race or nationality – that Jews should be separate only in the way they worshiped. He thought they needed no state or political and social institutions of their own. He went to great lengths to avoid having The Times branded a Jewish newspaper. He resented other publications for emphasizing the Jewishness of people in the news. In the same article, Frankel quotes Laurel Leff, associate professor of journalism at Northeastern University, who in 2000 had described how the newspaper downplayed Nazi Germany's targeting of Jews for genocide. November 1942 was a critical month for American Jews. After several months of delay, the U.S. State Department had confirmed already published information that Germany was engaged in the systematic extermination