[In the following review, Roskies argues that The Holocaust in American Life fails to take into account broader cultural and historical factors that affect Jewish-American conceptions of the Holocaust.]

Must every major city in the United States boast its own museum of the Holocaust? Must every high school offer a mandatory curriculum on the destruction of European Jewry, every college campus have an endowed chair of Holocaust studies? Should a so-called Week of Remembrance in mid-April be observed, as Martin Luther King Day is now observed in mid-January? How many movies and books are enough?

To Peter Novick, the point of saturation has already been reached. A professor of history at the University of Chicago, Novick has set out to write the story of Holocaust consciousness in America [in The Holocaust in American Life,] beginning in the war years and ending with a glimpse at the future. And the first thing he reminds us is that the Holocaust did not always occupy such a prominent place in our urban landscape, on college campuses, in our civil religion, in cinemas and bookstores, or on the op-ed page of the New York Times. Even to think about World War II in terms of the fate of the Jews, as we tend to do now, is, he admonishes, to impose present preoccupations onto a very different past.

Defending certain elements of that past, and decrying the Holocaust-obsessed present, is the burden of this book. In his opening chapters, Novick returns us to an era when a public emphasis on ethnicity was viewed, not least by American Jews themselves, as politically counterproductive and perhaps intrinsically suspect. And with reason: although, nowadays, it is commonplace to hear that American Jews did not do nearly enough to help their co-religionists during the war, Novick argues otherwise. Basing himself on the minutes and internal memoranda of the American Jewish Committee, the American Jewish Congress, the Jewish Labor Committee, and the National Community Relations Advisory Council, he concludes that organized Jewry acted vigorously and responsibly in light of the actual political landscape at home and, especially, the intractable conditions abroad.

Similarly in the immediate post-war period, when the Jewish community rallied behind Washington to confront the new threat of Soviet totalitarianism. Under the impact of the cold war, Novick writes, American Jewish discourse about the Holocaust was necessarily “either muted or turned to anti-Soviet purposes.” As for Holocaust survivors who had made their way here, to the extent they were talked about at all they were upheld not as figures of martyrdom but as model citizens who were taking full advantage of the American dream.

It was during the 1960's and 70's, the period Novick calls “The Years of Transition,” that things changed. The catalysts were two events that occurred halfway around the globe, in the state of Israel. The first was the trial of Adolf Eichmann, which etched the details of the German killing machine into the collective Jewish psyche. The second was the Six-Day war of 1967, when American Jews relived the trauma of mass annihilation in the belief (false, according to Novick) that the Israeli army was in imminent danger of defeat.

What resulted from these two events was an American Jewish fixation with the horrors of the Holocaust that would mark—or, in Novick's view, disfigure—the decades to come, legitimating a whole new orientation to communal affairs. At the extreme, he writes, fears based on the Holocaust impelled Jewish organizations more or less to invent a surge in domestic anti-Semitism, with the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith being “especially assiduous in giving wide circulation to anti-Semitic remarks by obscure black hustlers and demagogues.” Similarly inflated notions of Jewish insecurity lay behind the hysterical campaigns to rally support for Israel and Soviet Jewry (“Never Again!”), and to warn against the dangers of assimilation.

And this, says Novick, is where we still are today. American Jews who themselves have abandoned any but the most rudimentary religious practices, and are as fuzzy in their grasp of history as their fellow non-Jewish Americans, have created an entire surrogate religion around the Holocaust, complete with saints (survivors), scripture (Schindler's List), and shrines (those ubiquitous museums). A community more secure, and more affluent, than Jews have ever been in all of history has given itself over to an utterly irrational scenario of destruction and victimization, in disregard of political reality and to the detriment of its own best interests and values.

As this brief summary suggests, Israel and Zionism are the combined bête noire of Novick's account of the career of the Holocaust in American consciousness. The sea change that occurred between the 1940's, when the murder of European Jewry still lacked a name, and the 1970's, when the whole world began to suffer from Holocaust-envy, was, in his view, the work of the Zionist lobby. Even the word “Holocaust,” he contends, did not gain currency in America until it was imported from Israel during the Eichmann trial. Likewise, the campaign to vilify Hannah Arendt for her 1963 book, Eichmann in Jerusalem—a book whose thesis “that the typical Holocaust perpetrator was ‘terrifyingly normal’ and by no means a driven anti-Semite” is, Novick airily asserts, now accepted by “almost all scholars”—was launched from Israel. After the Six-Day war, American Jewish organizations routinely took their marching orders from Israel, sometimes literally so: the annual March of the Living, a world-wide effort to rescue Jewish teenagers from assimilation by leading them on a pilgrimage to the Nazi death camps and then to Israel, is a transparent Zionist product. And so forth. Novick even blames the Zionists for doing away with the last vestiges of authentic Jewish American speech patterns, replacing the beloved yarmulke with kippa and the homey shabbes with the harsh-sounding shabbat.

All the main villains in Novick's story are either “Zionists” or “neoconservatives,” or both. The late Lucy S. Dawidowicz, for example, the formidable historian of the Holocaust, appears here only as a neoconservative “expert on Communism.” Novick has mined archival sources for every letter-to-the-editor Dawidowicz ever wrote, every internal memorandum she ever prepared for a Jewish organization; yet nowhere does he so much as mention her classic 1975 book, The War Against the Jews, 1933-1945, a work whose sobriety, rigor, and uncompromising argumentation set a gold standard for the then-infant field of Holocaust studies.

In short, the real subject of Novick's book is not the Holocaust at all but rather the politics of memory. This, however, is an area in which his own credentials rather severely qualify his competence to pass judgment. As a resolutely secular Jew, with, apparently, little if any command of traditional sources, Novick demonstrates no feel whatsoever for the processes of covenantal memory whereby Jews have always apprehended historical events under such constituent rubrics as exile, martyrdom, redemption. If, for example, during the Yom Kippur war of 1973, Jews the world over instinctively “remembered” the Holocaust, Novick assumes that Zionist propaganda was somehow to blame. That the Egyptians themselves chose the holiest day in the Jewish calendar to launch their near-fatal attack on the Jewish state does not even enter into his historical equation. They remembered, but he does not.

As a stranger to the inner life of the Jews, Novick also demonstrates no feel for their habitual patterns of collective behavior. Discussing the postwar displaced-persons (DP) camps, for example, he documents the efforts of Zionist chaplains and emissaries from the Jewish Agency to influence refugees to emigrate to Palestine, castigating these officials for manipulating the naive sensibilities of the traumatized and helpless refugees. What he does not know or does not acknowledge is that the majority of Jews who survived the war had in fact been members of one or another highly politicized prewar youth movement, and that the second thing they organized in the DP camps, after a quorum to recite kaddish, was political parties. If some proportion ended up going to Palestine, it was not out of naiveté but out of informed conviction.

But this particular set of convictions is not much to Novick's liking. Nor does he like it any better in its present-day manifestation, when it takes the form of a Holocaust-inspired preoccupation with Jewish self-interest. As a Left-liberal, he complains that this overmindfulness of their own sorrows commits Jews to nothing positive as Americans. Worse, by “raising the threshold of outrage,” the emphasis on remembering the Holocaust has desensitized Jews to their moral obligation toward those less fortunate than themselves. In an outburst of passion, he asks why the American Jewish community does not labor to rescue the millions upon millions of innocent children who are dying of starvation today. This, of course, is the purest cant—and, as a glance at the agenda of any major Jewish organization would confirm, a wild distortion of the truth to boot.

Despite the multiple deformations under which Novick labors, has he nevertheless stumbled onto an important point? Is there not something deeply troubling about an American Jewish community that has been spending exponentially more money erecting monuments to the dead than to educating its young, or about the proliferation of Holocaust courses that teach about the Jews only as a community marked for destruction, and then often in the context of a competition for victim status in today's multicultural America? There is, indeed. Nor has Novick been the only one to be troubled by this state of affairs.

But in this respect The Holocaust in American Life may in fact be a symptom of a subtle, and still largely unarticulated, shift in mood. What, after all, explains the huge success of the Oscar-winning escapist fantasy, Life Is Beautiful? Although the Italian comic Roberto Benigni may seem to make a strange bedfellow with the dour professor Peter Novick, each in his own way is urging us to bring closure, as it were, to the Holocaust, the one by means of zany antics and the mindless message that love and laughter will save a child from the hangman, the other by demystifying Jewish memory itself as nothing but a tool of Zionist politics.

Novick is also not wholly wrong in focusing on the pivotal role played by Zionism in the resurgence of Jewish collective memory in our day, though he is blind to the reciprocal nature of the dynamic. Jewish political sovereignty itself would never have been achieved in the land of Israel had it not been for Zionism's ability to appeal to such ancient and ineradicable Jewish archetypes as the ingathering of the exiles, Ezekiel's vision of the dry bones, and the tradition of kiddush haShem, the sanctification of God's Name through martyrdom. Nor would the campaign to free Soviet Jewry have succeeded in mobilizing the energies of hundreds of thousands of American Jewish youngsters without the powerful reverberations of the biblical injunction, “Let My People Go!,” a more compelling slogan by far, incidentally, than “Never Again!” The airlift of Ethiopian Jews to Israel is similarly unimaginable in the absence of the sanction implied by the very name of “Operation Exodus.”

It stands perfectly to reason, in other words, that American Jewish organizations should have drawn upon Israel and Zionism in their own efforts to forge a sense of a shared Jewish past, present, and future. The use—and, yes, the abuse—of Holocaust memory forms part of a much larger mobilization of group memory for the sake of group survival. But what this means is that, as the power of the Zionist appeal wanes—and it is demonstrably waning—so, too, will the power of the Holocaust.

And then where will American Jews be? If they follow the instruction of Peter Novick, they will be good Americans—of his stripe—and they will be even more bereft of their own history and memory than they already are.