[In the following review, Abrams discusses flaws in Novick's historical argument in The Holocaust in American Life, but concludes that the book offers an useful discussion of American perceptions of the Holocaust.]

The murders and deportations in Kosovo have brought with them memories of the 1930s, when Europe's Jews were subjected to the genocidal attack we now call the Holocaust. Commentators on the Balkan crisis say we must “learn the lesson of the Holocaust”; an advertisement placed by the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith asks us to “respond as you wish the world had responded last time.” Such analogies are familiar nowadays—no matter how dissimilar events in Kosovo may be from the actual Holocaust. Ironically, this impulse to find new Holocausts here and there reflects the all-but-universal recognition of the uniqueness of the Holocaust—the same recognition that leads us, more appropriately, to record its horrors and to offer reverent tributes to those who suffered from them, in history books, films, and the like. But as Peter Novick reminds us in The Holocaust in American Life, despite the prominence that the Holocaust has today attained, our acute consciousness of it is a fairly recent development.

In the immediate post-war years, the Holocaust was rarely spoken of—by Christians or Jews. When The Diary of Anne Frank was produced as a play in 1955 and as a film in 1959, it was lauded for emphasizing universalist themes rather than the Jewishness of Nazi victims. Nathan Glazer's classic work American Judaism, published in 1957, contained no index entry for “Holocaust.”

All this began to change in 1961, Novick writes, with the trial of Adolf Eichmann. The trial was “the first time what we now call the Holocaust was presented to the American public as an entity in its own right, distinct from Nazi barbarism in general.” Furthermore, in the United States, “the word ‘Holocaust’ first became firmly attached to the murder of European Jewry as a result of the trial.” This was an important change. The most commonly used English-language version of the Torah at the time, that edited by Rabbi Joseph Hertz in 1936, employs the term to mean any mass killing. In discussing animal sacrifice, for example, Hertz refers to “the holocausts King Solomon slaughtered when he dedicated the Temple.” Such usage would be unthinkable today.

Another turning point came with the 1967 and 1973 wars between Israel and its Arab neighbors, which made many Jews wonder if “it could happen again.” In a crucial change of strategy, many Jewish organizations concluded that “Americans could be made more sympathetic to Israel, or to American Jews, through awareness of the Holocaust, [and so] efforts had to be made to spread that awareness throughout American society.” These efforts were largely successful—the 1978 television miniseries Holocaust brought the subject into millions of American homes, and literally thousands of courses on the Holocaust were introduced in American colleges. Finally, in 1993 the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum opened on the Mall in Washington.

What impact have these measures had? Says Novick, not much. For most Americans, deploring the Holocaust is little more than a ritualistic gesture, albeit well meant, toward Jews who ask them to do so. To Novick, this is unsurprising: The Holocaust occurred not here but in Europe, and its perpetrators were not Americans. Nor does Novick (who is Jewish) believe that Americans do or should feel guilty for their conduct during those years: “The notion that the rescue of threatened foreign civilian populations was an obligation of a country involved in total war didn't occur to Americans during World War II or in its aftermath.” Moreover, he is at pains to discredit critics of American action (or inaction), arguing that during the war there was little that could in reality have been done. Here he sometimes ties himself in knots: For example, he argues that Americans should not feel any guilt about the failure to rescue more European Jews, then absolves the Roosevelt administration of its failures—on grounds that popular anti-Semitism prevented admitting refugees.

For Jews, the Holocaust is a far more salient matter. Recently, the major Jewish organizations have often advocated Holocaust studies as a means of developing or deepening Jewish identity at a time when inter-marriage and assimilation appear to threaten the Jewish future in America.

Novick's book includes a good discussion of why this “sacralization” of the Holocaust undercuts so much of traditional Jewish theology. “Where once it was said that the life of Jews would be a ‘light unto the nations’—the bearer of universal lessons—now it is the … death of Jews that is said to carry universal lessons.” Moreover, as he does not point out, using the Holocaust to promote Jewish identity simply isn't working. The years during which the Holocaust has been at the center of American Jewish life (say, 1975 to now) are those in which intermarriage rates have risen fastest and the identity/assimilation/survival crisis has seemed to grow most rapidly.

What of the future? Novick rightly notes that the Holocaust has been institutionalized—in the museum on the Mall, similar museums in New York and Los Angeles, memorials in many cities, legislative mandates to teach it, and endowed chairs and programs. As Novick says, “there are by now thousands of full-time Holocaust professionals dedicated to keeping its memory alive.” If, as he reports, all this has had little apparent impact on non-Jewish Americans, it may prove dangerous for Jews by making this horrendous period of Jewish suffering more familiar to them than their own religion. In fact, the prospect is disquieting: professionals churning out Holocaust materials for a diminishing Jewish population that learns more and more about the period from 1933 to 1945 and knows less and less about the 4,000 years of Judaism that preceded it.

Sadly, Novick's politics mar his book. His lengthy and unpersuasive discourses about the Cold War (which “led to marginalizing the Holocaust” because the Germans were now our allies) are reminiscent of CNN's notorious series. In fact, Holocaust consciousness grew rapidly during the 1980s, the dreaded Reagan years when “Cold War ideology” haunted the land. Otherwise, The Holocaust in American Life is a useful history and an often acute analysis of a major theme in American Jewish life.