[In the following review, Levine questions Novick's methodology and use of sources in The Holocaust in American Life, noting some significant omissions in his argument.]

In 1967 George Steiner, the British literary critic, predicted and also urged:

We cannot pretend that [Bergen] Belsen is irrelevant to the responsible life of the imagination. What man has inflicted on man in very recent times has affected the writer's primary material—the sum and potential of human behavior—and it presses on the brain with a new darkness.

Last year, a Steiner less sanguine about how much that “responsible life of the imagination” could do with the “new darkness”—or possibly overwhelmed by the newer darkness of the 1990s—warned of an epoch defined by the “decline of the incredible.”

Now [in The Holocaust in American Life,] University of Chicago historian Peter Novick has written what will surely long be the most comprehensive, nuanced interpretive account of the periods that preceded and followed Steiner's entreaty. But Novick's concern is different. The question that puzzles (and motivates) him is “why in 1990s America—50 years after the fact and thousands of miles from its site—the Holocaust has come to loom so large in our culture.” To his credit, in pursuit of an answer Novick largely rejects the glib psychobabble about repression and trauma. Regrettably, he does not seem to realize an assumption underpinning his argument made at the outset—that “historical events are most talked about shortly after their occurrence, then they gradually move to the margin of consciousness”—is itself open to dispute. As was true of their expulsion from Iberia at the end of the 15th century, Jews have been known to absorb their catastrophes in a variety of ways over the span of several generations, and the most creative responses tend to come later rather than sooner.

Be that as it may, Novick shows how the destruction of European Jewry by the Nazis and their collaborators from 1933 to 1945 eventually came to be called “the Holocaust,” surrounded by claims of uniqueness. He outlines the major phases in the history of the consciousness of the horrific event, and details the complex transformation of reactions to it in this country, particularly among American Jews—with selective comparisons to American Christians and to Israeli Jews when it serves his argument.

During the fighting the fate of Europe's millions of Jews received limited attention. Immediately after the War when some concentration camp survivors were eager to tell the world what had transpired, they were virtually ignored. The focus was already on the danger posed by yesterday's ally, the Soviet Union, and its global ambitions for Communism. Indeed, the Cold War agenda made it difficult to even think too harshly of West Germany, now on the front line of Communist containment.

In Jewish communities, meanwhile, other agendas encouraged the inclination to look ahead. In the United States, Jews were busy trying to emigrate to the suburbs; Israelis were busy gathering in the “exiles”; most of those who were survivors, wherever they happened to be, were themselves preoccupied with rebuilding their lives.

While attempting to explain the “why now” and “why here” aspects of today's interest in the Holocaust, Novick presents an array of contributing historical and cultural factors. Adolf Eichmann's trial of the early '60s, and the debate precipitated in Israel and in America by Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, certainly were important. So were the 1973 Yom Kippur War; a faltering Israeli government trying to secure and legitimate its territorial gains; changing relations between the Israeli and American governments; revised perceptions of Arabs and Jews; the agonizing effects of the Vietnam War; and the implications of all of this for American Jews suffering the insecurities of the newly arrived as well as confronting intermarriage, assimilation and the decline in meaning.

Novick knows the difference between causes and influences. Yet despite all of the impressive evidence he musters for his arguments, and his skill at contextualizing where the record is unclear, he struggles mightily but not always successfully with the same methodological issue he took up in his previous book, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession.

In approach and tone, Novick seems to be closer to the soft and humane sociology of knowledge analysis than to the often reductionist and nihilistic postmodernism. He has little to say, however, about the way multiple circumstances interact. Too many of those he cites could very well serve contrary positions. For example, it is difficult to know what he means when he says that “America's elevation of ‘victim culture’” to a high standing is not a “cause” but a “background condition,” or that “the Holocaust as a ‘consensual symbol’” has “mandated an intransigent and self-righteous posture in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”

Frequently one wonders where Novick was when the Holocaust was being Americanized. This may seem an irrelevant, even an unfair question to ask of a historian. But the author places himself in his historical narrative and asserts some first-hand awareness of contemporary events. His thorough literature search is not matched by an intuitive sense of whose views are important and whose are not. Uncritical citations of questionable public opinion polls, and an occasional reliance on the authority of “most people” further detract from the specialist's knowledge Novick should possess. Agonizing discussions, including public conferences on the “Use and Abuse of the Holocaust,” go back to the 1970s. Someone might have failed to invite Professor Novick. Still, his observations at the end of the '90s, long after many “No business like Shoah business” impresarios and their publicists have gone on to other subjects, come across as a bit stale.

One also must ask “Where were you?” with respect to serious omissions by Novick in The Holocaust in American Life. Most glaring is his failure to take into account the role of Elie Wiesel, the one individual who, from the 1960s to the present day, has come closest to being the “leader” of American Jews in this area. In his person and in his writing, among Jews and non-Jews, within the orbit of Jewish organizations, the academy and far beyond, the indefatigable Wiesel has given spiritual and artistic form to the inchoate. In this book, though, he does not qualify as “cause,” or even “background condition.”

For Novick, the Yom Kippur War appears to be the formative moment and turning point in the development of Holocaust consciousness. He thus also tends to scant the Six Day War. Stated but uncaptured is the deep emotional response of a surprisingly broad spectrum of American Jews to the way the United Nations and especially the United States government turned a blind eye to Arab international treaty violations that Israel felt were “life threatening.” Many totally assimilated American Jews were surprised by their own response to what could happen to Jews in 1967, and its evocation of what did happen to them in 1933-1945.

Woefully skimpy, too, is the discussion of the renewal of Jewish awareness in the Soviet Union, and the reclaiming of the Holocaust as a Jewish experience from Communist rhetoric and ritual. In the U.S. the student organized Soviet Jewry movement—with its “Never Again” posters and hardly subtle references to the Holocaust—embarrassed the mainline Jewish organizations, against instructions from Jerusalem, into taking a strong public stand on Jewish rights (or the lack of them) in the USSR.

To be sure, Wiesel is mentioned in the book many times, particularly in regard to his dealings with President Jimmy Carter, the U.S. Holocaust Commission and the ensuing Washington Mall museum—the one instance where he actually assumed an organizational role. Whatever Novick's criticism of the entire undertaking, it only represents a single dimension of Wiesel's leadership in regard to the promulgation of Holocaust consciousness. The spotlight that he has trained on the political vicissitudes and human rights violations of the end of the 20th century, by profoundly melding Jewish particularism and universalism, has been far more influential in universalizing the Holocaust than any intellectual argument for or against its uniqueness.

The depreciation of Wiesel's involvement in the history Novick describes finally goes beyond the limits of fairness and points up the author's poor grasp of some material that he tries to analyze. Novick accuses Wiesel of Christianizing the Holocaust, and thereby gaining popularity among Christians as well. The evidence: Wiesel's “gaunt face with its anguished expression. … Wiesel's carefully cultivated persona as symbol of suffering, as Christ figure.” Novick proceeds to allow the possibility that “this stance is thoroughly authentic,” but he finds other Christian links. The new evidence: Wiesel's describing “the lure of and quest for suffering” during his school days in his recently published memoir. But Novick ignores Wiesel's own questioning of the asceticism of his youth.

Following that insulting distortion, Novick again acknowledges suffering as “authentically Jewish” but maintains it is “quite distant from the mainstream of Jewish thought.” Scholars would disagree. Similarly, the author dismisses perhaps the best-known epigram in the Talmud, made famous by Steven Spielberg—“He who saves a single life, it is as if he has saved the entire world”—as originally referring to Jews only. He seems unaware that the leading modern scholars authenticate the more universal reading. He does not demonstrate the respect for scholarship that his own scholarship in many ways deserves.

Ultimately, Novick turns to conspiracy theories. Without presenting very much evidence, he attributes the most significant rise in Holocaust consciousness to the media moguls, print and celluloid, on both coasts. In doing so he joins generations of anti-Semites who have been explaining the business decisions of those moguls as a reflection of their Jewishness. Never mind that anyone trying to publish or produce anything on the Holocaust today can tell you how mercurial as well as Jewishly ambivalent these “elders of Zion” are, particularly after a triple martini luncheon, and how most likely (and incorrectly) they will decide the Holocaust “market” is “glutted.”

Since I'm talking about conspiracies, let me propose my own: containment. There are some “Holocaust professionals,” to use Novick's unflattering formulation, who foster Holocaust memorials, museums and school curricula to preserve our memory of it, to prevent its consuming us with grief and wrong lessons, and to focus our attention on current and future human suffering. At a time when “compassion fatigue” is discussed as a diagnostic category—soon to qualify for Blue Cross/Blue Shield reimbursement—when, as George Steiner warns, we are at risk of losing our sense and indignation that anything can be “incredible,” containment of the Holocaust is the conspiracy that I would like to join.