[In the following review, Herf argues that The Holocaust in American Life offers interesting research and insights, but comments that Novick's argument is one-sided and fails to take into account other possible explanations for the continuing preoccupation with the Holocaust in American culture.]

Historians of Jewish and European history have been aware for some time that a focus on the Holocaust has advantages as well as drawbacks. The history of the Jews is by no means only or primarily a history of suffering, persecution, and victimization. Yet a focus on the Holocaust tends to push interest in and knowledge of Jewish theology, culture, and moral traditions to the margins. Similarly, though the Holocaust is inseparable from many of Europe's and Germany's traditions, there are many continuities and traditions which have nothing to do with it, or with Nazism, or fascism. Yet to the extent to which Americans and American Jews focus on the Holocaust, these other dimensions of European and German history fade into the background. Europe was the charnel house for the Jews but it was not only that.

Now [in The Holocaust in American Life,] Peter Novick, a historian at the University of Chicago most well known for his much-discussed 1988 work, That Noble Dream: The ‘Objectivity Question’ and the American Historical Profession, offers a spirited if one-sided argument about how the Holocaust became so prominent in American life. But, he does not examine other possible explanations for this relatively greater attention given to the Holocaust in America: the decline of anti-Semitism, the cosmopolitan understanding of what World War II was about, the growing sensitivity to all kinds of racism following the civil rights struggles of the 1960s, the aging survivors of the Holocaust and their determination to see that its memory will not die with them, the ability and willingness of an economically successful and highly educated American Jewish community to bring these issues to a broader public and, finally, a reception of the message because non-Jewish Americans recognized more than immediately after the Holocaust that this was the nadir of absolute evil in the twentieth century. In other words, it is possible and plausible to view the interest in the Holocaust as evidence that American society has become more tolerant, more pluralist, indeed even more multicultural in the best sense of that term. Just as Novick pointed out that in the 1960s marginalized groups had found a voice, he could argue that now the centrality of the Holocaust in European and American history represented a similar advance of knowledge.

Instead, he casts the causes of the Holocaust's prominence largely in pejorative terms: the replacement of integrationists with identity- and victim-celebrating politics, the rise of Jewish particularism linked to a move to the political right centered on anti-Communism and efforts to deflect all criticism of Israel, and the erosion of religious and cultural sources of Jewish identity that turned the Holocaust into “virtually the only common denominator of American Jewish identity.” Novick finds the idea that the Holocaust was unique to be “quite vacuous” and “deeply offensive” because it underemphasizes non-Jewish suffering. “Turning the Holocaust into the emblematic Jewish experience” has been “closely connected to the inward and rightward turn of American Jewry in recent decades”—as an expression of regrettable ethnic particularism and a retreating from a more distinctively Jewish, universalist message.

Novick's angry book, however, is not without some insights and interesting research. Unfortunately, he consistently undermines some of his better points with overstatement. Novick perceives aspects of “recent Jewish Holocaust commemoration as ‘un-Jewish,’” even Christian:

I am thinking of the ritual of reverently following the structured pathways of the Holocaust in the major museums which resemble nothing so much as the Stations of the Cross on the Via Dolorosa. … The way suffering is sacralized and portrayed as the path to wisdom—the cult of the survivor as secular saint.

These are themes that have some minor and peripheral precedent in Jewish tradition, but they resonate more powerful with major themes in Christianity.” There is something to this, but in his desire to separate Jewish tradition from memory, Novick goes too far. It is wrong to claim, as he does, that Judaism fosters memory of God's handiwork but not of past suffering, as if the Old Testament had only the book of Genesis but not Exodus. The story of the Exodus, commemorated every year at Passover, calls on Jews to cultivate the memory of the bitterness of slavery and the joy of liberation. Novick writes as if this religious and then secularized largely liberal and leftist Jewish tradition of anti-redemption did not exist and had not contributed to the emergence of memory of the Holocaust.

Novick takes on the argument that de-emphasis of Nazi persecution of the Jews amounted to their “abandonment.” He cites officials in the Roosevelt administration's Office of War Information who sought to convince the American public that the Germans “were everyone's enemy” and in that effort sought “to broaden rather than narrow the range of Nazi victims.” To have suggested that American intervention amounted to a war to save the Jews would have, they believed, narrowed support for the anti-Nazi struggle, played into the hands of isolationists, and appeared to confirm Nazi propaganda about Jewish influence on Roosevelt. But the Republican Party of 1940 also had slogans such as “It's Your Country—Why Let Sidney Hillman Run it?” while some candidates attacked the “Jew Deal” and “President Rosenfeld.” Moreover, in light of the German control of the continent from 1940-1944, practical prospects for rescue were “dim.” As Robert Dallek, the leading historian of FDR's foreign policy has argued, his failure to intervene decisively to open possibilities for immigration or rescue was Roosevelt's most serious shortcoming. Yet, given the degree of anti-Semitism in American society—the Gallup poll indicated that it peaked around June 1944 and began to decline after the revelation of the death camps in June 1945—Novick agrees that a reduced wartime focus on the Holocaust was not necessarily an expression of anti-Semitism.

At times, Peter Novick is so mean-spirited and insensitive that he undermines his own reasonable arguments. For example, he notes that the Yiddish press had much greater coverage of the Holocaust than the Anglo-Jewish press and that wartime memorial activity was concentrated in immigrant centers like the Lower East Side and the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. The reason:

recency of immigration—which meant stronger family connections to Europe—was closely tied to the depth of feeling the Holocaust evoked among American Jews. Baldly stated, it was the difference between contemplating that abstraction “European Jewry” being destroyed and imagining Aunt Minnie at Treblinka.

The choice of the endearing “Minnie,” a relative who is close, but not too close, introduces a tone of inappropriate levity. Perhaps Novick did not intend callous humor, but he should have been more careful to avoid such distractions.

While Novick sees benign causes for the relative lack of prominence of the Holocaust during World War II, he focuses on what he views as the regrettable causes of marginalization during the Cold War. As the United States mobilized to contain its former wartime ally, the Soviet Union, and to reintegrate its former enemies into the Western alliance, “talk of the Holocaust was not just unhelpful but actively obstructive.” It was the “wrong atrocity” with which to mobilize anti-Soviet sentiment. Novick stresses the contribution made by the theory of totalitarianism to marginalizing the Holocaust—focusing attention to the political rather than ethnic identity of Nazism's victims. “Conversely, any suggestion that the Nazi murder of European Jewry was a central, let alone defining, feature of that regime would undermine the argument for the essential identity of the two systems.”

Yes, the work of Carl Friedrich and his students did discuss totalitarianism which had no essential link to anti-Semitism. Yet, Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism (1950), probably the single most important text in the entire “literature on totalitarianism,” places anti-Semitism and the death camps in the center of its analysis, at a time when Marxists gave much shorter shrift to the dimensions of Nazi racial ideology as an autonomous factor. Arendt was able to remember the Holocaust while also pointing to the role of ideology and terror in the Soviet Union. Although the Holocaust then was not a topic of general conversation, Arendt's book was influential among intellectuals and scholars. Nor is Novick convincing when he writes that for American Jewish organizations seeking to dissociate themselves from Communism “in matters having to do with Germany there was a virtual taboo on mention of the Holocaust.” Such staunch Cold War anti-Communist organizations as the American Federation of Labor, which in the early 1950s had strong ties to West German Social Democrats, spoke out forcefully for restitution for Jewish survivors. However, it is plausible, as Novick concludes, that the Cold War limited discussion of the Holocaust and that it remained largely a “private, albeit widely shared, Jewish sorrow” which did not become “a public communal emblem.”

Novick discusses the Slansky trial in Prague only as an occasion for American Jewish leaders to dissociate Jews from Communism. He might have recalled that American liberals in the 1950s, not primarily American conservatives, were focused on the Slansky trial and other episodes of the “anti-cosmopolitan” purges in the Soviet bloc. They did so fully aware that the anti-Jewish persecution of the Communist 1950s paled in comparison with the Nazi Holocaust. While American Communists and leftists were quick to perceive anti-Semitism in the trial of the Rosenbergs, they did not denounce the even more blatant attacks on “Jewish monopoly capitalists” in the conspiracy theories swirling around the Soviets' trials.

Instead, Novick focuses his criticism on an American Jewish Committee press release for presenting the “grotesque fabrication” that the East German government was rounding up “non-Aryans” based on principles of selection resting on Nazi racial legislation. In fact, in 1952-53 the East German government did carry out a purge of many Jewish members of the party and government, and did frighten Jewish community leaders sufficiently to induce its major leaders to flee to the West that winter. This purge did not rest on Nazi racial legislation and was not directed at “non-Aryans” or all Jews. Jews remained in the East German government and party. Yet the anti-Semitic aspects of the purge were clear to anyone reading attacks on the international conspiracy of Zionists, capitalists, and imperialists in East Germany's official newspaper, Neues Deutschland. Novick is angrier at the American Jewish Committee for an exaggeration which captured elements of facts about the purge—and facts were hard to come by given East Germany's ability to close off access to accurate information—than about this burst of anti-Semitic politics in Europe less than a decade after the Holocaust. In West Germany, liberals and left-liberals, rather than conservatives, were most concerned about the anti-cosmopolitan purges.

Is Novick correct when he asserts that in the 1950s American Jewish religious thinkers “had nothing” to say about the Holocaust? It seems plausible, compared to “the omnipresence of the Holocaust in the 1980s and 1990s—nobody in those years seemed to have much to say on the subject, at least in public.” Americans were more focused on Hiroshima than the Holocaust, both because it carried “urgent lessons” about nuclear weapons and because Americans were involved as perpetrators and potential victims. With the decline of anti-Semitism, an upbeat economy, a celebration of victory in the war, and the absence of identity politics, the Holocaust was “an inappropriate symbol of the contemporary mood, and that is surely one of the principal reasons it stayed at the margins.” Novick presents evidence that in the late 1940s, the American Jewish Committee, the Jewish Labor Committee, the Jewish War Veterans, and the Anti-Defamation League—concerned that focusing on the Jews as victims would sponsor anti-Semitic stereotypes—opposed a Holocaust memorial in New York City, because “it would be a perpetual memorial to the weakness and defenselessness of the Jewish people” and thus would “not be in the best interests of Jewry.” Novick focuses more critically on the anti-Semitism of American conservatives. But, in response to the Eichmann trial and the publication of Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem, the Wall Street Journal editorialized that the trial risked reviving anti-German sentiment—which would benefit the Communists and was pervaded by “an atmosphere of Old Testament retribution,” while William F. Buckley's National Review argued that Communists would benefit from the “Hate Germany movement” the Eichmann trial furthered. This was just the kind of anti-Jewish backlash the leaders of Jewish organizations feared.

Though the Eichmann trial first brought the Holocaust as a discreet event to broad international and American attention, Novick argues that, instead, events in the Middle East were decisive. Specifically, the Yom Kippur War of 1973, though culminating in Israeli victory, brought home Israel's vulnerability and political isolation. In response, Novick argues that American Jewish organizations paid unprecedented attention to the Holocaust because its memory would deflect “legitimate grounds for criticizing Israel, to avoid even considering the possibility that the rights and wrongs were complex.” Citing literature by Jewish lobbying organizations, Novick argues that the memory of the Holocaust was used for the purpose of building support for Israel and immunizing it against criticism. Yet, Novick finds it unreasonable that in light of the hostility of the Arab world, and the United Nations resolution of 1975 equating Zionism with racism, Jews and non-Jews would recall that the Holocaust had in fact occurred, and that hostility to the Jews and the Jewish state had hardly disappeared from international politics.

Finally, Novick argues that a Jewish identity focused on the Holocaust became “dominant, because it was, after all, virtually the only one that could encompass those Jews whose faltering Jewish identity produced so much anxiety about Jewish survival.” This is why American Jews chose as their central representation to erect a museum in Washington, D.C. devoted to the Holocaust. Here again, Novick's critical insight is undermined by his lack of nuance. While the much discussed “crisis of meaning” probably did contribute to the emergence of the Holocaust, Novick is not convincing that identity formation was the driving force behind the establishment of the Holocaust museum. Nor is it necessarily the case that the lessons the Holocaust has to teach, such as the values of tolerance, democracy, and pluralism, are not so much wrong as they are “empty” and “not very useful”; that its memory has the effect of making us less concerned about subsequent horrors that don't match it in extremity; or that it leads us to avoid the more painful memories of racial persecution against African-Americans that are, in contrast to the Holocaust, part of American history. Novick rhetorically agrees with Emil Fackenheim's view that forgetting the Holocaust would give Hitler a posthumous victory. “But it would be an even greater posthumous victory for Hitler were we to tacitly endorse his definition of ourselves as despised pariah by making the Holocaust the emblematic Jewish experience.”

The Holocaust has become—who knows for how long—a part of American mass culture. Like all discussions based on memory, it can evoke great amounts of narcissism. Most American Jewish teenagers are probably learning more about Auschwitz than about the Hebrew prophets. Some aspects of Holocaust education in the schools may teach lessons that are trivial. Examples of lobbying groups using and misusing the memory of the Holocaust for contemporary political purposes ought to be examined. The problem with The Holocaust in American Life is not that all of Novick's criticisms are wrong, but that he makes them without sufficient nuance and balance. He would have written a much better and more convincing book had he examined the host of other and equally plausible and not at all pejorative reasons for the emergence of the Holocaust as a theme in American life.

Peter Novick has placed himself in a paradoxical situation. He is a distinguished historian who bemoans the entry of the story of absolute evil in modern world history into a prominent place in American society and culture. But any agenda of scholarship to suit the political needs of the moment is objectionable. Aside from the debate about American policy during the Holocaust, Novick does not examine the historiography of the Holocaust written by American historians. This would have been the reasonable thing to do to see if the lessons they drew were profound or vacuous, narrowly ethnic and/or universal, intellectually and historiographically enduring or the stuff of transient propaganda. I cannot recall another recent example of a prominent American historian objecting so vociferously to the growing prominence of a history of persecution into public consciousness and seeing that emergence as due only to narrow, self-interested, and regrettable motives. Especially in light of long-standing complaints about complacent optimism and disinterest in history and memory in our country and our culture, one would have hoped for recognition that the emergence of the Holocaust also represents a growing decency, cultural diversity and intellectual and moral maturation of an America less innocent of history's darkest time.