[In the following review of The Holocaust in American Life, Popkin questions whether or not Novick sees any value in the maintenance of a distinctive Jewish identity in American culture.]

Imagine a well-meaning person—Jewish or non-Jewish—who has been moved by a visit to the Holocaust Memorial Museum, who has waded through historical accounts and memoirs on the topic, and who then picks up Peter Novick's The Holocaust in American Life. How will he or she react to the discovery that a prominent Jewish American historian now condemns the entire effort to remember and comprehend the Jewish catastrophe of 1933-1945 as yet one more trend that is “bad for the Jews”? Just when Jews and Gentiles seemed to have agreed that knowledge of the Holocaust should be part of every modern citizen's moral education, Novick comes along to announce that the event has no significant lessons to teach any of us, and that dwelling on it could even be construed as a “posthumous victory for Hitler” (281). For those who have not kept up with the increasingly arcane scholarly arguments about how the Holocaust should be represented, the effect of reading Novick's polemic is likely to be bewilderment at best, shock and resentment at worst.

To be sure, the appearance of a book like Novick's was almost inevitable. The enormous growth in interest in the Holocaust over the past few decades has generated its share of unseemly side effects, epitomized in the often-cited phrase, “There's no business like Shoah business.” The study of the Holocaust is now strongly institutionalized, even if Novick's reference to “thousands of full-time Holocaust professionals dedicated to keeping its memory alive” (277) is surely exaggerated. Indeed, the study of how Holocaust memory has developed has become a growth industry in its own right, inspiring books like James Young's The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (1993) and Edward Linenthal's Preserving Memory: The Struggle to Create America's Holocaust Museum (1995). The novelty of Novick's argument is his claim that the interest in the Holocaust is not just excessive and sometimes inappropriately expressed, but that the phenomenon is dangerous to American Jews and misguided for American society in general. Novick began his scholarly career thirty years ago with a study that noted how exaggerated claims about the number of victims claimed by the purges that followed France's liberation in 1944 had poisoned that country's public life, and, although he does not dispute the figures for Jewish losses during the war, The Holocaust in American Life often reads as though Novick thinks he is dealing with a similar situation in the United States.

Novick announces at the outset his doubt that “the prominent role the Holocaust has come to play in both American Jewish and general American discourse is as desirable a development as most people seem to think it is” (1) and concludes, almost 300 pages later, that “it would be an even greater posthumous victory for Hitler were we to tacitly endorse his definition of ourselves as despised pariahs by making the Holocaust the emblematic Jewish experience” (281), Along the way, he dismisses every justification that has been advanced for commemorating or studying the Holocaust in the United States. He finds it “striking … how ‘un-Jewish’—how Christian” recent Holocaust commemoration has become, with its emphasis on Jews as victims (11). The events of the Holocaust were too extreme to teach useful lessons for contemporary life. Rather than increasing sensitivity to oppression in the present, consciousness of the Holocaust “works in precisely the opposite direction, trivializing crimes of lesser magnitude” (14). In any event, “contemplating the Holocaust is virtually cost-free: a few cheap tears” (15). Those who blame the American government for not having done enough to prevent the tragedy are a “prosecution team” whose writings “devalue the notion of historical responsibility” and divert attention from “those responsibilities that do belong to Americans as they confront their past, their present, and their future” (48, 15).

The Holocaust in American Life operates on two levels. On one level, it is an analysis of how the events which we now sum up under the label “The Holocaust” have been described and understood in American culture over the past fifty years. On another, it is a jeremiad for the decline of a certain kind of American and Jewish liberalism and a warning of the fragility of a collective identity based on identification with the victims of one of history's greatest tragedies. For the most part, Novick's review of how the present-day representation of the Holocaust developed follows what has become the conventional scholarly wisdom. American Jews, and the general American public, were well aware of Nazi anti-Semitism in the 1930s. Reports about mass killings and death camps circulated during the war, but the details were often contradictory and hard to believe. The liberation of German concentration camps in 1945 dramatized what had happened to the Jews, but the “Final Solution” was subsumed in a larger reaction against the Nazis' “crimes against humanity” and the term “Holocaust,” used to distinguish the killing of Jews from other atrocities, only appeared later. Israel's capture and trial of Adolf Eichmann in the early 1960s greatly increased awareness of the specificity of German crimes against the Jews, and the Israeli-Arab wars of 1967 and 1973 created circumstances in which American Jewish leaders found it important to link the two events. As the mood of the American Jewish community changed in the 1970s and 1980s, emphasis on the Holocaust served to maintain a sense of Jewish identity and to justify concern with expressions of anti-Semitism. Novick notes the importance of the media in spreading interest in the Holocaust among the general American public, citing the examples of the 1978 Holocaust mini-series and Schindler's List, and discusses the institutionalization of Holocaust memory in school curricula and the Holocaust Memorial Museum.

In telling this story, Novick rarely misses a chance to put the worst spin on the motives of those involved in the events he discusses. He describes the failure of American Jews to put rescue of Hitler's victims at the top of their agenda, for example, as a “decision to ‘write off’ European Jewry and concentrate on building for the future … based on a thoughtful, if chilling, appraisal of what was and was not possible” (44). This characterization hardly does justice to the atmosphere of confusion—both about what was happening to the European Jews and about what the actual possibilities for helping them were—in which American Jewish leaders had to work. It is characteristic of Novick's tone that everyone involved in postwar discussions of the Holocaust comes off looking manipulative, self-interested, or misguided. Noting that, in the immediate aftermath of the war, there was a tendency to urge survivors not to dwell on their experiences, he writes,

There is, in fact, an eerie symmetry between the messages survivors received in the forties and fifties and those of the eighties and nineties. Earlier, they were told that even if they wanted to speak of the Holocaust, they shouldn't—it was bad for them. Later they were told that even if they didn't want to speak of it, they must—it was good for them. In both cases others knew what was best.

(83-84)

American Jews who spontaneously boycotted German goods during the 1950s were wasting their time—the reparations agreement with Germany meant that Israel was being flooded with German exports during the same years (109). If Holocaust scholarship after 1980 began to give increased attention to the role “bystanders” played during the war, this was not an effort to better understand what had happened, but a way of pointing the finger at all Gentiles, not just the Germans (179).

The point to Novick's book is not merely to trace the changing image of the Holocaust, however, but to argue that the growing emphasis on it since the 1960s has been a change for the worse. In his view, American Jews and American culture as a whole distanced themselves from the event during the 1940s and 1950s because they were focused on real issues that concerned the future, such as the threat of nuclear weapons, and because it was a period of optimism and “those whose outlook is basically optimistic and universalist—as Americans, including American Jews, were in the fifties—are not going to be inclined to center the Holocaust in their consciousness” (114). Even as he stresses the positive tone of the postwar period, however, Novick does, somewhat contradictorily, point out that Jews also hesitated to emphasize the subject for fear of stirring up anti-Semitism, a phenomenon whose persistence into the 1950s he documented in his well-received study of American university historians, That Noble Dream: “The Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession (1988). Among other things, he provides a choice selection of press citations showing how forcefully charges of Jewish “vengefulness” surfaced after the capture of Eichmann in 1960. Fears that the Eichmann affair would provoke an anti-Semitic backlash proved unfounded and the trial did a great deal to promote discussion of the Holocaust, but Novick sees the Israeli-Arab wars of 1967 and 1973 as more critical in this process, because appealing to the memory of the six million became “a deliberate strategy for mobilizing support for Israel among American Jews, among the general American public, and in the American government” (165). Ironically, in Novick's view, this effort was too successful: by the mid-1980s, as doubts about Israel's policies grew, “the Holocaust offered a substitute symbol of infinitely greater moral clarity” that threatened to divert support from the Jewish state (168).

American Jews' increased interest in the Holocaust, in Novick's view, was a sign of unfortunate changes in the American Jewish community. “Formerly, Jewish organizations had had an outward orientation, had emphasized building bridges between Jews and gentiles, had stressed what Jews had in common with other Americans,” he writes. “Now there was an inward turn, an insistence on the defense of separate Jewish interests … a shift away from the posture of the earlier period when American Jews rejected the status of ‘victim community’” (171). The Jewish community became more politically conservative and took up an unseemly form of “identity politics” (189). (Novick acknowledges that Jews in the 1980s and 1990s continued to vote more heavily for liberal candidates than any other ethnic group except blacks, and even cites a claim that “‘Jewish money’ comprises about half the funding” of the Democratic Party (335), but dismisses this as a liberalism confined to “questions of sexual morality, like abortion and gay rights” (183).) He finds it especially deplorable that Jews used the Holocaust to “trump American crimes against what was, by an equally wide margin, the least advantaged group,” namely, blacks (194). Novick insists that this evolution was “by no means a spontaneous development” and attributes it largely to conscious decisions by “communal leaders,” although he admits that the end result—an unhealthy obsession with the Holocaust—was not their conscious aim.

The result of all this, in Novick's view, has been an American Jewish community in which a shared identification with the victims of the Holocaust has become the only common element. Beyond citing the familiar figures for intermarriage, Novick's evidence for this claim is impressionistic at best. He notes that there has been little support for efforts to make commemoration of the Holocaust a major element in Jewish religious ritual; he does not note that the success of Schindler's List or of the drive to build the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., owed a great deal to non-Jewish interest. Even Novick's assertion that the leadership of the American Jewish community continues to use the Holocaust as its main argument to win support for Israel is exaggerated. Whether their claims have been justifiable or not, Israel's advocates have tended to put more stress on the country's value as a strategic asset, its status as a functioning democracy, and sometimes on its place in the hearts of Christians.

If it were really true that American Jews now overwhelmingly embraced a self-image of themselves as “pariahs” and were in the process of isolating themselves from their Gentile fellow citizens, there might be some basis for Novick's concerns. The very statistics on inter-marriage that Novick cites would seem to point to the opposite conclusion, however: the younger generation of American can Jews seems, if anything, too comfortable with its place in American society. In recognizing the issue posed by rising rates of intermarriage, Novick paradoxically aligns himself with the professional community leaders he so often criticizes. The only difference is that, whereas the standard complaint about the danger of assimilation is made in the name of an imagined community of shared and distinctively Jewish values, Novick's nostalgia is for an equally imaginary past in which all Jews were dedicated to values of universal justice and willing to forego any claims on behalf of their own group. The question hanging over Novick's book is whether he sees any value at all in the maintenance of a distinctive Jewish identity. His argument questions the existence of any real connection between American Jews and those elsewhere; he repeatedly points out that the events of the Holocaust took place on another continent and are therefore not a legitimate basis for the formation of an American collective identity (2). Where Novick thinks this argument logically leads is, however, unclear. Is his answer complete assimilation, or the reconstitution of American Jewish life on some totally new and undefined basis? Aside from suggesting that American Jews recognize the superior moral claims of African-Americans, Novick provides no hint of an answer.

Although Novick's book is addressed to a general audience, the heavy footnoting demonstrates that it is also intended as a contribution to Holocaust scholarship. Curiously, however, he says little about the role this scholarship has played in generating concern about the Holocaust, even though Holocaust studies is one area where academic publication has reached an audience well beyond the bounds of the campus. Raul Hilberg's name comes up in connection with the debate over Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem, but his The Destruction of the European Jews, one of the fundamental building blocks of our current understanding of the Holocaust, is never referred to. Other Holocaust scholars mentioned—Lucy Dawidowicz, David Wyman, Steven Katz—receive this honor only because Novick chooses to cite them as egregious examples of tendencies he deplores. He is quick to pronounce on involved historiographical debates, asserting, for example, that Auschwitz could not have been successfully bombed and that the prisoners would have opposed such action because they “knew that liberation was near at hand” (55), a statement that ignores the fact that the Germans actually succeeded in transferring most of their surviving prisoners to other camps or killing them en route.

There are thus many grounds on which Novick's book can be criticized, but the essential question is whether his dire vision of the results of Holocaust memorialization is appropriate. Novick's polemic certainly throws the baby out with the bathwater. For him, the fact that the only incontrovertible lessons the Holocaust seems to teach are that no atrocities are beyond the realm of possibility and that “civilized” peoples can behave in barbaric ways means that it is not worth drawing attention to this catastrophe (262); others may feel that these lessons are by no means unimportant. Novick's deep pessimism, both about the condition of American Jewry and about the “decline in America of an integrationist ethos (which focused on what Americans have in common and what unites us) … (6) leads him to an essentially nihilist conclusion: since historical memory is always subject to distortion and history's lessons are always uncertain, there seems to be no point in studying the past at all.

Fellow historians may be tempted to link this argument to the conclusion of Novick's earlier volume on the American historical profession. There, too, Novick ended on a note of gloom, writing that “as a broad community of discourse, as a community of scholars united by common aims, common standards, and common purposes, the discipline of history had ceased to exist” (Noble Dream, 628). Many other historians saw the multiplicity of new perspectives on history that Novick lamented as evidence that the discipline was in fact alive and well. Similarly, it is possible to interpret the increased consciousness of the Holocaust that Novick documents quite differently from the way he does. Rather than leading most American Jews to fear and distrust their Gentile neighbors, the current emphasis on the Holocaust seems to have reassured the Jewish community that their concerns are taken seriously by the culture at large. The Holocaust Museum may not teach about the American past, but it does give Jews a presence in this country's most important symbolic space, as Edward Linenthal has pointed out in Preserving Memory. Awareness of the Holocaust has not totally transformed American life or American values, but it has unquestionably influenced debates about whether this country should intervene to protect endangered groups in other countries, and it has had and continues to have a transformative effect on American Christianity, forcing a re-examination of traditional theological attitudes toward Judaism. Rather than blotting out attention to the injustices suffered by other ethnic groups, it has often opened the way for greater recognition of them—Steven Spielberg, after all, followed up Schindler's List with Amistad. For all the paradoxes involved in stressing the importance of a horrible catastrophe that took place a half century ago and half a world away the impact of awareness about the Holocaust in American life has been a good deal more constructive than Novick's polemic would have us believe.