SOURCE: Baron, Lawrence. “Experiencing, Explaining, and Exploiting the Holocaust.” Judaism 50, no. 2 (spring 2001): 158-75.

[In the following excerpt, Baron discusses several recent books on the Holocaust, including The Holocaust in American Life, commenting that Novick's book represents a warning against using the memory of the Holocaust as a means of advancing Jewish identity or other political agendas.]

The number of Holocaust memoirs being published has increased dramatically in the last few years as more and more survivors feel an urgent obligation to document their wartime experiences as concentration camp inmates, ghetto dwellers, hidden fugitives, partisans, or refugees before they die. Similarly, the corpus of scholarly literature about the Holocaust grows unabatedly as the event itself recedes further into the past. A quick look at the Amazon.com website under the subject heading of “Holocaust” lists over 3,000 titles on the topic.

This proliferation of publications about the Shoah recently prompted the librarian in charge of purchasing books at the university where I teach to question my habit of ordering every new book on the Holocaust for the library's collection. He reminded me that many new Holocaust memoirs were being published by vanity presses and replicated what our students could learn about the plight of the Jews under Nazism from the substantial holdings on this subject which our library already possessed. Although I initially resented his criticism, I eventually acknowledged that some of the books I automatically had approved for purchase were neither well-written nor novel contributions to understanding the Holocaust. I have come to view the vast body of autobiographies and studies on the Holocaust as a pointillist painting. Each personal account and scholarly analysis of different aspects of the Holocaust fills in a small space on a canvas which, viewed from a distance, reveals the contours and details of Germany's attempt to eradicate the Jews of Europe, as well as the spectrum of Jewish and Gentile responses to this state-sanctioned policy of genocide. With this metaphor in mind, I recognize that there are memoirs and studies of the Holocaust that constitute only a bit of barely perceptible shading in the overall picture we have of this complex event. Yet as a historian, I feel even this shading may be useful and important in helping us piece together the complete picture. …

How the Holocaust has been selectively remembered to shape the postwar national identities and politics in Germany, collaborating countries, the Allied powers, and Israel has been the topic of a growing number of studies over the past decade.¹ The most recent literature not only explores this theme from the vantage point of public commemoration, but also from the perspective of how the graphic, literary, and performing arts create aesthetic forms to communicate the Holocaust experience to contemporary audiences.² Scholars are also now looking beyond 1945 to the postwar restoration of decimated Jewish communities in Europe, the political role played by Holocaust survivors in Israel and the United States, and the continuing impact of the Shoah on international law, philosophy, and theology.³

In the process of writing this synopsis of recent trends in Holocaust research, I feel like a literary Sorcerer's Apprentice who has conjured up far more books than I can possibly review. I did so deliberately with the intention of dispelling a fear that is often articulated by Holocaust survivors and scholars alike—namely, that the Holocaust may be forgotten or denied altogether when the last survivor dies.⁴ The profusion of scholarly and popular works about the Holocaust and the rapid growth of high school curriculum units and college courses about the Shoah stand as concrete proof that this fear is unsubstantiated. Despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary, even authors like Tim Cole who are sharply critical of the “mass marketing” of the Holocaust cite the American Jewish Committee's Poll of 1993 that found high percentages of American adults and high school students “either do not know or offer incorrect answers to the question ‘What does the term “the Holocaust” refer to?’” (186). When the findings of this poll were challenged on the grounds that the questions were ambiguously worded, the American Jewish Committee commissioned another poll in which the meaning of the questions was clarified. The results were far more positive with only 1.1٪ of those polled doubting the Holocaust ever happened and another 8.8٪ saying they didn't know enough about the Holocaust to answer the question.⁵

In his path-breaking study While America Watches, Jeffrey Shandler traces the popularization of the Holocaust in American culture through the medium of television. Immediately following the Second World War, American movie audiences viewed the grisly newsreel films of the mounds of corpses and the remnant of dazed skeletal survivors encountered by the Allied troops who “liberated” the German concentration and death camps. The United States' prosecution team at Nuremberg edited this footage into an hour-long documentary entitled Nazi Concentration Camps and entered it as evidence of German war crimes and crimes against humanity to bolster the Allied case against the German defendants. In the 1950s, scenes from the film were often spliced into television documentaries about World War Two like Crusade in Europe, Victory at Sea, and The Twisted Cross. Playhouse 90's 1959 production of Judgment at Nuremberg also featured wrenching scenes from this film. The Holocaust occasionally served as a theme on early television shows like This Is Your Life, The Eternal Light, Philco Television Playhouse, Studio One, and Frontiers of Faith, and subsequently provided the plot line for episodes of popular television series like The Twilight Zone, Star Trek, All in the Family, and Lou Grant. Shandler devotes entire chapters to the televising of the Eichmann Trial in 1961 and the miniseries Holocaust in 1978. He convincingly argues that these two broadcasts paved the way for the frequent usage of the Holocaust as the subject of TV documentaries and dramas in the last two decades. While recognizing how television tends to trivialize the Holocaust by presenting its viewers with a comforting subtext that explains the genocide of the Jews as the product of an “un-American” authoritarianism, charismatic dictatorship, mass hysteria, or religious bigotry, Shandler convincingly demonstrates that television has elevated the Holocaust into “a powerful and daunting presence in the nation's cultural landscape, achieving the status of a master moral paradigm” (xviii).

Since, as Shandler amply demonstrates, the Holocaust has become a “household word” in contemporary America, then the concern of Holocaust survivors and scholars should cease to be over whether the Holocaust will be forgotten or denied, but rather over how and why it is being remembered. Both Tim Cole's Selling the Holocaust and Peter Novick's The Holocaust in American Life grapple with these issues and conclude that commemorations, museums, and popular depictions of the Holocaust draw obvious “lessons” from the event reflecting the political priorities of their creators or sponsors.

To Novick, the representation of Holocaust history and the public memorialization of the event in the United States rarely have been exercises in the objective documentation and remembrance of historical facts. Instead, the “facts” have been selected in ways that affirm uncontested assumptions about the relevance of the Holocaust to American history in general or to Jewish identity in particular. Novick's analysis of Holocaust commemoration should not be misconstrued as a form of Holocaust denial, but rather as a warning against reducing the Holocaust to trite lessons that enhance Jewish identity or advance a variety of contemporary causes.

He begins his book by reminding us that during World War Two, not only the Roosevelt Administration, but most Jewish organizations as well, downplayed the Jewish animus of Nazi atrocities. In December of 1942 the Allied Powers issued a joint declaration with the nations of the fledgling United Nations denouncing Germany's “intention to exterminate the Jewish people in Europe.”⁶ Novick, however, presents ample evidence that government officials did not want to draw attention to reports of Jewish genocide since this might give isolationist critics of American intervention in Europe “proof” that the United States was fighting Germany just to mollify Roosevelt's Jewish supporters or might strain American-British relations since Palestine was an obvious and nearby destination for Jewish refugees fleeing persecution in Europe. Novick reasonably argues that the majority of American Jewry backed the policy of “rescue through victory” as the most efficacious form of saving European Jewry and deliberately eschewed the kind of strident Jewish nationalistic appeals of groups like the Emergency Committee to Save the Jewish People of Europe in order to counter accusations of having dual loyalties.

Novick reiterates Henry Feingold's assessment that retrospective condemnations of how American Jewry failed to act on behalf of their European co-religionists represent ahistorical projections of American Jewry's postwar status and power onto the deeply divided and relatively insecure American Jewish community of the 1930s and 1940s. After the war, American Jews tended to downplay the image of Jews as victims and identified more with the chalutzim who took Jewish fate into their own hands and built modern Israel. As the last vestiges of anti-Semitic residential and social discrimination disappeared as a result of the Civil Rights movement, Jews increasingly engaged in a parochial politics modeled after the “Black Power” and ethnic revival movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s.⁷ From the vantage point of this Jewish militancy, American Jews questioned the timidity of their wartime leaders to lobby the Roosevelt administration to rescue European Jews and conveniently forgot that when it was happening, the Holocaust usually was considered part of the larger civilian and military carnage left in the wake of World War Two.

Following the defeat of Germany, the Jewish survivors in Europe constituted part of the broader influx of “Displaced Persons” whom the Allies had to rehabilitate and resettle. Novick maintains that their ordeal was overshadowed by other momentous events like the suicide of Hitler, the bloody battles of Iwo Jima and Okinawa, the dropping of atomic bombs on Japan, V-J day, and the emergence of the Cold War. Although it has become almost axiomatic that guilt for what had befallen European Jewry tipped the debate in the United Nations in favor of the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, Novick echoes the conclusion of an Israeli historian “that a great majority of UN members considered the Palestine question in terms of concrete interests and political realities rather than (in terms of) any feeling of remorse” (71). After citing the spectrum of Jewish opinion over whether the debilitated DP's could ever be productive citizens of the new Jewish state or whether they should immigrate to the United States instead of Israel, Novick provides evidence that in both countries survivors initially were marginalized and told to put their traumatic memories behind them.

It is unfortunate that Novick did not have a chance to read Shandler's manuscript because it shows how the consciousness of the Holocaust seeped into American public memory even in the politically quiescent Fifties through television documentaries and dramas. By dismissing the book and movie versions of Leon Uris's Exodus as “schlock fiction” (157), Novick underestimates the impact of popular culture in forming the common ideas and images of the Holocaust and Israel held by many Americans. In 1947 the consciousness of Nazi genocide prompted the making of the first two feature films exposing American anti-Semitism, Crossfire and Gentleman's Agreement. The associations of Israel as the natural refuge for Holocaust survivors, of Nazi anti-Semitism with Arab anti-Zionism, or of Israel's struggle against neighboring Arab states with the American Revolution were explicit themes in movies like Sword in the Desert (1949), The Juggler (1953), Hill 24 Doesn't Answer (1955), and Exodus (1960).⁸ Personally, I recall how deeply imprinted on my mind these notions were after viewing the movie Exodus as a 13-year-old on a Hebrew school field trip for boys whose bar-mitzvah year coincided with the thirteenth Anniversary of the founding of Israel.

What brought the Holocaust to the forefront of American Jewish consciousness, Novick argues, was a conjuncture of Jewish concerns that served as a catalyst for increased Jewish anxiety about the survival of Judaism in the United States and the security of Israel in the Middle East. If Israel's resounding defeat of its Arab neighbors in 1967 reversed the Holocaust image of Jews as passive victims, the Yom Kippur War and Israel's subsequent international isolation revived fears that Jews were destined to be an embattled people always struggling to survive against an omnipresent anti-Semitism that could be ignited into another Holocaust by cultural diplomatic, economic, or political crises. In the same period, Jewish liberals and leftists who had championed African-American and Third World causes found themselves alienated by the anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism that often was espoused by militant spokespersons for these causes.

Although the polling data tracked a continuous decline in the levels of Gentile anti-Semitism in the United States, many American Jews saw parallels between their status and that of the German Jews before the rise of Nazism. A conspicuously successful minority, no matter how acculturated, easily could serve as the lightning rod for popular discontent. Thus, the Holocaust, which had been the great exception to the trajectory of emancipated Jewry in Western Europe and the United States, was transformed into a cautionary tale about American Jewish identity. The “lessons of the Holocaust” increasingly were invoked to discredit anything which might adversely affect Jews and Judaism like affirmative action, the high rate of Jewish intermarriage, and public criticism of Israeli policies. Orienting their identity around the “uniqueness of the Holocaust,” many American Jews laid claim to a kind of “hereditary victimhood”⁹ to justify Jewish political parochialism, rationalize Israeli belligerency, or minimize the historical suffering of other oppressed minorities like African-Americans or Gypsies.

Novick documents the successes of American Jewish organizations in placing the Holocaust at the center of American collective memory. The building of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum on what is America's secular version of sacred space, the inclusion of Holocaust units in the public school curricula of numerous states, and the popularization of the Holocaust through the television miniseries “Holocaust,” box office successes like Schindler's List, and civic commemorations of Yom-Hashoah attest to how a European Jewish event has been integrated into America's national identity. Novick worries that the American preoccupation with the Holocaust enables the United States to shirk dealing with the long-term legacy of its own human rights abuses like the internment of Japanese Americans, native American massacres and relocation, and slavery and institutionalized discrimination against African-Americans. He expresses his concern that the Holocaust is exploited to maintain Jewish identity by creating a gnawing anxiety among American Jews that they always will be potential victims. On this last point, he echoes the sentiments of Jewish writers like Michael Goldberg and Anne Roiphe.¹⁰

One searches in vain in Novick's book for references to Marc Ellis's Jewish variation of liberation theology,¹¹ or to scholars who analyze the similarities, and not just the differences, between the Holocaust and other Genocides like Israel Charny, Frank Chalk, Irving Louis Horowitz, Leo Kuper, or Robert Melson.¹² James E. Young, the pioneering researcher on how collective memory is influenced by Holocaust memorials, is relegated to two footnotes. Yet Young has noted that the diversity of American society has generated a multiplicity of lessons that are derived from the Holocaust. As he keenly has observed, “In America the motives for memory of the Holocaust are as mixed as the population at large, the reasons variously lofty and cynical, practical and aesthetic.”¹³

I think Novick underestimates how much public interest in the Holocaust derives from the frightening scale of the genocide itself and that it was committed by a modern industrialized state. Genuine curiosity about such an unnerving subject does not have to be artificially manufactured by the major American Jewish organizations. The majority of the students enrolled in my history of the Holocaust course are not Jewish. The complex debates among scholars of the Holocaust which I cover in the course does not satiate those who are seeking easy answers to their questions about why the Shoah occurred and why most Jews and Gentiles in Europe and the United States stood idly by. I concur with the historian Michael Marrus who praised the overall quality of academic works about the Holocaust for being “accounts of the past that challenge received wisdom by deepening understanding, standing up to intense critical enquiry, posing challenging questions, and reaching plausible answers, firmly grounded in evidence.”¹⁴

Tim Cole's Selling the Holocaust traverses the same territory as Novick's book, but does so in a more meandering fashion. Cole traces the manner in which the Holocaust has been popularized through media depictions of three key figures, Anne Frank, Adolf Eichmann, and Oskar Schindler, and by three Holocaust memorials, Auschwitz, Yad Vashem, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Cole analyzes how the public representations of these people and the implicit messages conveyed by these museums structure Holocaust memory into a set of myths which are at variance with the dismaying history of the Holocaust. For example, the Anne Frank House Museum, the first edition of her diary, and the play and movie versions based on it portrayed Anne as an innocent victim of Nazi racism whose optimism in the goodness of humankind could be achieved in Western democracies. Her Jewishness and the role of Dutch collaborators in her betrayal were minimized to communicate this liberal myth. Cole worries that the myth then comes to stand as a substitute for historical reality and in turn provides grist for Holocaust deniers who find faults in the myth. Thus, Holocaust deniers opportunistically have seized upon the expurgation of Anne's diary by her father and the subsequent publication of the “critical” and “definitive” versions of her diary as “proof” that it originally was a forgery.¹⁵

There are two main problems with Cole's approach. First, any arbitrary list of “representative” people and places associated with the Holocaust is bound to omit other key characters and locations that reflect different aspects of how the Holocaust is remembered. Elie Wiesel's account of a Jewish childhood scarred by the existential wounds inflicted in Auschwitz provides a grim contrast to the vision of Anne Frank. Wiesel's international prominence has led his readers to understand the depths of degradation and deprivation endured in the death camps. He has utilized his stature to act as a moral gadfly for world leaders to intervene on behalf of other persecuted minorities. Cole argues that Wiesel's interrogation of God for allowing the Holocaust to happen has contributed much to the mystification of the Holocaust as a supernatural event which defies conventional explanations.

Cole condemns “Shoah business” because it distorts the truth about the Holocaust and thereby provides fodder for those who claim that the Holocaust never happened, and concludes his book with this contention, “In many ways Holocaust denial has emerged only within the context of the emergence of the myth of the ‘Holocaust.’ It was not until the ‘Holocaust’ emerged as an iconic event that it was perceived to be an event which was deemed worth denying” (188).

This is a dubious proposition. The first major American denier of the Holocaust was Harry Elmer Barnes. His rejection of the Holocaust “myth” was a continuation of his philo-German stance that dated back to his defense of Germany against its punishment as the most culpable aggressor in launching World War One. The motivations for Holocaust denial are varied: neo-Nazism, German patriotism, anti-Zionism, anti-Semitism, and intellectual iconoclasm.¹⁶ The popularization of the Holocaust is hardly the cause of Holocaust denial. The more the Holocaust becomes the theme of journalism, popular culture, and tourism, the more it will be simplified and sometimes fictionalized. That is why I must return to the point I raised about Novick's book. Even though academics intentionally or unintentionally inject their own ethnic, gender, political, racial, religious, or social biases into their scholarship, the scrutiny that their works undergo in the acceptance process for publication by scholarly publishers and journals and then by their peers who review their works in the journals of their respective disciplines provides the “objective” grounding for the field of Holocaust Studies.¹⁷

Given the flood of articles, memoirs, monographs, movies, novels, and works of art about the Holocaust, what is sorely needed to prevent the myths of the Holocaust from overshadowing the scholarly literature about it is concise and lucid overviews of this overwhelming amount of data. Michael Marrus accomplished this in his brilliant synthesis of Holocaust historiography, The Holocaust in History, which was published in the late 1980s.¹⁸ The anthology The Holocaust: The Known, the Unknown, the Disputed, and the Reexamined, which was compiled under the auspices of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, updates the public on the state of Holocaust research in the 1990s, but since this volume is over 800 pages long, it may not attract a large readership.¹⁹ Currently, the best short introduction to Holocaust scholarship is Inga Clendinnen's Reading the Holocaust. Clendinnen, a distinguished anthropologist and scholar of Aztec and Mayan culture, concedes that she has studied the Holocaust as an “outsider” who is writing for a lay audience. The grace of her prose and the clarity of her explanations deftly cut to the quick of the scholarly debates about those who ordered and implemented the “Final Solution” and those who experienced it as victims or resisters. She never trivializes the material, and she gives her readers much to reflect upon, whether they agree or disagree with her conclusions.

The only weak part of Clendinnen's book is the last chapter which deals with artistic representations of the Holocaust. Here she too quickly agrees with those who question whether artists can render an authentic vision of the Holocaust within traditional aesthetic forms. As she sees it,

The Jews huddled in Schindler's ark live; Styron's Sophie survives to relive her impossible choice—but can such stories help us grasp how it was in that place, where everyone lived in the realistic expectation of death, and where nearly everyone died? Ordinary rules of dramatic narrative must as least suspend if they do not implicitly deny that great fact.

(168)

The meaning of any human experience is comprehended in a variety of ways: academically, artistically, psychologically, and theologically. No one would criticize Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities for depicting only a tiny part of the reality of the French Revolution. The novel works as a panoramic piece of historical fiction precisely because of its literary quality. Feature films, novels, paintings, poetry, sculpture, and theater based on events from the Holocaust need to be judged according to the criteria appropriate to each medium. They transmit “truths” about the Holocaust that affect their readers and viewers at a deeply emotional level which usually is lacking in the sober analysis and specialized terminology of Holocaust scholarship.²⁰ Academics usually are too quick to dismiss the impact of movies like Schindler's List. Clendinnen compares it unfavorably to Claude Lanzmann's epic documentary Shoah. Yet Spielberg's film was viewed by 65,000,000 people when it aired on American television. I doubt that more than a million persons throughout the world ever have seen all 8-1/2 hours of Shoah. The more Holocaust scholars can bridge the gap between academic analysis and popular perceptions of the Holocaust and come to appreciate the particular strengths of other modes of representing it, the less we will have to fear from those who would turn the Holocaust into pap for the masses for the sake of politics or profit.

Notes

1. The first survey of this subject was presented in Judith Miller, One, by One, by One: Facing the Holocaust (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990). It has been followed by many studies of how the memory and memorialization of the Holocaust reflects and shapes the public opinion and policy in the countries directly or indirectly affected by the event. For examples, see James E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993); Tom Segev, The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993); Edward T. Linenthal, Preserving Memory: The Struggle to Create America's Holocaust Museum (New York: Viking Press, 1995); Ian Buruma, The Wages of Guilt: Memories of War in Germany and Japan (New York: Meridian Press, 1995); David Wyman and Charles H. Rosenzveig, eds., The World Reacts to the Holocaust (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); Dick van Galen Last and Rolf Wolfswinkel, Dutch Holocaust Literature in Historical Perspective (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1996); Dan Diner, ed., Beyond the Conceivable: Studies on Germany, Nazism, and the Holocaust (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); Jeffery Herf, Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in the Two Germanys (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997); Michael Steinlauf, Bondage to the Dead: Poland and the Memory of the Holocaust (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1997); Mary Fulbrook, German National Identity after the Holocaust (Oxford: Polity Press, 1999); Caroline Alice Riemer, The Claims of Memory: Representations of the Holocaust in Contemporary Germany and France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999).

2. Matthew Baigell, Jewish-American Artists and the Holocaust (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1997); Alan L. Berger, Children of Job: Second Generation Witnesses to the Holocaust (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997); Hilene Flanzbaum, ed., The Americanization of the Holocaust (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999); John Ireland and Claude Schumacher, Staging the Holocaust: The Shoah in Drama and Performance (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Michael H. Kater, The Twisted Muse: Musicians and their Music in the Third Reich (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Dieter Lamping, Today's Germany and the Jews: The Representation of Jews in Postwar German Literature (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1998); Lillian Kremer, Women's Holocaust Writing: Memory and Imagination (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999); Andrea Liss, Trespassing Through Shadows: Memory, Photography, and the Holocaust (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998); Diana Orendi and Linda E. Feldman, Evolving Jewish Identities in German Culture: Borders and Crossings (Westport: Praeger, 2000); Vivian M. Patraka, Spectacular Suffering: Theatre, Fascism, and the Holocaust (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1999); Pamela M. Potter, The Most German of Arts: Musicology and Society from the Weimar Republic to the End of Hitler's Reich (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998); Marc Lee Raphael and Linda Shermer Raphael, eds., When Night Fell: An Anthology of Holocaust Short Stories (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1999); Rebecca Rovit and Alvin Goldfarb, eds., Theatrical Performances During the Holocaust: Texts, Documents, Memoirs (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999); Janet E. Rubin, Voices: Plays for Studying the Holocaust (Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 1999); Daniel R. Schwartz, Imagining the Holocaust (New York: St. Martins Press, 1999); Efraim Sicher, ed., Breaking Crystal: Writing and Memory After Auschwitz (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998); Robert Skloot, The Theatre of the Holocaust, Vol. 1 and 2 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999); Marguerite M. Striar, ed., Beyond Lament: Poets of the World Bearing Witness to the Holocaust (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1998); Nelly Toll, When Memory Speaks: The Holocaust in Art (Westport: Praeger, 1998); Ernst Van Alphen, Caught by History: Holocaust Effects in Contemporary Art, Literature, and Theory (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997); Barbie Zelizer, Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory Through the Camera's Eye (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).

3. Howard Ball, Prosecuting War Crimes and Genocide: The Twentieth-Century Experience (Lawrence: University of Kansas, 1999); Judith Tydor Baumel, Kibbutz Buchenwald: Survivors and Pioneers (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1997); David R. Blumenthal, The Banality of Good and Evil: Moral Lessons from the Shoah and Jewish Tradition (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1999); Zachary Braiterman, God After Auschwitz: Tradition and Change in Post-Holocaust Jewish Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998); Michael Brenner, After the Holocaust: Rebuilding Jewish Lives in Postwar Germany, translated by Barbara Harshav (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997); Norman Geras, The Contract of Mutual Indifference: Political Philosophy After the Holocaust (New York: Verso, 1998); Stephen R. Haynes, Holocaust Education and the Church Related College (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1997); Schlomo Jaacobi, The Religion Instinct: A Reflection on the Origins and Nature of Religious Susceptibility and Its Role in the Holocaust (Toronto: Martin Glynn, 1998); David Jones, Moral Responsibility in the Holocaust: A Study in the Ethics of Character (Lanham: Roman and Littlefield, 1999); Jonathan Kaufman, A Hole in the Heart of the World: The Jewish Experience in Eastern Europe After World War Two (New York: Penguin, 1998); Katherine Knox, Refugees in An Age of Genocide: Global, National, and Local Perspectives During the Twentieth Century (London: Frank Cass, 1999); Berel Lang, The Future of the Holocaust: Between History and Memory (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999); Theodor Meron, War Crimes Law Comes of Age: Essays (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); Martha Minnow, Between Vengeance and Forgiveness: Facing History After Genocide and Mass Violence (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998); Mark Osiel, Obeying Orders: Atrocity, Military Discipline, and the Law of War (New Brunswick: Transaction Press, 1998); John Roth, Leonard Grotb, Peter J. Haas, David H. Hirsch, David Patterson, and Didier Pollefeyt, eds., Ethics After the Holocaust: Perspectives, Critiques, and Responses (St. Paul: Paragon House, 1999); Shlomo Shafir, Ambiguous Relations: The American Jewish Community and Germany Since 1945 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1999); Hannah Yablonka, Survivors of the Holocaust: Israel After the War (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999); Idith Zirtal, From Catastrophe to Power: Holocaust Survivors and the Emergence of Israel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).

4. For example see Deborah Lipstadt, “Holocaust Denial: An Overview,” Dimensions: A Journal of Holocaust Studies 8.1 (1994): 7. Lipstadt writes, “Their (Holocaust deniers) objective is to plant seeds of doubt that will bear fruit in coming years, when there are no more survivors or eyewitnesses to attest to the truth.” In the same issue of Dimensions, see Abraham H. Foxman, “Holocaust Denial: The Growing Danger,” Dimensions: A Journal of Holocaust Studies 8.1 (1994): 16. Foxman writes, “As survivors of the Nazi genocide pass from the scene, and, as hollow comparisons to the Holocaust proliferate, the danger of losing sight of the Holocaust's uniqueness grows.” Also see Alex Grobman, Arthur Hertzberg, and Michael Shermer, Denying History: Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do They Say It (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).

5. Cole and the publishers of his book are doubly guilty of sloppy research and/or editing on this point. They incorrectly attribute the poll to the American Jewish Congress and not the American Jewish Committee and ignore the subsequent discrediting of the first poll by a revised poll that found much higher levels of holocaust familiarity among American adults and high school students and lower percentages of Americans who denied that the Holocaust really had happened. The findings of the original poll were reported in Jennifer Golub and Renee Cohen, What Do Americans Know About the Holocaust? (New York: American Jewish Committee, 1993) and the revised results appeared in Tom Smith, Holocaust Denial: What the Survey Data Reveal (New York: American Jewish Committee, 1995). Also see Lawrence Baron, “Holocaust Awareness and Denial in the United States: The Hype and the Hope,” in Lessons and Legacies: Volume 3: Memory, Memorialization, and Denial, edited by Peter Hayes (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1999), pp. 225-235.

6. David S. Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust 1941-1945 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), p. 75.

7. Henry L. Feingold, A Time for Searching: Entering the Mainstream 1920-1945 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992; Henry L. Feingold, Bearing Witness: How America and Its Jews Responded to the Holocaust (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1995), pp. 205-276. Compare to Haskel Lookstein, Were We Our Brothers' Keepers? The Public Response of American Jews to the Holocaust, 1938-1944 (New York: Media Judaica, 1985); Rafael Medoff, The Deafening Silence: American Jewish Leaders and the Holocaust (New York: Carol Publication Group, 1987).

8. Lester Friedman, The Jewish Image in American Film (Secaucus: Citadel Press, 1987), pp. 140-156; also see Michelle Mart, “Tough Guys and American Cold War Policy: Images of Israel, 1948-1960,” Diplomatic History 20.3 (Summer 1996): 357-380.

9. Zygmunt Bauman, “Hereditary Victimhood: The Holocaust's Life as a Ghost,” Tikkun 13.4 (July/August 1998): 33-39.

10. Michael Goldberg, Why Should Jews Survive? Looking Past the Holocaust Toward a Jewish Future (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Anne Roiphe, A Season for Healing: Reflections on the Holocaust (New York: Summit Books, 1988);

11. Marc H. Ellis, Beyond Innocence: Confronting the Holocaust and Israeli Power (New York: Harper Row, 1990); Marc H. Ellis, Ending Auschwitz: The Future of Jewish-Christian Life (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1994).

12. Israel W. Charny, Genocide: The Human Cancer (New York: Hearst Books, 1982); Israel W. Charny, “Forward,” Is the Holocaust Unique: Perspectives on Comparative Genocide, edited by Alan S. Rosenbaum (Boulder: Westview Press, 1996), pp. ix-xv; Israel W. Charny, ed., Toward the Understanding and Prevention of Genocide (Boulder: Westview Press, 1984); Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn, The History and Sociology of Genocide: Analyses and Case Studies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990); Irving Louis Horowitz, Genocide: State Power and Mass Murder (New Brunswick: Transaction Press, 1977); Leo Kuper, Genocide (New York: Penguin Books, 1981); Robert F. Melson, Revolution and Genocide: On the Origins of the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).

13. James E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), p. 284,

14. Michael R. Marrus, “Good History and Teaching the Holocaust,” Perspectives: American Historical Association Newsletter 31.5 (May/June 1993): 12.

15. Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl, translated by B. M. Mooyaart (Garden City: Doubleday, 1967); The Diary of Anne Frank: The Critical Edition, edited by David Barnouw and Gerrold Van Der Stroom, translated by Arnold J. Pomerans and B. M. Mooyaart (New York: Doubleday, 1989); Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl: The Definitive Edition, edited by Otto H. Frank and Miriam Pressler (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1997).

16. Deborah Lipstadt, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory (New York: Plume Books, 1994), pp. 65-83.

17. The major journals of Holocaust Studies are: Holocaust and Genocide Studies published by the Holocaust Memorial Museum, The Journal of Genocide Research published by Carfax Publishing Company in the United Kingdom, the collected papers from the annual Scholar's Conferences on the Holocaust and the Churches published by the Edwin Mellen Press, the collected papers from the biennial Lessons and Legacies Conferences published by Northwestern University Press, Yad Vashem Studies published by Yad Vashem, and Dimensions: A Journal of Holocaust Studies published by the Anti-Defamation League.

18. Michael R. Marrus, The Holocaust in History (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1987).

19. Michael Berenbaum and Abraham Peck, eds., The Holocaust: The Known, The Unknown, The Disputed, and the Reexamined (Bloomington: Indiana University Press: 1998).

20. For a discussion of the omission of “emotional understanding as a form of knowledge” in most surveys of public awareness of the Holocaust, see Katherine Bischoping, “Method and Meaning in Holocaust-Knowledge Surveys,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 12.3 (Winter 1998): 454-474.