[In the following review, Douglas praises Novick for providing an interesting analysis of the politics of memory in The Holocaust in American Life, but notes that Novick fails to acknowledge the great intrinsic importance of the Holocaust itself.]

What is the value of preserving the memory of the Holocaust's radical evil? The most familiar answer finds expression in the shibboleth, “Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it.” Implicit in this view is the idea that memory serves as a tool of liberation: Only by vigilantly minding the past can we hope to create a less hateful future.

Such vigilance has turned the project of preserving memories of the Holocaust into a major industry. Countless books, movies, videos, memorials, and museums are devoted to keeping the Nazis' campaign to exterminate the Jews of Europe from drifting out of our collective consciousness and conscience. And while some groups—such as Armenian-Americans—might envy the success that American Jews have had in riveting the nation's attention upon the past sufferings of their coreligionists, no one, except perhaps a bizarre fringe of Holocaust deniers, seems to question the wisdom and necessity of keeping the memories of genocide alive.

No one, that is, except Peter Novick. In The Holocaust in American Life, Novick has written an important, brave, and somewhat irritating book about the cult of Holocaust memory in the United States. Though trained as a historian (Novick teaches at the University of Chicago and has authored, among other works, a well-respected study of Vichy France [The Resistance versus Vichy: The Purge of Collaborators in Liberated France]), Novick has not penned yet another history of the Final Solution. Instead, following the lead of scholars such as Henri Roussou and Maurice Halbwachs, Novick has written a book about the history of collective memory. The Holocaust in American Life studies how, over the past half-century, Nazi genocide has been remembered in this country—and why.

As a history of memory, Novick's book promises to solve a riddle of time and place. Why, he asks, has our preoccupation with the Holocaust grown rather than diminished with time, and why is it so important in this country, of all places? To answer these questions, scholars of the Holocaust have often relied on Freud's theory of trauma and repressed memory. Nazi genocide, it was argued, so traumatized our collective psyche that it could be meaningfully confronted only decades after the original crime.

Novick, by contrast, has little use for such psychoanalytic explanations. His interest is the politics of memory—how concerns in the present, strategically and subtly, serve to shape our uses and recollections of the past. In the early postwar years, Novick argues, American Jews had little use for the Holocaust. Sharing in the prosperity of these years, American Jews were reluctant to be seen as connected to a group of hapless old-world victims. Moreover, cold-war hostilities made Jewish groups reluctant to harp on the crimes of Germany, now an ally, as they feared that in so doing they would resurrect old canards about the affinities between Jews and the Red menace.

Isolated events, such as the publication of Anne Frank's diary in 1952 and the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961, served to bring the Holocaust closer to the consciousness of Americans in general and Jews in particular. Yet it was not until the early seventies, Novick argues, that American Jews “discovered” the Holocaust. The Yom Kippur war in 1973 was the catalytic event. Stunned by the early military successes of Syria and Egypt, American Jews suddenly came to see Israel not as the tiny but invincible force of the Six Day War, but as a vulnerable nation facing potential annihilation. American Jews were gripped with fears of a second Holocaust, and used these fears to petition the government for needed military assistance to Israel.

A second potent threat to the American Jewish community came from within. The very successes of Jews within America fueled an ethos of aggressive assimilationism which, in turn, threatened to destroy the community through such practices as intermarriage. In the face of this threat, the rhetoric of the Holocaust again found itself usefully deployed—both to characterize the magnitude of the danger, and, more important, to offer a picture of Jewish identity that could appeal to the secular sensibilities of American Jews. According to this view, it did not matter whether a Jew identified with the commitments of the religion; all that mattered was whether one would have been considered a Jew for Hitler's purposes.

Having discovered the Holocaust, Jews, in turn, have been remarkably successful in persuading the rest of America to share in the memorialization and sacralization of their experience. This, Novick explains, is because Jews are not simply “the people of the book,” but more to the point, “the people of the Hollywood film and the television miniseries, of the magazine article and the newspaper column, of the comic book and the academic symposium.” Such a claim, of course, comes perilously close to echoing classically anti-Semitic arguments that “the Jews own the media,” and in making it Novick at once reminds his reader of his own Jewish identity, while also insisting that his description of the influence and prestige of Jews is a statement of fact, not a condemnation.

Yet there is a distinctly critical edge to Novick's book, and he enlists his carefully elaborated historical argument to attack the contemporary cult of Holocaust memory. For American Jews, Novick argues, the cult of memory is particularly destructive. First, it siphons attention away from the beliefs, practices, and culture of a fantastically rich and complex religious history by defining Jewishness in terms of a shared legacy of victimization. This, in turn, merely exacerbates the worst aspects of contemporary identity politics, as blacks and Jews find themselves pitted in a tribal struggle to be recognized as America's most aggrieved minority.

The cult of Holocaust memory is also unhealthy for all Americans, Novick argues. Instead of sensitizing our consciousness to acts of atrocity here and abroad, an over-fixation on the Holocaust can cripple judgment and paralyze action. Indeed, the very radicality of the Nazis' crimes against the Jews may leave us convinced that only the most extreme, Holocaust-style atrocities deserve our humanitarian attention, if not our military intervention.

In lieu of the cult of memory, however, Novick has precious little to offer. He concludes with the weak plea that we make “more informed and thoughtful choices” about how we remember the Holocaust. Not only does he neglect to tell us what such informed choices might look like, but he suggests that collective memory is simply a matter of decision and will. In committing himself to such a position, he ignores the organic and spontaneous quality of collective memory—the ways in which it resists strategic manipulation.

More troubling, Novick refuses to give credence to the idea that our continued fascination with the Holocaust may have something to do with the intrinsic importance of the event itself. Here he completely overlooks the works of scholars who, in the words of Richard Rubenstein, locate in the Holocaust an “expression of many of the most profound tendencies of Western civilization in the twentieth century.”

But if the book does not fully convince, it certainly provokes. Though at times Novick presents his controversial positions in a tone that seems needlessly polemical, in general his writing is clear and uncluttered. For those of a more scholarly bent, he has appended a substantial apparatus of footnotes. Yet the book addresses not the professional historian, but the serious lay reader—Jew and non-Jew alike. Though it offers a sturdy history of memory, The Holocaust in American Life is ultimately a cautionary tale. It warns of the costs, not of failing to remember, but of refusing to forget.