[In the following excerpt, Hochberg states that although Novick's central argument in The Holocaust in American Life is sound, he misunderstands what causes the impact of the Holocaust on American culture.]

A number of recent works attempt to explain the phenomenon of the “Americanization” of the Holocaust and the prominent role that this European event has increasingly come to play in the consciousness of American Jews and Americans in general. Peter Novick's book [The Holocaust in American Life] is both a history of this development and a polemic against this trend. He traces the growth of Holocaust awareness during the past six decades, touching on what he sees as significant milestones: the Adolf Eichmann trial in 1961, the Middle East wars of 1967 and 1973, the television mini-series “Holocaust” in 1978, and the opening of the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington in 1993. Although he pays too little attention to the crucial impact of the Vietnam War and its aftermath on the growing American awareness of war crimes issues, his history is generally sound.

It is difficult to quarrel with Novick's warnings about the trivialization of the Holocaust as this event enters the mainstream of American popular culture. Novick also correctly questions the supposedly obvious “lessons” we are all to learn from the events of 1933-1945. His arguments are most sound and useful when he raises questions about the cultural and political uses of the Holocaust. When he analyzes the historical causes for the growth of Holocaust awareness, however, he is less persuasive, both in his analysis of American Jewry's interest in the Holocaust and in his sense of the American heartland.

Novick argues that the lack of attention paid by American Jews to the Holocaust and its survivors in the 1940s and 1950s was due to the increasing integration and acceptance of Jews into American society, even during the war years (“When those little Yellow-bellies meet the Cohens and the Kellys,” went a popular wartime song he cites). Jews, along with other Americans, shared in the “ebullient mood” of the postwar period, and Americans repudiated anti-Semitism. Novick asserts that Holocaust survivors (the term was rarely used during the 1940s), like other Americans, desired more to forget the past than to dwell on it.

According to Novick, attention to the Holocaust in American Jewish life increased dramatically during the 1970s and 1980s because the optimism of the postwar years had soured. American Jews, he argues, developed an unhealthy anxiety about Jewish identity and Israel, were rapidly assimilating, and no longer had much in common. Thus this increasingly conservative and fragmented Jewish community and its leaders clutched at the Holocaust to fill an “identity void” in a rapidly disintegrating group.

Novick's nostalgic view leads him astray. While there is little doubt that anti-Semitism waned in the decades after the war when compared to the virulent anti-Semitism of the 1930s and early 1940s, during the immediate postwar years, according to Leonard Dinnerstein and others, more than half the American population expressed strongly anti-Semitic feelings and did not want to go to work with, live near, or go to school with Jews. The spirit of that age was captured by Laura Hobson in the novel Gentleman's Agreement (1947). The public attitude toward refugees and survivors was, if anything, even more hostile, as the history of the struggle to admit displaced persons between 1945 and 1950 illustrates. When Rep. William Stratton of Illinois proposed a bill to allow displaced persons into the United States in 1947, a political adviser told him that “Nobody in Illinois, outside of Jews, wants any more Jews in this country” (Dinnerstein, Anti-Semitism in America, 1994, page 161).

In such an atmosphere, American Jews were not encouraged to pay much public attention to the Holocaust and its survivors. Nor is it surprising that the American Jewish community in the last three decades, far more accepted and secure, was able to give public expression to mourning and memorialization for their murdered co-religionists. In fact, the trajectory of the history of slavery and the Armenian genocide has followed a similar path in America: the greater the self-confidence of the group, the more public its agenda and the narrative of its historical calamities. Moreover, Novick offers little hard evidence for his assertion that the American Jewish community embraced the Holocaust because of its fragmentation, disappearing identity, and increased conservatism. A very recent (April 2000) Zogby poll of six American ethnic groups found that American Jews have a greater sense of common bond, greater communal feeling, and a more positive sense of identity than all but one of the others. The Holocaust, moreover, appears to be far less central to this identity than religion, Israel, and liberalism. Throughout his work, Novick pays far too much attention to the machinations of (sometimes obscure) Jewish leaders and mistakes their concerns for those of American Jews.

Even more serious is Novick's misunderstanding of the causes of the impact of the Holocaust on American society. Holocaust awareness became part of the American agenda, according to Novick, as a result of media manipulation, ethnic fragmentation, the popularity of “victim” narratives, and the machinations of Jewish leaders. He relies far too heavily on the supposed influence of Jewish mass media moguls to explain popular American interest in the subject. Although the mass media certainly helped to some extent to draw attention to the Holocaust, that does not provide a sufficiently convincing explanation. The events of the 1933-1945 period resonate deeply in the American psyche for reasons that have little to do with Jews, Jewish leaders, the media, or “competitive victimization.” The issues ordinary Americans (selectively) see and respond to in those events are clearly American preoccupations: abuse of governmental power, racism the extent of responsibility for one's neighbor, above all the embodiment of Adolf Hitler as Absolute Evil. Those themes have powerful resonance in American history. Americans, heirs to a (often secularized) sectarian Protestant tradition, tend to view historical events as moral dramas, which they then integrate into their civic culture. Nor is it entirely true that those events “have nothing to do” with the United States, for Americans know that they took place during a war in which eleven million Americans fought. This was America's “good war,” in fact the only unambiguously good war in the nation's history, and it was good precisely because Hitler, the embodiment of everything that was “un-American,” was defeated. This is probably why the Vietnam War, with its moral ambiguities, created such fertile ground for the current interest in the Holocaust.