SOURCE: Hochstadt, Steve. Review of The Holocaust in American Life, by Peter Novick. Modern Judaism 21, no. 2 (May 2001): 184-92.

[In the following review of The Holocaust in American Life, Hochstadt asserts that Novick's historical overview of American popular conceptions of the Holocaust is sound, but that Novick fails to adequately understand the significance of the Holocaust itself.]

The Holocaust in American Life has already made a considerable impact among those in America most concerned with teaching the Holocaust. Due to Peter Novick's reputation as a prize-winning historian, his pointed and scholarly critique of the way the Holocaust is publicly discussed in America has been received respectfully in popular journalistic circles.¹ This critique rests upon a profound dissatisfaction with what he sees as unfortunate tendencies in American Jewish life and their connection to the Holocaust. The inward turn of Jews away from ecumenical participation towards a rigid defense of perceived group self-interest; the “growth of victim culture” among American Jews leading to the “sordid game” of “superior victimization” (pp. 8-10); and uncritical support of Israel and Zionism are all closely connected with, if not caused by, Jews “putting the Holocaust at the center of self-understanding” (p. 6). A widespread acceptance of this argument would throw into question the recently developed consensus among American educators that there is value in teaching the Holocaust. Thus, it is important to take his work seriously.

Novick's presentation can be persuasive: his discovery of some disturbing patterns of thought among leading Jewish spokesmen is embedded in a smoothly flowing logic, and supported by an impressive scholarly apparatus. This polished surface, however, covers two very different kinds of historical writing. A valuable, insightful, and solidly documented analysis of the use of the Holocaust by a significant segment of American Jewry is woven together with a superficial, distorted, and tendentious presentation of the Holocaust itself. Novick's hard-won understanding of the chronology and politics of the changing role of Holocaust memory in American public life is placed in the service of biased polemic. A close reading of his book can demonstrate this uneasy dichotomy.

The book's strengths and weaknesses are revealed clearly in the brief introduction. In the second sentence one of Novick's foundational claims appears, that the Holocaust “has come to loom so large in our culture” (p. 1). Although this claim is repeated, and Novick ends the book with the even stronger formulation that the Holocaust has “become so central in American life” (p. 277), nowhere is this statement specified more clearly, much less documented.² On the second page Novick asserts the existence of a “tacit consensus” about why the Holocaust is so important. The Holocaust was a traumatic event for American society, which was first repressed, but later inevitably returned to society's consciousness, as must occur with all “repressed material” (pp. 2-3). Novick cites no person who makes what he calls this “influential explanation.” But he then argues how this Freudian explanation is dubious (I agree entirely). These patterns, of making significant assertions without any supporting apparatus, and of creating straw arguments which he then can easily dismiss, pervade the book.

In the introduction, Novick also opens up the most fruitful area of inquiry that this book offers. He shows how the evolving political concerns of American Jewish organizational and intellectual leaders over the past fifty years have been connected to the “changing fortunes” of public Holocaust memory (p. 5). As I indicate in more detail below, Novick demonstrates how this particular historical consciousness was intimately tied to contemporary Jewish issues and world politics.

Finally, at the end of the introduction, Novick slips into a sneering tone that occasionally mars this book. While considering our own history of racial oppression would cause America serious emotional difficulties, he says, “contemplating the Holocaust is virtually cost-free: a few cheap tears” (p. 15). Exactly whose tears Novick so casually dismisses is not specified, but such tasteless remarks reveal both the anger and the lack of understanding of the Holocaust which lurk below the surface of this book.

The Holocaust in American Life should be seen like an onion, whose thick outer layers conceal the more tender core. The first chronological layer the reader encounters is the Holocaust itself, as it was reflected in American life. Novick enters many of the controversies of recent Holocaust scholarship and popular understanding: what was known and understood at what times; American, and especially American Jewish, “inaction”; the possibilities of rescue. Novick has clear opinions on these matters, which he expresses with characteristic confidence: for example, expecting the American government to have acted any differently is “more than a little utopian” (p. 58). The weakness of these first three chapters is Novick's superficial confrontation with the Holocaust itself. The knowledge of the history of the Holocaust demonstrated in the book is not sufficient to provide more than schematic descriptions of real intellectual controversies and arbitrary judgments about who is right. He is willing to dismiss complicated historical subjects with an insouciance uncharacteristic of a serious historian.

For example, his argument that the American government should not be reproached for inaction offers a restricted selection of evidence in support, omitting any reference to those facts which are not easily assimilated into his claims: American government behavior before and during the Evian Conference in 1938; the lack of support for potentially successful, if individualized, rescue operations like that led by Varian Fry; or the State Department's anti-Semitic visa policy. His whole discussion of institutional anti-Semitism in wartime America is self-serving and contradictory, since he uses it in one place to justify Roosevelt's lack of advocacy for more generous treatment of refugees, but elsewhere dismisses it as “relatively shallow” (p. 41). He writes as if the actions of President Roosevelt were the only significant issue in this controversy, and then depends on one book, based on a conference held at the Roosevelt Library in order to rehabilitate his reputation, to support that position.³ Novick cites sources only on one side of controversial issues, disparages distinguished historians of the Holocaust without taking their work seriously, and uses the most radical statements of minor figures to discredit moderate arguments.

It is worth examining closely a section of Novick's writing to appreciate exactly how his arguments are constructed. In chapter 3, Novick takes on what he feels is “bad history”: the thesis of the “Abandonment of the Jews.” In his first paragraph he resorts to a frequent tactic, the invention of an extreme argument as a straw figure. Novick mentions five of the best-known books which conclude that the American government could and should have done more to save Jews from the Nazis, and then implies falsely that their authors agree that “there is … a sense in which all of the victims of the Holocaust are the responsibility of the Allies” (p. 47). Novick offers a footnote, which, in fact, shows David Wyman, one of the four, making a much less sweeping statement. Novick extends his criticism to Deborah Lipstadt, and finally implies that all these historians agree that this failure left the United States with a later obligation to support Israel. Again a footnote is offered, which gives no evidence about any historians, rather citing the Israeli prosecutor of Eichmann as the proponent of such sentiments. On the next page, Novick says that “most professional historians agree” that Wyman's work is “bad history,” a completely incorrect claim, even about Wyman's critics.⁴

Novick is not really interested in the study of the Holocaust.⁵ These three unhelpful chapters about the Holocaust years are mainly a rough covering of the book's next chronological layer, where Novick's prize-winning historical skills are evident. The history of American popular and Jewish institutional confrontation with the Holocaust in the second half of the twentieth century has never been subjected to such a careful critique. By examining mass media culture, newspaper and magazine coverage, major political issues affecting Jews and Israel, and Jewish organizational politics, Novick demonstrates how the very concepts which we too often accept as immutable, like the Holocaust, Nazi evil, anti-Semitism, and collaboration, in fact have their own histories of development and transformation. He lays bare the connections that some Jewish leaders, concerned about the security of Israel, made between the deliberate use of Holocaust imagery and American support for Zionist interests. His close reading of the words of Jewish spokesmen and women allows Novick to trace a convincing chronology of the public understanding of the Holocaust as closely linked with both contemporary political issues and seemingly unrelated American Jewish concerns, like the prevalence of intermarriage. He demonstrates that “every generation frames the Holocaust, represents the Holocaust, in ways that suit its mood” (p. 120).

Just one of the fascinating connections that Novick elucidates is the Cold War pressure on Jews to downplay the Holocaust because the Germans, who had murdered millions of Jews, were now our allies against the Soviets. The tendency of American Communists and leftists to invoke the Holocaust in their political propaganda, especially during the Rosenberg trial, embarrassed Jewish leaders who worried about the typically anti-Semitic linkage of Jews and Communism. Major Jewish organization fought against creating a Holocaust memorial in New York in the 1940s. Leaders of the American Jewish Committee tried to prevent Rolf Hochhuth's play “The Deputy,” a scathing indictment of Vatican inaction, from being performed, while the Anti-Defamation League defended Pope Pius XII's silence. Thus, Novick finds that “the principal impact of the cold war was to limit talk of the Holocaust” (p. 98).⁶

I believe these chapters (4-8) represent a significant advance in the study of the postwar history of the Holocaust as a growing presence in American culture. The current significance of the Holocaust as a major recent event, as a subject for pedagogical and intellectual discussion, and as a political touchstone needs to be understood as one probably temporary stage in changing American consciousness. The conclusion must be that Holocaust memory, scholarship, and teaching will change again, in unpredictable ways, in the twenty-first century.

It is only in the deepest layer, however, that Novick's own motivations, along with the most serious flaws in his argument, become dominant. The two longest chapters (9 and 10) represent a third form of writing, the polemic. He is angry about a number of recently emerged elements of American Jewish life. This is certainly an instructive polemic, because Novick cites a variety of statements by Jewish leaders that reveal their casual willingness to instrumentalize the Holocaust. History often took a back seat to calculated efforts to meet perceived immediate political needs. Jewish organizations claimed to perceive growing anti-Semitism, and then used that as a weapon in discussions about how to remember the Holocaust. Questions about the contents of the proposed Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, especially who should be counted as victims, were argued as political issues. Zionists effortlessly linked Palestinian and other Arab leaders with the Nazis to employ Holocaust sympathy in the service of support of Israel. Arguments about the uniqueness of the Holocaust were used both to denigrate the claims of blacks and Native Americans for compensation and to bring young secular Jews back to the synagogue.

Unfortunately, Novick makes no pretense at evidentiary evenhandedness or balanced judgement in this discussion. He presents severely truncated and distorted descriptions of these sites where Holocaust memory intersects American culture and politics. His method can best be seen by looking at a few examples. Novick devotes little more than a page to the Justice Department's prosecution of those implicated in mass murder. He brings up one case in the text, that of John Demjanjuk, about whose identity there was much controversy, and one in the notes, Frank Walus, who was mistakenly identified as a Gestapo agent. Thus the whole process of seeking to bring war criminals to delayed justice is dismissed as “the Demjanjuk fiasco” (p. 229). Those whose positions don't match Novick's are dismissed as “implacable,” like Deborah Lipstadt, who, among many others, supports such prosecutions. In the next paragraph, the Swiss gold issue is treated in a sneering tone, as Novick focuses exclusively on what he calls the “opportunistic climbing on the Swiss-bashing bandwagon” (p. 230). Major names in Holocaust scholarship, like Raul Hilberg, appear only if they can be quoted in support of one of Novick's arguments. Hilberg's unique career, which represents in microcosm the delayed interest in the Holocaust, should be a focus of analysis for any book entitled The Holocaust in American Life. The title misadvertises Novick's work, where such significant and continuing subjects are treated in a perfunctory and one-sided manner.

Novick would like American Jews to choose a different way of dealing with the memory of the Holocaust, “more integrationist and more universalist in sensibility, less religious and less Israel-oriented” (p. 280). To accomplish this he attacks Holocaust educators with the same methods he uses in much of the book: selective quotation, superficial discussion, opinion masquerading as analysis. While the indictment of Holocaust education is pointed and nasty, it is not serious, since Novick has not studied how the Holocaust is taught in the United States. His research methodology, reading “thousands of newspaper stories on the Holocaust” (p. 276), rather than original sources, fails him and the reader on this, as on many issues. It serves him well when his subject is the public use of Holocaust memory in political controversies, and when his anger does not get in the way of his willingness to read evidence on all sides of an issue. But one cannot grasp the Holocaust as an historical event from newspaper stories. Novick's efforts at political persuasion consistently interfere with the intellectual task he claims for himself of describing the place of the Holocaust in American life. He makes a most unusual claim for an historian: he doubts whether anything “useful” can be extracted from the Holocaust (p. 263). So why teach history at all?

Strangely, at the end Novick undercuts his major historical contribution in order to push his personal argument. After skillfully demonstrating how the memory of the Holocaust was so closely tied to the geopolitical concerns of American elites, including Jewish leaders, he claims in the conclusion that “memory of the Holocaust is so banal, so inconsequential, not memory at all, precisely because it is … so apolitical” (p. 279).

More disturbing to me than weaknesses in method and argument is the way Novick's condescending tone encompasses people whose integrity he ignores, and by implication disparages. One of Novick's special targets is Elie Wiesel. Novick repeatedly calls Wiesel “the most influential interpreter of the Holocaust” (pp. 201, 274), but his portrait in these pages is of a cranky, annoying, mystically misguided Holocaust promoter, about whose motives one ought to be skeptical. Survivors generally receive only slightly less contemptuous treatment. He seems to appear sensitive to survivors' concerns by wondering if more public attention to the Holocaust might not create as much distress as catharsis. But Novick casually dismisses the most important contribution that survivors can make, their testimony. He opines that Auschwitz survivors who report that they hoped for Allied bombing of the gas chambers got this idea from the postwar discourse about American inaction (p. 55). Survivors who have testified in Holocaust prosecutions are portrayed here only as unreliable witnesses. He claims that survivors' memories, as recorded in interviews, “are not a very useful historical source” (p. 275).

In his discussion of survivors, Novick's evidence is consistently one-sided: he picks the most vulnerable methodologies (Spielberg's massive interview project) and the most extreme individual cases (Benjamin Wilkomirski's apparently spurious memoirs) to support his sweeping judgment about survivor testimony. The widespread effort to record survivors' memories by academic institutions, local Holocaust educational groups, and individual researchers is a major phenomenon of contemporary American life. Novick rarely cites survivors' testimony about the Holocaust itself here, rather using prominent survivors' public statements as political targets. Novick is only interested in the critical margins, the idiosyncratic errors, not in sustained historical analysis. In those places where Novick reveals what he is most angry about, his historical skills give way to impassioned special pleading.

David Roskies argues that the book's weaknesses lie in Novick's lack of understanding of Jewish thought and behavior. In a critical review, Roskies argues that Novick “demonstrates no feel for the processes of covenantal memory” through which even many secular Jews are connected to the religious roots of Judaism.⁷ I would argue that Novick's major failure is an insufficient understanding of what the Holocaust meant. When he occasionally slips into the language of emotions, the inappropriateness of his sentiments is obvious. He wishes to defend the American refusal to allow the S. S. St. Louis to land in 1939, so he says that that story appeared to have a “happy ending” because the passengers did not return to Germany (p. 50). He believes that Jewish students “rush to pin yellow stars to their lapels” on Yom Hashoah (p. 8) and then “proudly” wear them (p. 191). I suppose these are the likely sources of the “cheap tears” Novick sniffs at. Novick's cold, distanced, and even disdainful attitude toward those who have been touched physically or emotionally by the Holocaust is perhaps a partial explanation for his lack of understanding of the nature of Holocaust scholarship.

In a recent methodological article about the ethics of historical writing, Novick places himself among recent critics of “traditional” historiographical assumptions about objectivity and truth, who assert that historical accounts are necessarily constructions by historians, not factual representations of some historical reality. Limiting his sights, he still describes his ideal ethics of historical practice as including the injunction that “professional historians would be obliged to be accurate about straightforward factual matters.”⁸ I think that his passionate moralizing in The Holocaust in American Life has led Novick away from even these minimal scholarly standards, especially concerning claims about what other historians have written, reducing the value of his solid historical research about some American reactions to the Holocaust.

The Holocaust, perhaps as much as any recent historical event, is important for modern Americans to know accurately. Political promoters of all persuasions, especially Jewish ones, will use the Holocaust, precisely because of its significance, to push their own agendas. Outrage at the abuse of Holocaust history in the service of particularist politics or crass commercialism has produced a number of recent books, including Tim Cole's Selling the Holocaust: From Auschwitz to Schindler, How History is Bought, Packaged and Sold, and Norman Finkelstein's The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering. But outrage, combined with the desire to produce a simple attention-getting message, rarely results in careful scholarship.

Nevertheless, abuses of the Holocaust are real. All the more reason not to abandon the effort to study and teach it properly. That means taking the Holocaust seriously, not as caricatured in the worst manifestations of popular culture, but as eyewitnesses and historians have painfully reconstructed it. Although there may be no obvious lessons of history, hardly anything is more useful for a society than knowledge of its own past.

Notes

1. Examples of laudatory reviews are by Eva Hoffman, “The Uses of Hell,” New York Review of Books, March 9, 2000, pp. 19-23; Geoffrey Wheatcroft, “Horrors beyond tragedy,” Times Literary Supplement, June 9, 2000, pp. 9-10; Jon Wiener, “Holocaust Creationism,” The Nation, July 12, 1999, p. 29; Elliott Abrams, “Genocide on Main St.” National Review, June 28, 1999, pp. 54-55; David Van Biema, “Spinning the Holocaust,” Time, June 14, 1999, p. 66. Somewhat critical, but still accepting Novick's historical arguments, are Lawrence Douglas, “Too Vivid a Memory,” Commonweal, August 13, 1999, pp. 24-25; and Marla Stone, “Holocaust Infatuation,” Tikkun, September 1999, p. 75.

2. It might be interesting to compare the single major Hollywood film about the Holocaust made in the 1990s, Schindler's List, with the much larger number produced about other aspects of World War II or about Vietnam. Novick's claim is trumped by Norman Finkelstein, whose review of the book claims that “The Holocaust is more central to American cultural life than the Civil War”: “How the Arab-Israeli War of 1967 gave birth to a memorial industry,” London Review of Books, January 6, 2000, p. 33.

3. Verne W. Newton, FDR and the Holocaust (New York, 1996).

4. It is instructive to compare Novick's unsupported characterizations about what historians believe with the quite different portrait of the state of Holocaust research in The Holocaust and History: The Known, the Unknown, the Disputed, and the Reexamined, edited by Michael Berenbaum and Abraham J. Peck (Bloomington, Indiana, 1998). Only a lack of knowledge about Holocaust historiography or the triumph of bias over judgment would have led Novick to compare Wyman's work with the recent book by William D. Rubenstein, The Myth of Rescue: Why the Democracies Could Not Have Saved More Jews from the Nazis (London, 1997), which has been universally rejected by scholars as worthless. Again Novick asserts that “most other scholars” share his view (p. 292, note 9), which is simply untrue.

5. This is noted by some other reviewers, for example, Tony Judt in the New Republic, July 19 and 26, 1999, p. 38.

6. But here, as in too many places in this book, Novick ignores evidence which does not fit his schema. Thus his discussion of Hollywood films which use the Holocaust as a theme, despite a claim of “completeness” (p. 307, note 4), misses some of the most important examples: “The Search” (1948), directed by Fred Zinnemann, a Viennese refugee, which won an Oscar for the screenplay; “Me and the Colonel” (1958) starring Danny Kaye and Curt Jurgens; and the acclaimed “Pawnbroker” (1965).

7. David G. Roskies, “Group Memory,” Commentary, September 1999, p. 64.

8. “(The Death of) the Ethics of Historical Practice (and Why I Am Not in Mourning),” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 560 (November 1998), p. 39.