SOURCE: Judt, Tony. “The Morbid Truth.” New Republic 221, no. 324 (19-26 July 1999): 36-40.

[In the following review of The Holocaust in American Life, Judt observes that Novick's account of the historical development of Holocaust-awareness in America is accurate and well-researched, but comments that Novick's treatment of the Holocaust itself is superficial.]

The Holocaust today is as much an argument as a memory. When the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, and Marek Edelman, a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, expressed their support for NATO attacks on Serbia recently, they did so with an explicit analogy with Hitler's attempted extermination of the Jews. The latter has become a metaphor, a moral lesson, a practical warning, an admonition. The argument-from-the-Holocaust has acquired an almost a priori character: it does not need to lay out its premises because these are familiar and understood. We know and understand what happened, and who did what to whom and how, and who stood by and let it happen and at what cost. To explain the point of an allusion to the Holocaust is usually redundant; in the United States especially, it is sufficient to name the reference to have made the case.

Things were not always thus. The Holocaust is now ubiquitous in American pedagogy and conversation, but in the immediate post-war years most Americans (including most American Jews) had only the sketchiest notion of Hitler's war against the Jews. It was not until well into the 1960s that this began to change. It was then, and with gathering speed, that the Holocaust (not generally known as such until the mid-'60s at the earliest) entered American public life and went on to become a staple of entertainment, moral education, electoral politics, media attention, comparative victimology, and foreign policy debate. There was a time when we were haunted by the fear that Auschwitz would be forgotten; but there are now those, such as Peter Novick, who worry that we remember it too much.

[In The Holocaust in American Life,] Novick has written a dense, carefully researched, and rather irritating account of how the Holocaust came to occupy so central a place in American (and American Jewish) life. His chronology seems to me unimpeachable. In the years after 1945, the “displaced persons” of World War II (the term “survivors” was not yet in fashion) were not at the center of most people's attention, and the sufferings of the Jews among them did not attract special concern. Western awareness of Nazi atrocities drew on images of the camps that were liberated by the Americans and the British—Dachau, Buchenwald, Belsen; concentration camps but not, originally, death camps. Although Jews were in fact present there in large numbers, they were not singled out for particular sympathy by reporters or Allied administrators. Films about Nazism made in the late 1940s and in the 1950s treated Jews as just one group of Hitler's victims—the greatest victims, perhaps, but symptoms of the broader criminal character of the Nazi regime. The presentation and the reception of The Diary of Anne Frank (the book, the play, and the film) were indicative: if there were lessons, they were redemptive and universal. The fact that Anne was a Jew was almost incidental.

Those Jews who came to the United States in the post-war years (about 100,000 arrived by 1951) certainly had a different tale to tell, but most people were not listening. The initial post-war disbelief was rapidly overtaken by the onset of the Cold War. The West Germans were, now our allies, the Russians our enemies. The Jewish community, like other, “foreign” minorities with historically left-leaning associations, kept a low profile in the McCarthy years. In any event, the chief victims of what was now referred to as “totalitarianism” were those who had suffered, and continued to suffer, under Stalin and his heirs. Hitler was by no means forgotten, but his victims were not on the agenda of American politics and American culture. The Holocaust was a strictly Jewish memory, and mostly a private one.

The change began in the early 1960s. The Eichmann trial in Israel, which was aired nightly on American television, aroused interest and memory; David Ben-Gurion's success in adapting it to Israeli national and pedagogical objectives encouraged American Jewish organizations to pay the Holocaust more attention in their own publications and pronouncements. By the time of the Six Day War in 1967, Jews in the United States were ready to make the association between the Jewish state (and the dangers facing it) and the experience of genocide just a quarter of a century earlier. In the aftermath of the short-lived euphoria of Israeli success in 1967, and the more enduring anxiety that followed a harder-won and bloodier victory six years later, the transition was completed. Private and public attitudes to the Holocaust and its invocation were transformed. In the eyes of an influential subsection of American Jewish opinion, Israel was a living reminder of Jewish survival in the face of near-extermination. The world owed Israel its support; and the best way to make the case was to invoke at every opportunity the world's earlier failure to assist the Jews, at fatal cost.

At this point, for Novick, the story splits, Official American Jewish spokesmen successfully transformed the Holocaust into a civic theme, as important for non-Jews as for Jews themselves. In the course of the next two decades, funds were raised, films were made, museums were built, school programs were introduced; the Holocaust filtered into American consciousness at every turn. At the same time, however, the Holocaust took on a particular significance for Jews themselves. No longer bound together by community, language, faith, or shared experience, American Jews were “marrying out” and assimilating rapidly. At this rate, many feared, Jews—and Judaism—might disappear altogether. In the words of the president of Yeshiva University in 1987: “Who says that the Holocaust is over? … The monster has assumed a different and more benign form … but its evil goal remains unchanged: a Judenrein world.”

And so, Novick claims, the Holocaust was invoked and instrumentalized as an identifier. If nothing else bound Jews together, they would at least be conscious of one common denominator: the incomparable sufferings of their brethren in the recent past. Transformed into a kind of pride, this consciousness might yet serve to draw the flock together again: if the Holocaust was unique, then so must the Jews be unique. If this worked, Novick suggests, it was because it coincided with the growing American obsession with “identity politics” and competitive victimhood. In the race for sympathy, for a distinguishing tag, and for public and private funds, American Jews might seem to be at a disadvantage: they are an established presence in America, they suffer no discriminatory mistreatment, they are well-represented in profitable and respected occupations. But they do have the Holocaust.

Novick tells this tale copiously, even relentlessly. As a self-confessed universalist of the older school, he confesses a distaste for today's sectarian instrumentalization of suffering; and he is openly nostalgic for the days when Americans (including and especially American Jews) were proud to be Americans and did not feel the need to assert their own hyphenated identity at the expense of some less-deserving group. He has a rather keen ear for specious or exaggerated victim-hood, too: that the few thousand homosexuals killed in Hitler's camps should have comparable standing to the millions of dead Jews (and Poles) rightly strikes him as absurd, as an anachronistic concession to political vogue.

Novick is no more forgiving of the present-day cult of memorialization, whereby every American town of any standing wants its own memorial to the dead Jews of Europe, and money flows to such projects while worthier Jewish causes starve for funds. He has a nice eye for Holocaust kitsch: Ralph Reed prettifying his politics by taking out lifetime memberships in the Holocaust Memorial Museum and in Yad Vashem; Hillary Clinton ostentatiously ornamenting herself with Elie Wiesel at a State of the Union speech; Woody Allen explaining how he coped with his domestic scandals by reading tales of Holocaust survivors who got through by focusing on the daily horror of their experiences; Cherie Brown proposing in Tikkun that there should be support groups for Jews who have listened to Holocaust stories to help them “release the grief.” In all these ways the Holocaust is cheapened and its very distinctiveness undermined. It no longer teaches lessons of its own; it has become instead a vehicle for whatever obsessions and messages people bring to it. It has become banal, sanitized, and uncontroversial, an uncontested morality tale—and so, in Novick's view, it has lost touch with itself. At no cost and with little effort, Americans at large have adopted this memory of other people's sufferings. American Jews have sworn fealty to a death cult. Is this good for America? Is this good for the Jews?

Novick's book certainly has an important subject, and its criticisms would seem to be necessary and trenchant. This, no doubt, is why it has been welcomed in anticipation by so many people, some of whom have allowed themselves to be quoted on its cover with imprudently lavish praise. The book is certainly well-researched: Novick has apparently trawled every archive and every publication of every American Jewish organization for the past half-century, and he has read what must be tens of thousands of pages of periodicals, pamphlets, and speeches by every American Jewish intellectual and spokesperson you can name, and many you could not name. If the result is frustrating and ultimately inadequate to its theme, no one can fault the author for effort. The problems lie elsewhere.

For a start, Novick doesn't write very well. He has a clunky, folksy style: we learn that William Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich “resonated throughout American society … the book put Nazism and World War II on the American cultural map in a big way.” (There is a lot of resonating in this book.) Of the decision by Jewish organizations to “market” the Holocaust, he concludes that “the Holocaust looked like the one item in stock with consumer appeal.” Of the “screwballs” who are attracted to Holocaust-denial, he concedes that “the activities of these fruitcakes were irritating, indeed infuriating.” “Resonates,” “consumer appeal,” “screwballs,” “fruitcakes”: leaking through here is the voice of the anxious professor striving to capture the interest of apathetic students.

There are also touches of easy cynicism. Novick concludes a discussion of the vexed issue of the precise number of victims—six million or eleven million, that is, whether or not to treat non-Jewish victims of Nazism as part of the Holocaust—in the following manner: “When looking at discussions of the Holocaust in the media, the use of six or eleven often seems haphazard. Is the line of type too long to fit? Change eleven to six. Is it too short? Change six to eleven.” I detected, too, a tone of condescension—themes and arguments are summarized, recapitulated, and signposted much as a lecturer might remind his inattentive listeners of what they have just been told; and definitions are presented at a level suited to junior high school: “Most of the time, when we say that an event carries lessons that can be applied in another situation, we're doing what's called making an analogy.”

But these are not the book's more serious weaknesses. For much of the time, Novick appears to be engaged in open warfare with American Jewish officialdom for their betrayal of what he calls “the larger social consciousness that was the hallmark of the American Jewry of my youth—post-Holocaust, but pre-Holocaust-fixation.” There is an undertone of pique, even of anger, at the mainstream American Jewish organizations for their obsession with Israel and the Holocaust, their instrumentalization of both for fundraising and influence-peddling, and their transformation of Jewishness into a “culture of victimization.” After 1967, in Novick's view, “the hallmark of the good Jew became the depth of his or her commitment to Israel.” There are hints that Novick feels understandably resentful that his own distance from such an approach makes him less of a “good Jew”; and this book is a catalogue raisonné of that resentment.

The confusion that results is illustrated by the uncertainty with which Novick hovers around the question of whether or not to blame American Jewish institutions for the current place of the Holocaust in American life. He concedes on a number of occasions that there was no conscious or central “plan” to instrumentalize the Holocaust as a device for Jewish mobilization and as a new form of Jewish identity: “No central decision-making body of American Jewry concluded that it was the absence of Holocaust-consciousness that explained the declining Jewish commitment of the young, that the way to keep straying sheep in the fold was through Holocaust programming.” But the whole book is written around the deliberations, the minutes, the decisions, and the actions of various Jewish organizations in such a way as to convey the sense that the whole thing was indeed their doing.

When Novick recognizes that he has gone a bit too far, he beats a tactical retreat. So what if the whole Holocaust “thing” was masterminded by Jewish political pressure groups? “There is certainly nothing improper in any of this; every group does it; American pluralism in action.” On the one hand, on the other hand. The explanation for our present Holocaust obsession presumably lies somewhere between a carefully hatched plan and the Invisible Hand of history; but Novick cannot decide where. Instead we have a steady flow of compensatory overstatements (“From the outset, ‘genocide’ was a rhetorical rather than a juridical device, employed for purely propagandistic purposes”) and easy shots: poor Norman Podhoretz is wheeled out time and again to illustrate the unwisdom of invoking the Holocaust whenever you want to cast aspersions on your critics, and we are reminded that both Yigal Amir and Baruch Goldstein were “Holocaust-obsessed,” as though there were a slippery slope leading from Holocaust awareness to political assassination and mass murder.

Even survivors themselves come in for censure. Since “Holocaust-obsession,” in Novick's view, has led some to condemn the United States unfairly for its failure to bomb the death camps, he feels the need to discredit any and all such criticism. Of the argument that some of the inmates themselves longed for the Allies to bomb them, even at risk to their own lives, he writes: “No doubt some Jewish prisoners did hope for bombing, though probably fewer than the number who reported this feeling after the Allied failure to bomb Auschwitz had become a standard trope of Holocaust discourse.” At this point, questionable history veers off into poor taste.

If Novick spends so much time settling scores with the more egregious words and deeds of gung-ho American Jewish spokesmen and AIPAC operatives, it is because his real subject, I think, has fundamentally eluded him. He has spent a lot of time thinking about the uses and the abuses to which the Holocaust has been put in modern America; but he has devoted curiously little effort to thinking about the Holocaust itself. He might retort that the Holocaust itself is not his subject. Yet the result of his approach is a disturbingly superficial treatment, in which the Holocaust itself is largely incidental to the narrative.

One could similarly write a history of “The Automobile in American Life” and adduce some of the same themes: conspiracy; influence-peddling; sectoral interest and advantage; a steady increase to the point of omnipresence of the entity under discussion, and its abuse; an accounting of the damage done to the fabric of the community; and so on. I exaggerate, of course. Except for the most extreme environmentalists, a discussion of the place of the automobile in modern America does not raise philosophical first principles or primary moral dilemmas. A discussion of the Holocaust broaches precisely such matters; but Novick never genuinely engages them. In his account, Holocaust awareness is always and primarily about something else: a political agenda, a cultural shift.

Novick notes the paradox that too much Holocaust awareness can make us insensitive to “lesser” crimes, but he fails to follow through on the next question: just how much Holocaust awareness, then, is appropriate, and in what form? The reason for this omission seems to be that he is troubled less by the risk that we (Jews, Americans, anyone) might forget what Hitler did to the Jews than by the assertion that the resulting Holocaust was “unique” and has a special claim upon our attention. Novick dismisses the debate over “uniqueness” with what amounts to a sophistic sleight-of-hand. Since nothing is ever totally “unique”—all events have some features that are distinctive to them and others that they share with comparable events in other places and times—we may conclude, or so he argues, that the Holocaust is “distinctive” but not “unique.” It has something in common with previous massacres of Jews and others, and it has some distinguishing and novel features.

This gets us around analytical categories such as “genocide,” and around normative categories such as “evil.” The latter, Novick characteristically concludes, “is a philosophical (or religious) question we can sidestep.” No more discussion, then, of comparative evil, or of distinctive forms of experience. Since nothing is unique, the Holocaust is not unique, and therefore Jews are not unique because of it; so let us return to the more entertaining subject of internecine Jewish politics.

There has to be better way to sort out the dilemma posed by the Holocaust, to criticize the troublingly instrumental uses to which the catastrophe is put without abandoning the attempt to engage with it on its own terrible and fundamental terms. And this is not just an American story. By confining his attention to the United States, and to American Jewish institutions and organizations in particular, Novick has distorted his material. If it were indeed the case that it was the fate of the Holocaust to rise and to fall in public memory and public discussion at the whims of McCarthyism, American Jewish insecurity, identity politics and hyphenated-Americanism, the allegedly Zionist concerns of major Jewish networks, and the fashions of Hollywood—and these alone—then how should we account for the comparable trajectory of Holocaust (and other war-related) memories in Europe?

The answer, of course, is that there is a larger story here: of forgetting and remembering; of generations and inter-generational communication; of a growing international (and philosophical) interest in the idea of rights, from which has flowed over time an increased concern over the abuse of rights, now and in the past; of steady revisions in the academic analysis and the public understanding of World War II, such that transnational violence and suffering of the kind epitomized by the Holocaust have displaced reassuring national myths at the center of the narrative. Some of these elements apply in more places than others. Some speak to distinctively European memory and experience. But some apply to America, too. And it is only when they, and the overlapping national cases that they describe, are treated as a whole that we can understand why the Holocaust has become what it is today, and why it could not have been that in earlier decades. In this more cosmopolitan version of the story, Norman Podhoretz, the American Jewish Committee, and paranoid Brooklyn rabbis play only a secondary role.

How else to explain, for example, the coincidence in the 1970s of increased American discussion of the Holocaust and a new level of French interest in the treatment of Jews under Vichy, a subject resolutely neglected hitherto? Does Novick think that German debates in the 1980s over the “Unmastered Past” were prompted, shaped, and sustained merely by the showing of the American television series “Holocaust”? How does he account for the interesting parallels between American and British attention to the destruction of the Jews, after 1945 and again in recent years? After all, the Cold War, which plays so crucial a role in Novick's account, was perceived quite differently on the other side of the Atlantic, where anti-Communism, not to speak of McCarthyism, was culturally insignificant; but on the subject of the wartime suffering of the Jews a similar silence prevailed. Obviously the American response to the Holocaust is distinctive; but it is not, as Novick would be the first to admit, unique. A little comparative history would have liberated his book from its parochialism.

Just as attention to the context of growing international interest in the Holocaust need not dilute one's appreciation of its distinctively American contours, so Novick's desire to furnish a historical account of the uses to which the Holocaust is put ought not to have precluded a concern for moral dilemmas. Yet these he steadfastly sidesteps. Is the Holocaust “unique”? In one sense, of course it is. The enterprise of Nazism took place recently and was carried through over a period of years. Its victims were defined by “race” and were hunted down across an entire continent. They were destined not for expulsion or punishment, but for extermination: murder was not the by-product of some vicious political project, it was the project itself. On the way to their extermination the Jews were dehumanized and tortured. “Scientific” experiments were carried out on children. The whole scheme is extraordinarily well-documented, and its victims numbered in excess of five million people. Now, certain features of the extermination of the Jews of Europe remind us of similarly obscene undertakings in other times and places; but surely there is no remotely comparable undertaking known to history, whether measured by intention, scale, methods, or outcome.

And yet the moral enormity of the Holocaust is not a consequence of its uniqueness. Uniqueness here is a descriptive category. If we invest the Holocaust with special significance, this must be because of some distinctive feature, established by quite different criteria. What might those criteria be? The fact that all this was done to Jews? That is not a very convincing argument for most people, including most Jews. The fact that it has special lessons to teach? But what would those lessons be? Man's inhumanity to man, perhaps; but we did not need Auschwitz to teach us that particular lesson.

Does the Holocaust have something positive to offer us? Is there a usable message that may be coaxed out of this hell? American presentations of the Holocaust, whether in museums or schools or fiction, do sometimes lean on this crutch; and even the museum in Washington errs in this direction, though less than its critics have claimed. But it takes a distinctly religious or optimistic sensibility to find uplift in what happened in the camps or the death marches. As Novick rightly suggests, that is the kind of lesson that the listener already brings to the story.

I do not see any obvious lesson in the particular experience of the Jews at the hands of the Nazis, though I recognize that some Jews may see it as a warning against living among non-Jews. But even Zionism did not need the Holocaust to be necessary or legitimate. At the same time, it is manifest humbug to speak of the Holocaust as a “universal” experience. It was decidedly not that. It was perpetrated by one group of persons (Germans, with local assistance from collaborators) upon another group of persons (Jews) in a particular time and a particular place. It is a Jewish memory (and, in recent years, a German one). Memorials and commentaries that collapse and confuse the identity of perpetrators and victims alike do a disservice to history and to their own purpose.

But if the Holocaust was something done by Germans to Jews in Europe in the 1940s, what is it about that Jewish experience that gives it, as Elie Wiesel likes to claim, universal implications? Peter Novick would reply, I think, that the answer is merely circumstance. The Holocaust became important because it served a useful role in Jewish life in America after the 1960s. Jews are a significant presence in American public life, after all, and the United States dominates the cultural and economic life of our planet, so the Holocaust and its imputed significance spread in a sort of neocolonial manner.

I would prefer to say that the Holocaust has acquired an iconic status because it captures succinctly and forcibly, at the end of our terrible century, something for which we lack a modern vocabulary, but which lies at the heart of our recent past and thus our present inheritance. That something is the idea of evil. To be sure, this is not an original suggestion. Hannah Arendt saw the point in 1945, when she wrote that “the problem of evil will be the fundamental question of postwar intellectual life in Europe—as death became the fundamental question after the last war.” Arendt was wrong about the timing; it took thirty years before the question of evil found its way onto the intellectual agenda of the West. But her intuition was unerring.

Efforts to locate the Holocaust in a political or ideological narrative have consistently broken on the rock of irrationality: there is no story of human purposes, of the kind that makes sense to us, into which the behavior of Hitler or his executioners can be convincingly inserted. But those are not the only kinds of stories that can be proposed. We can understand this better by looking at what happens to visitors to the Holocaust Memorial Museum. A strikingly large number of those visitors are children—school groups, families. Many of them are not Jewish. So the awful things that they read and they see at the museum can make little sense as part of a personal or family narrative. They do not know the European history or even the American history into which some of their elders can insert these things. (As Novick disparagingly remarks, many American children—and college students—cannot even place World War II in the correct half of the century.) The only narrative available to such an audience is a moral one: the Holocaust as an illustration of pure badness. As an adult, a historian, and a Jew I may be uncomfortable with this. I may find myself wanting to insert context, to explain, to explicate, to complicate the images and texts that make up such a demonstration of human evil. But I may be mistaken.

The Holocaust is not an irreplaceable reminder of human nastiness; for such knowledge we can look in many places. But it is a rather distinctive reminder—or a distinctive warning—of what happens when the patina of civilized life cracks. It is, ironically, an illustration of something that the great reactionary thinkers of earlier times knew well, but which was forgotten by their optimistic, forward-looking successors: that civil society, public life, open political systems and the forms of behavior that they encourage and on which they depend, are all paper-thin constructions. They are much more fragile than it suits us to believe. In this sense, Nazism and its murderous climax serve as an admonition: think twice before unraveling the threads of convention; do not be hasty in welcoming root-and-branch projects to remake or to undo the unsatisfactory social compromises that history has bequeathed to us.

If the lesson of the Holocaust, then, is that there is evil “out there,” and that we should become a little more adept at recognizing it and combating it, and that at the end of an exhausting and murderous epoch of all-encompassing, all-destroying projects we should learn to be more politically discriminating and more ready to condemn and to do battle with evil when we see it, then maybe the Holocaust does have something “universal” to teach. And those lessons, despite their moral key, are also political lessons. Sooner or later, taking the Holocaust seriously becomes a responsibility of American and European policy.

The Holocaust, in short, is many things. It is a terrible history that we must not forget, for the simple reason that we should not forget the past—ours and other people's. And because it is the past, and things were different then, we must be careful not to exploit it mercilessly for present advantage, lest we abuse the present and the past alike. But there is more. Because the Holocaust, for many people today, can speak to us mainly as a deracinated account of absolute evil, it has a special value in a world adrift on a sea of ethical and ideological uncertainty.

I do not wish to understate the paradoxes of popularized Holocaust-obsessiveness: the risk of sectarian abuse (“my suffering trumps your suffering”); the inclination to measure all other horrors against that of the industrial extermination of a whole people and to find them somehow wanting (“Kosovo is not Auschwitz”); the recently acquired habit of calling every political crime a “holocaust”; the danger of a backlash against over-exposure. Elie Wiesel's outburst against the television soap-opera “Holocaust” had its place—the Holocaust, he said, “can never be comprehended or transmitted. Only those who were there know what it was; the others will never know”; but faced with such imperfect choices, I still share James Young's preference for inadequate and even abused memory over comfortable forgetting.

All in all, the ubiquity of Holocaust awareness today is not a bad thing. Although the compass needle of moral anguish in this country can waver uncertainly across an unnervingly wide swath of public choices, the direction in which it has pointed in recent decades is a clear and sustained improvement over earlier times. To the extent that the obsession with the extermination of the European Jews has contributed to this improvement, public interest in the Holocaust is to be encouraged. Is it good for the Jews? I am not sure. Is it good for America? Absolutely.