[In the following review, the critic offers a mixed assessment of The Holocaust in American Life, noting that Novick fails to adequately address the questions he poses in regard to American conceptions of the Holocaust.]

Why has the Holocaust become, in the last several decades, the central symbol in reflection on human depravity and cruelty in modernity? And why has this reflection occurred centrally in the United States rather than Europe? These are the questions with which Peter Novick began his investigations into the development of the Holocaust as a central moral symbol of American moral and political imagination. But while Novick begins with these questions, he doesn't answer them; they go missing when his historian's conscientiousness distracts him from the deeper questions into the surface narrative of events. What we get [in The Holocaust in American Life] is not why, but how—how, after 20 years of near-silence concerning the Holocaust, it became so crucial to American culture that it warranted institutional memorialization with a museum on the National Mall (where American slavery and the genocide of Native Americans still remain unremembered). Novick approaches an answer to the why-question with his proposal to replace the “return of the repressed trauma” explanation of the imaginative rise of the Holocaust with an explanation grounded in the idea of “collective memorialization” of the past as a response to present social, cultural, and political issues. Still, more could be said—especially about the way that the image of the Holocaust, as it haunts us, may be able to serve as a useful moral prod to not let such horrific events happen again—but then, when one remembers Rwanda, Bosnia, and Iraq, perhaps such hopes are over-blown. No matter what one thinks of the moral usefulness of considerations of the Holocaust, however, Novick's work remains a thought-provoking and generally provocative book. But it is not the book that Novick set out to write, nor the one he claimed to deliver; that book remains unwritten.