On Peter Novick'sThe Holocaust in American Life

Abstract

n 1988, Peter Novick published That Noble Dream: The Objectivity Question and the American Historical Profession,1 in which he criticized the sometime ideal among American historians of writing neutral or objective historical accounts-epitomized in Leopold von Ranke's conception of history written wie es eigentlich gewesen ist (as it actually was). That ideal, Novick argued, was-is-illusory: a noble dream, in Carl Becker's phrase (and not always, according to Novick, all that noble). In The Holocaust in American Life, published in 1999,2 Novick now provides a vivid illustration of his own thesis, though not, one supposes, by design. The tendentiousness and ideological tilt he found in the work of other historians is here on prominent display; his conclusions, too, go beyond the evidence from which his accusations of the artifice of Holocaust centrality and its harmful effects on the American Jewish community and the larger American public allegedly follow. Allegedly, because the three basic conclusions to which Novick lays claim do not in fact follow from his premises: 1. Question: What is the place of the Holocaust in American life? Answer: Large. Too large. For American Jewish life, much too large. 2. Question: What caused this? Answer: Interests and calculations unrelated to the Holocaust: an