Response to Lederhendler and Lang

Abstract

T am, of course, pleased that Eli Lederhendler had so many complimentary things to say about The Holocaust in American Life. In my response I'll accentuate the negative: concentrate on points of disagreement in the interests of fruitful engagement. Lederhendler has two major criticisms of the book. First, he believes that I underrate the influence of the Holocaust on American Jewry in the late 1940s and early 1950s; he suggests that there was a Holocaust awareness in early postwar American Jewish life that bears closer look than Novick is prepared to give it. The question really is not one of subterranean awareness, because awareness (that is, knowledge) of the Holocaust was universal among American Jews, as was awareness that but for the accident of parents' (or grandparents') immigration, they would have shared the fate of European Jewry. Rather, it is matter of how central or marginal this was to their consciousness. The investigation of this sort of thing is (to put it mildly) difficult, because it has to be based on indirect evidence, on inference, and on what might be termed informed intuition. My low estimate of the salience of Holocaust consciousness in those years squares with the impressions of contemporary observers, whom I cited in the book. I cited as well number of published symposia in those years in which Jewish participants were invited to talk of what had shaped their thinking and about the grounds of theirJewish identity. The fact that, in these symposia, the Holocaust was almost never mentioned seemed to me very suggestive (though not decisive) in judging its private salience. Although I emphasized that the absence of much Jewish public discourse about the Holocaust did not mean the absence of discussion around the kitchen table, I registered my belief