The Holocaust in American life

Abstract

The in American Life. By Peter Novick. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1999. Pp. 1, 373. Cloth, $27.00) In this engaging and important study, Peter Novick undertakes two primary tasks: to offer an historical account of how the became such a prominent feature of American cultural and political life, and to question the held assumption that this prominence is an inherently good thing. In addition to these goals, Novick seeks to debunk the claim that the stands apart from other atrocities as a unique purveyor of moral lessons. Indeed, he takes his case one step further by contending that, in the end, the may actually offer no moral lessons at all. In tracing the history of the in American life, Novick is largely successful. Like other recent scholarship on this themes, Novick argues that, while Americans were not silent about Nazi atrocities during and immediately after the war, the Holocaust was not recognized as a discrete historical event until decades later. In contending that the became more ubiquitous in American cultural and political life after 1968 than it had been in the postwar years, Novick rejects psychoanalytically informed accounts that explain this lag in terms of trauma or repression. Drawing on a wide range of published and unpublished sources, Novick argues that in the years following World War II, public discussion of the was muted because it ran counter not only to the aims of organized American Jewry, but to the broader cultural and political climate of postwar America. The demands of the Cold War and the new alliance between Germany and the United States required that Stalinism, rather than the Holocaust, be cast as the most damning crime of the modern age. Leaders of the American Jewish community promulgated this view and were largely silent about the in an attempt to dispel stereotypes that identified Jews with both Bolshevism and eternal victimhood. An excessive public preoccupation with the was seen as incompatible with a rapidly assimilating American Jewish community, determined to participate fully in euphoric postwar prosperity. While the destruction of European Jewry was surely a widely shared Jewish during these years, it was, according to Novick, a sorrow shared largely in private. By the mid-1960s, this had begun to change. Novick cites the 1961 trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann and the subsequent publication of Hannah Arendt's controversial Eichmann in Jerusalem as two of the major catalysts for a growing public discussion of the Holocaust. A less obvious claim is that the heightened public preoccupation with the in the late 1960s and 1970s coincided with the birth of identity politics, reflecting both a broader shift away from an integrationist ethos to a particularist one, and the growth of a victim that increasingly valorized oppression and suffering over heroism. While not everyone may agree with Novick's implicitly critical definition of identity politics, this is an important dimension of his argument, for it offers a compelling, if only partial explanation for the ubiquity of the in contemporary American life. It was only within a political culture that valorized victimization that the could become the locus of so many strong and contradictory feelings, including possessiveness, proprietariness, envy, and resentment. Novick is also interested in how, by the late 1960s, a growing public discourse reflected the shifting priorities of organized American Jewry, and here, too, he offers an illuminating account of how Jewish leaders once reticent about the were now placing it at the top of their political agendas. In their concern over escalating rates of intermarriage and waning interest in organized Judaism, leaders now seized on the in order to shore up a sense of American Jewish identity and to caution American Jews against the dangers of complacency. …