Customer Reviews

The Holocaust in American Life

5 star:		(17)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Before anything else, I'd like to comment on some previous (negative) reviews on this book, which said that it was, among other things, 'trite' and 'boring'. The word 'trite' in particular has been mentioned several times by previous reviewers. These 2 characterizations puzzle me, since they seem far from what anyone could say about 'The holocaust in American life'. Could this book be called controversial? Sure. Provocative? Perhaps. But trite and boring? No way. The book is interesting and fascinating. This just goes to show how, when lacking arguments, one can just accuse someone or something of being 'trite' and 'boring' and think they've expressed an opinion. What they have done in actuality is express a great big 'nothing'.

Other reviews mention inaccuracies in Novick's book, or accuse him of discussing the representations and discourses of the holocaust, and not the holocaust itself in its historical details. But surely they're missing the point: Novick is looking at the American collective memory of the holocaust, he's looking at the way the discourse around the holocaust is shaped today, including how it was shaped in the past and how and why it has changed. So one could say Novick is a historian of the present moment, interested in how certain ways of talking about the holocaust contribute to the shaping not only of Jewish identity, but also of the identity of the victim, of what suffering means, of what an atrocity is etc. I fail to understand why this is criticized by some reviewers. It seems to me a perfectly legitimate goal, to document the way a discourse is shaped, separately from the actual historical facts of the holocaust as it happened in the '40s.

Furthermore, what Novick does, he does very well. On a subject that is full of minefields and strong emotions, Novick manages to express his arguments clearly and persuasively. His main point (discussed by previous reviewers) is that the way the discourse around the holocaust is shaped in America today is far from self-evident: it was different in the past and could be different in the future. He stresses that a historical understanding of the events of world war 2 & of the holocaust do not lead to only one way of representing it and understanding it in today's culture.

The Holocaust as historical event is one thing. The Holocaust as discourse today, as representation in cultural life, is another. Novick discusses the second, and is very critical of the uniqueness, unrepresentability, incomprehensibility discourse that seems prevalent today. He is also critical of the emphasis on the identity of victim which seems central not only to Jewish Americans, but also to various other groups. His critique is not at all a conservative one, i.e. 'get over it and get on with things'. Far from it, he stresses the importance of memory and history. What he does is question the way this memory and history of the holocaust is shaped and implemented, especially when people end up comparing different historical instances of suffering, always putting the holocaust on top, as the instance of suffering par excellence. Novick insists that such an approach is not only meaningless but also morally problematic: because, as he says, even if there had been 2 or 3 genocides of equal horror before Hitler's one, we would still have to say that what happened in Europe in the '40s was terrible and unique in some ways, similar to other catastrophes in others; we would still have to remember it and fight against anything like it happening in the future. Because really- do we need something to be unique in order to fight against it? The idea of uniqueness, Novick argues, is often used to really talk about an hierarchy of catastrophes, with the Holocaust on top, which can really only serve other goals, far from the actual historical understanding of the Holocaust.

One important point to stress here: this idea of 'serving other goals' does not mean that there is any kind of conspiracy, any far fetched group which plans and plots about how the holocaust will be discussed. This couldn't be further from Novick's point. What he argues is rather more everyday. How all of us, you and I, discuss and understand the holocaust today, has to do with present needs and desires that we have: for example, the need to have a clear moral compass, a guide to show us what the absolute good and what the absolute evil is. It is to an understanding of these needs and desires of all of us that lead to certain ways of understanding the holocaust that Novick addresses his book.

All in all, Novick's book is interesting, thought-provoking and actually a quick and easy read. Its main points are explained well, and I think anyone interested in this subject would find it a very good read.

This is one of the most intellectually stimulating books I have ever encountered. While few people with probably agree with everything the author has to say, he has written a thoughtful, thoroughly researched examination of how the idea of the Holocaust--and popular thinking about that tragedy among both Jewish and Gentile Americans--has evolved over the 60 years since the outbreak of World War II. He also has the courage to challenge conventional thinking as well as the beliefs of generally revered leaders like David Ben Gurion and Elie Wiesel.

The book does an excellent job of linking popular thinking about the Holocaust with concurrent historical trends and developments, including the more intense American focus on the Pacific as opposed to the European theatre for much of the war, the lack of appreciation during and immediately after the war for the immensity of the Jewish genocide, the emergence of the Cold War (together with the "discovery" of common totalitarian threads between Nazism and Stalinism), the "rehabilitation" of Germany after Stalin took over Eastern Europe, changing views about "victimization" in American popular culture, the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem and Hannah Arendt's controversial analysis of it, the Arab-Israeli Wars of 1967 and 1973, as well as the decline in American anti-semitism in general at the same time that radical black activists were employing anti-Jewish rhetoric.

One of the most important contributions of the book is its discussion of the alleged "uniqueness" of the Holocaust, which the author shows to be both historically inaccurate and dangerous in leading down the slippery slope where any other more recent catastrophes and disasters are minimized in comparison. Rich with example and documentation--the footnotes and endnotes should be read, too--the book is one I expect to return to in the future. Broad in its scope and well-written, it is generally quite persuasive in the arguments it advances.

I would concur with those critics who fault the author's occasionally overly colloquial style, especially when he is discussing Holocaust deniers. His dismissal of them as "kooks" and "nut cases" detracts from the generally strong case he makes against them.

This excellent book could have only been written by an historian with ties to Judaism and much of it was destined to fall on deaf ears on both sides of the political/cultural divide. Being a non-Jew but interested in politics, this book seems to mesh well with other books that are nominally on the subject and my own experience. My favorite, aside from this one, is Culture of Critique by Kevin MacDonald which appears to have been received as a mixed blessing, like this one, by the "Jewish community" judging from some of the reviews and the author's comments in an update. It would be good to hear from Prof. Novick in this regard as both books appear to be well done academic works and the subsequent "debate" could add to the understanding of the controversial topic.

Several books could help a serious reader, and Paul Johnson's History of the Jews, especially the last part on Zion, is among others in that category. The Holocaust Industry by Norman G. Finkelstein, Salvation is from the Jews by Roy H. Schoeman and The Politics of Anti-Semitism by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair are not academic works but provided this writer with some good background of the diversity of Jewish opinions on the subject.

This is a well written, well researched book that asks why did Americans pay relatively little attention to the Holocaust before 1967 and so much attention to it afterwards. This thoughtful book argues that before 1967 the genocide of Jews was underemphasized for a number of reasons, some good, some bad. One reason was the emphasis during the war on the fact that Hitler was the common enemy of humanity, a belief fully shared by most American Jews of the time. (The concentration camps liberated by Americans were not in fact largely Jewish, who were concentrated in the extermination camps in the east, liberated by the Russians) Another reason was the emphasis on totalitarianism which, by concentrating on Stalin's evil, tended to reduce attention on the uniqueness of Hitler's systematic extermination. Still yet another reason was the general complacency and prosperity of the fifties. After 1967 the Holocaust increased its influence in the American mind for a number of reasons. The Cold War atmosphere relaxed, Americans became less complacent, Zionism came under increasing criticism for its attitude towards Palestinians and naturally the Holocaust was its best argument. The Holocaust served as the ultimate crime and American discourse invoked it to launch a thousand bad analogies.

Novick has an excellent eye for anecdote which illustrates his points. It is fascinating to hear Lucy Dawidowicz, who in the seventies became a prominent Conservative historian of the Holocaust, criticize Israel for accepting German reparations while doing nothing to help Arab refugees. It is also interesting to hear her argue that demanding mercy for the Rosenbergs would be like demanding it for Goering. In Novick's account we hear intellectuals arguing that the use of the term "ghetto" is a perfidious attempt by African-Americans to expropriate Jewish suffering when the term predates Hitler's rise to power by several decades. Contrary to many crocodile tears shed by the New Republic and other journals Jews were not particularly sympathetic to the civil rights movement. Jews were disproportionately represented among civil rights volunteers, but they were a minority of Jews. The two Jews murdered in Mississippi did not recieve religious funerals. In 1964 3/4 of New York Jews (and 9/10s of New York Catholics) thought the civil rights movement was going too fast, at a time when they had not even won the right to vote. Whether it consists of Americans mangling Pastor Martin Niemoller's famous quote ("First they came for the Communists, but I was not a Communist, etc.,) so as to exclude leftists, or accounts of Zionists trying to bully post-war refugees into moving to Israel instead of elsewhere, Novick has provided a fascinating account.

There are a few reservations about this book. Novick goes into detail about the Holocaust being ignored, and being manipulated too much. It is not clear what the golden mean should be. Moreover many bad invocations reflect less its inadequacy as a souce of morality then as the considerable ignorance many Americans have about any event in history. Although Novick is critical about arguments against the Holocaust's uniqueness, one can still defend the proposition for granting it a primary importance. Like it or not, the United States and the OECD are going to dominate the world for the forseeable future and they have much more in common with Nazi Germany than with the late Ottoman Empire, Democractic Kampuchea or the Rwanda of Hutu fanatics. These reservations aside however, Novick's book is one that everyone would benefit from reading.

Professor Novick has written a superb critique of the extent to which an preoccupation with the Holocaust dominates American-Jewish organizational agendas and priorities, along with a rigorous historical account of how we got here. This is really a book which should be read by all Jews who care at all about the activities of those organizations that purport to speak for the American Jewish community--and indeed, by all Jews who are concerned about American Jewish culture and society.

I'm afraid that Jew haters will find a certain amount here that will be useful to their cause.

A determination not to write anything that might potentially provide ammunition to Jew haters would only lead to a paralysis that prevented one from writing anything about Jews. Rest assured that Novick, a secularist Jew and University of Chicago historian, is the farthest thing one could imagine from a Holocaust denier. He quite properly dismisses them as "a tiny band of cranks, kooks, and misfits". Historians do not need to concern themselves with refuting Holocaust deniers any more than they would need to concern themselves with refuting Civil War deniers, slavery deniers, Roman Empire deniers, or flat-earthers.

Before reading this book, some of the things I knew about the Holocaust were that (1) the Allied military ignored the pleas of Jewish groups to bomb Auschwitz... (2) Bombing the rail lines to Auschwitz would have saved Jewish lives... (3) American guilt about failure to rescue Jews was an important factor in US support for the State of Israel in 1948... (4) The very existence of Israel was in peril during the 1967 and 1973 wars...

Novick argues (convincingly to me) that these, and a bunch of other things that I'd always assumed, are simply wrong. And I'm not just talking about the "soap factory" stories. The "political message" of the Holocaust (like most other things) often doesn't have much to do with "historical truth".

An earlier reviewer comments on the issue of the uniqueness of the Holocaust: actually, Novick does discuss this issue at some length, arguing convincingly that the whole issue is quite vacuous... uniqueness is a rhetorical rather than a historical matter.

I'm a little surprised that there hasn't been more of a media uproar over this book: it's a lot *more* controversial than Goldhagen's book of a few years ago (Hitler's Willing Executioners). Maybe the storm just hasn't broken yet?

The Holocaust in American Life is "must" reading for anyone teaching the Holocaust, at any level. Last semester (Spring '99) I taught a course on the Holocaust for the first time at a small, southern, state university. In preparation for this venture I read many of the standard works, I became familiar with the foremost issues. Since my primary area of research, teaching and expertise is Modern German History, the Nazi period, I was already relatively well versed in the subject and felt comfortable placing the Holocaust within the historical context of both modern Germany and European civilization. I did not, however, feel comfortable or competent questioning some assumptions and conclusions regarding several of the pertinent issues, such as the "uniqueness" issue. I accepted--with some reservations, but nevertheless accepted--the views of experts and authorities such as Wiesel, Dawidowicz, Hilberg, etc., even when my own knowledge and understanding of the issues, events, and historical context of the Holocaust raised my eyebrows and stoked some skepticism.

Peter Novick, however, has assured me that my reservations, questions, ideas, are valid and legitimate. I am now reassured and confident that I am not in some way violating sacred ground by raising these issues. He raises many other relevant points and assures the reader that others have done the same. It's OK to examine the Holocaust and what it has become in an objective exercise of scholarly inquiry, and to come away from that effort with conclusions different from those of the authorities.

In no way does Novick diminish or detract from the importance of the Holocaust, but he raises questions about the meaning of the Holocaust, its lessons, its place within the Jewish, American, Western, indeed, the human experience. Novick liberates and enables others to do so as well. One might say that he de-sanctifies the study of the Holocaust and returns it to the realm of everyday historical inquiry. An invaluable work.

Prof. Novick has produced an important book that challenges current nostrums. He demonstrates how the Holocaust has been used and, he implies, abused within the United States. Novick brings to light forgotten controversies, reminding us that the courageous Israeli capture of Adolf Eichmann was initially criticised. He correctly links the way in which American Jews have viewed themselves within American society and their changing perception and portrayal of the Holocaust. Like Arthur Hertzberg's "The Jews in America", Novick does not hesitate to contradict the consensus. Novick is, however, less effective than Hertzberg. Novick's style is too chatty, giving the impression that he is having a cup of coffee with some dim first year students. Some of the polemic is amusing but excessive. Many of the targets are too easy, such as the trite moralising or the picture postcard depiction of ever embattled Israel (which has long amused Israelis themselves). Still, Novick has a fine eye for the embarrassing quote and he makes many well regarded writers look less than wise.

There are some caveats, however. This book is not about the Holocaust. Indeed, there is almost nothing in this book about the event itself nor indeed is there much on Holocaust historiography, aside from some sensible comments about the reaction of the Allies. There are few comparisons as to how other societies and other Jewish communities have understood the Holocaust. One has to ask if the political use of the Holocaust and the changing portrayal of the Holocuast is as shocking or surprising as Novick implies? One sometimes has the impression that Novick takes a "heads I win, tails you lose" approach, that any portrayal of the Holocaust by American Jews would be wrong or trite.

Finally, Novick's book in many ways resembles Keith Richburg's "Out of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa." Both books are fundamentally inward looking and tell us much about how Americans misunderstand the world beyond their shores and little about what has actually happened. In that sense Novick is part of a worrying trend in history, where the study of how we think about the past and remember the past has replaced the study of the past. Knocking down misleading captions in the Holocaust Museum is important, but easy. Making use of the new archival sources that are now available in Eastern Europe, and which will greatly enhance our understanding of the Holocaust, is rather more difficult and far more important.

Peter Novick has written a lucid and deeply disturbing book. There is much in the book to agree with, but one is also struck time and time again by the cynicism and meretriciousness of various groups and organizations that have manipulated this tragic event for their own political ends--including the support of a foreign power, sometimes in direct opposition to American foreign policy and her national interests. There emerge, of course, the expected number of kooks who, in spite of copious evidence, still deny the actuality of the murders of European Jews (as well as communists, Poles, Ukrainians, Russians, Balts, Gypsies and many others). But even on the victims' side, the prevailing attitude is that noble ends justify any and all means, including manipulating politicians through "greed and fear." There is a Deborah Lipstadt, emerging victorious from the David Irving libel suit (where the latter was judged to have twisted historical truth), who-- when told that the memoir of a suffering Swiss-Jewish family (now thought to have been fabricated) that she used in her lectures--believes it's still "powerful . . . [although] it might complicate matters somewhat." And what is one to think of an Elie Wiesel--the personification of the concentration camp survivor to most television-watching Americans--or survivor Henryck Grynspan in whose eyes a gentile corpse is apparently less worthy of memorialization with public funds? Nor is Mr. Novick beyond a few ignoble swipes of his own, such as the statement that the nearly two million displaced persons left in Germany after the war and the initial wave of repatriation were " . . . Volksdeutsch [ethnic Germans] who had been expelled from Eastern Europe, Baltic and Ukrainian German auxiliaries, and various others . . ." Were one to claim that "the East European Jews who sought refuge against the attacking Nazi forces behind Soviet lines were mostly communists or collaborators and their families," one would rightfully recognize it as a gratuitous smear. There are a few other rash judgements about Christian refugees offered without documentary support. While, on balance, I recommend reading this book, one should also read Albert Lindemann's "Esau's Tears."

When I was growing up in the 1980s and 90s, from the way people talked about the Holocaust one would think that it was the main reason we went to war. The great tragedy of the Shoa has colored any discussion of the true motives behind Allied involvement in WWII in recent decades. Mr. Novick's book provides a much needed corrective to all I was taught growing up. We learn, for example, that until the 1960s, Jewish deaths during WWII were rarely discussed apart from the general casualty toll. A reviewer below contends that many of the issues raised in this book were brought up in earlier works. Frequently, however, these issues were discussed in isolation. Peter Novick's book is the first to bring together several issues in order to provide a coherent discussion of how the holocaust went from being an issue discussed only among Jews, to a subject that has become ingrained on the national consciousness as a whole. I only hope that Mr. Novick or another author takes up the subject of how memory of the holocaust has been used as a means to promote Jewish unity in the face of assimilation.