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Book Reviews
The Holocaust in American Life
By Peter Novick. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1999, 373 pp. List: $27.
Reviewed by Rachelle Marshall, JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2000, page 100-103
The Holocaust is a familiar topic to almost all Americans, Holocaust studies
are included in the curriculum of most high schools and colleges, the
Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC is visited by hundreds of thousands of
tourists every year, and, like the recent film "Schindler's List," two
comedies based on the Holocaust are currently drawing crowds at the box
office. But these and similar developments began taking shape less than 30
years ago, long after the events they recall took place.
In his book The Holocaust in American Life, Peter Novick, a Pulitzer
Prizewinning historian at the University of Chicago, writes that the attempt
by the German Nazis and their European sympathizers to exterminate the Jews
of Europe during World War II was originally seen as part of a larger
catastrophe, a war that took some 30 million lives. Only much later did the
murder of 6 million Jews become a separate event, unique in its horror.
Today it is a symbol of Jewish persecution and a sacrosanct subject to all
Jews and almost all Americans.
Novick traces in rich detail the remark able change that has taken place
over the years in how we think about the Holocaust, and how this change was
brought about. As a Jewish American and a liberal he asks why the Holocaust
has come to play such a prominent role in our culture, even though it was
once ignored, even by many Jews. He also asks if this change is desirable.
Novick's answers to these questions are certain to provoke controversy, if
not rage, among many readers.
In fact, a subtitle to his book might be "The uses and abuses of the
Holocaust. Without ever minimizing the horror and extraordinary suffering
inflicted on European Jews during the Nazi era, Novick argues that the
Holocaust looms so large today in our collective consciousness because
Jewish leaders have deliberately used the event to shape Americans' views
about Israel and to forge a stronger sense of identity and group loyalty
among Jews.
Until the 1960s neither the Holocaust nor Israel were prominent issues.
During the 1950s Germany was a Cold War ally and no one wanted to be
reminded of its past crimes. An Israel full of impoverished immigrants held
little attraction for most American Jews except as an object of charity.
Even the Israelis' spectacular kidnapping in 1962 of Adolf Eichmann, a chief
perpetrator of Hitler's "final solution," was widely criticized. William
Buckley's National Review, today an ardent supporter of Israel, deplored
Eichmann's capture as part of "an attempt to cast suspicion on Germany" and
charged that his trial would promote "bitterness, mistrust, the advancement
of communist aims." But it was Eichmann's trial, at which a succession of
death camp survivors gave their heart-rending evidence, that highlighted for
the world the attempted liquidation of the Jews as a separate and distinct
crime, of a different order from other Nazi crimes. During Eichmann's trial
the word Holocaust first began finding its way into general usage.
The second critical event of the 1960s took place in June 1967, when Israel
wiped out the entire Egyptian air force in one surprise attack and in the
next six days overran the West Bank, the Sinai, Gaza and the Golan Heights.
Jews were no longer seen as passive victims but as brilliant strategists and
able soldiers. At the same time, Israel's lightning victory convinced some
members of the Lyndon Johnson administration that its public support for
Israel could diminish some of the growing American media criticism of the
U.S. war effort in Vietnam.
The new image of Israel as a strong and vibrant nation made it possible for
Jewish leaders to restore the Holocaust to general consciousness and use it
to strengthen Jewish identity and engender support for Israel. With the
sharp decline of prejudice against Jews in America and a falling away of
young Jews from the synagogue, the Holocaust today serves as a common
denominator for all Jews, religious and otherwise, and the single
justification for the slogan "We are one." It fills the need to preserve
Jewish continuity in the face of increasing intermarriage (which the
president of Yeshiva University in New York has likened to "another
Holocaust").
During the 1970s and 1980s Jewish leaders used reminders of the Holocaust to
counter growing criticism in America of Israel's refusal to return captured
Arab territory, its repeated invasions of Lebanon, and its attack on a
Libyan airliner that killed over a hundred civilian passengers. The
zealously pro-Israel editor of Commentary, Norman Podhoretz, even accused
Jews who criticized Israel's 1992 invasion of Lebanon of granting Hitler a
"posthumous victory."
Recalling the Holocaust served notice on the world that the wrong done to
Jews was so great as to put Israel beyond criticism and justify any action
it might take against those it perceives as enemies. As Israeli scholar
Avishai Margalit wrote in a 1988 article for the New York Review, "Against
the weapon of the Holocaust, the Palestinians are amateurs." (In 1978 the
American Israel Public Affairs Committee [AIPAC], Israel's principal lobby
in Washington, DC even lobbied against the sale of AWAC planes to Saudi
Arabia by giving every member of Congress a book on the Holocaust.)
Fortunately, Novick writes, "increasing numbers of American Jews no longer
see things as quite so black and white." Nevertheless, the message that Jews
are under constant threat from hostile forces remains a central theme of
Holocaust remembrance. Ellen Wills, a columnist for the Village Voice,
expressed a widely held view when she asserted, "The status of Jews as
persecuted outsiders is at the core of what Judaism and Jewishness is
about."
Although many Jews, including this reviewer, strongly disagree with that
message, it is drummed into the ears of thousands of Jewish teenagers who
are taken from the United States every year to visit death camps in Poland.
On arrival they are told by an American rabbi, "The world is divided into
two parts: those who actively participated with the Nazis and those who
passively collaborated with them." Armed Israeli guards who accompany the
young people do everything possible to convince them they are in constant
danger as long as they are in Poland. At the end of the tour they are flown
to Israel, which many by then are convinced is "my real home."
David Roskies, who reviewed the book for Commentary, monthly publication of
the American Jewish Committee, criticized Novick for "demystifying Jewish
memory itself as nothing but a tool of Zionist politics" and argued that
"The use-and yes, the abuse-of Holocaust memory forms part of a much larger
mobilization of group memory for the sake of group survival."
Novick acknowledges the appropriateness of "awe and horror when confronting
the Holocaust-now and forever," but he sees danger in making the Holocaust
central to Jewish identity. In his view, "group memory," with its emphasis
on victimhood, too often encourages inward-turning and a sense of otherness
on the part of various segments of society. When groups compete over which
one suffered the most, the unity necessary for an effective social order is
undermined.
One of the many virtues of Novick's book is its fairness. He not only
documents each of his statements but takes care to qualify them. As a result
it becomes clear to the reader that the Jewish community in America is far
from monolithic and includes many who oppose the tribalism of its leaders.
One such critic is Daniel Singer, who, in the Sept. 27 issue of The Nation,
described his recent return to Poland, where almost all of his family died
in the death camps. Unlike Novick, Singer, who survived only by chance, does
find a lesson in the Holocaust, but it is a universalist, not a separatist
one: "When you cast somebody out because he is other, different, alien, when
you raise ethnicity to a political religion, you start on a slippery slope
that, we now know, can lead to hell on earth."
On visiting Auschwitz Singer writes, "My deep links are with the dead whose
ashes are interred here. But this should not be interpreted in any
nationalistic fashion. The heritage I claim is that of standing on the side
of the victims, of the downtrodden, the exploited, whatever their color or
passport, black, white or yellow, Palestinian or Jew." Judging by his book,
it is a heritage Novick would be willing to claim as well.
