Bigger Than History
But try proposing that the Holocaust offers no lessons at all, or suggesting that most Americans know more about it than they do about the bombing of Hiroshima–that will raise hackles, for reasons that have as much to do with the cold war as World War II. Then try declaring that many American Jews today use the Holocaust to win the gold medal in the “Victimization Olympics.”
Novick was certainly not looking for a fight when he began research on The Holocaust in American Life ten years ago (it came out early this summer). For most of his career and life, hot-button questions in the Jewish community haven’t concerned him. In fact, he doesn’t believe such a community exists: American Jews, he says, have almost nothing in common. They don’t share religious or political beliefs; their cultural traits are more determined by where they live than by their ancestry; they’re not united against anti-Semitism because, despite Benjamin Smith, it’s diminished over the decades; and Zionism, once a unifying principle, is for the majority of Jews now a pretty abstract concept. The only thing American Jews share, he writes, “is the knowledge that, but for the immigration of near or distant ancestors,” they too would have suffered the death sentence of European Jewry.
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So Novick decided to look at the history of our perceptions of the Holocaust. What’s odd, given how much anxiety there is today about how and when to talk about it, is how little anyone cared to do so for many years afterward–it wasn’t even known as “the Holocaust” until the early 1960s. When the war ended, there were supposedly two major but contradictory responses to Hitler’s mass murder of European Jewry. First, motivated by guilt over their inaction during the war, the nations of the world helped Israel establish itself. Second, the recent trauma of the war led Americans to repress discussion of the atrocity.
Then came the Six-Day War of 1967. Novick argues that although the war put Israel in no real danger, it evoked fears of a second Holocaust that made contemplation of the first seem an imperative for Jews and gentiles alike. When the 1973 war turned much of world opinion against Israel, the Holocaust became a crucial fund-raising tool for Jewish organizations: Israel was increasingly divorced from Jewish-American life, but the Holocaust could be presented as everyone’s concern. And yet it set Jews apart–which, after years of assimilation, suddenly seemed necessary. By the late 1970s, Novick writes, most Jewish groups were using the specter of mass murder as the surest way to build membership. As one of the philanthropists who started the Simon Wiesenthal Center in California noted, “The Holocaust works every time.”
“People will accept anything that lays the demon of the Holocaust to rest,” Roskies says, though they won’t necessarily buy into the book’s whole argument or realize the Holocaust has been abused for political ends. Rather, “people are tired of the Holocaust, and they’re going to listen to the first person who blows the whistle and says, ‘Too much.’” Roskies also notes that the book is finding admirers among a more discriminating audience–historians–a fact he finds dismaying given what he sees as Novick’s dismissal of many respected scholars.
