How and when did the Holocaust come to loom so large in post-war Jewish and American and international life? This is the question Peter Novick's controversial new book sets out to answer.
In the first decades after World War II, the Holocaust was little talked about, as dwelling on German crimes interfered with Cold War mobilisation, and Jews in general, and American victims, avoided the subject. With the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem (1961), and especially after the Six-Day War (1967) and the Yom Kippur War (1973), when the state of Israel began to see itself as threatened by a hostile world, the Holocaust began to assume central importance as a defining factor of Jewishness. With the release of the television series 'Holocaust' (1978), Claude Lanzmann's influential documentary 'Shoah' (1985), and Steven Spielberg's Hollywood blockbuster, 'Schindler's List' (1993), the Holocaust had become established as the defining moral issue of the twentieth century throughout the world.
As Peter Novick teases out the history of these developments he asks many searching questions, including:
- Does defining Jewishness in terms of victimhood alone hand Hitler a posthumous victory?
- How is collective memory created and is our collective memory of the Holocaust accurate?
- Does claiming uniqueness for the Holocaust render other atrocities (Cambodia, Rwanda, Kosovo) somehow "not so bad"?
In a book likely to provoke heated debate, Peter Novick gives a fascinating account of a sweeping cultural transformation and challenges us to consider whether the collective memory of the Holocaust we now share is the one we should have or should want to have.
