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Novick
book reviewed by Milton Goldin: Does Holocaust
Remembrance Define Jewishness?
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Author: Suzanna
Hicks
Date: Wednesday, June 9, 1999
H-NET BOOK REVIEW Published by H-Holocaust@h-net.msu.edu
(June, 1999)
Peter Novick. The Holocaust
in American Life. Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
1999. 373 pp. Bibliographical references and index.
$27.00 (cloth), ISBN 0-395-84009-0.
Reviewed for H-Holocaust by Milton
Goldin, H-Holocaust Book Review Editor
AFTER V-J Day in August 1945, I served in Japan--badly
wanting out of the Army of the United States, but not
because I yearned for a Jewish-oriented milieu. My
father's distaste for self-serving Jewish organizational
and religious leaders had deeply influenced me. True, I
had great affection for the Eastern-European culture of
my parents, and was shocked by fragmentary reports about
the unspeakable fate of Ukrainian Jewry. But the horror I
witnessed in the Pacific left me reluctant to learn more
about catastrophes, and it would take several years
before I began to study the scope and meanings of the
Holocaust. Peter Novick indicates that many others
took emotional and intellectual journeys similar to mine.
His discussions of starts, stops, and detours commonly
encountered make this book required reading for anyone
interested in learning how Holocaust remembrance
eventually became the ultimate expression of
American-Jewish belongingness.
Novick's Dramatis Personae include Hannah
Arendt, Norman Podhoretz, Elie Wiesel, and major
Jewish organizations and institutions such as the
American Jewish Committee, the American Jewish Congress,
the Anti-Defamation
League, and the United States Holocaust Museum. He
divides his discussion into five parts: The War Years,
The Postwar Years, The Years of Transition, Recent Years,
and Future Years. The critical question that underlies
the volume is succinctly posed on the Introduction's
first page: "Part of my puzzlement about how Americans
became so 'Holocaust conscious' had to do with timing:
why now?"
Indeed, why now? Publics usually react to events
during or immediately after their occurrences. But
American Jews initially ignored the Holocaust, and not
until several years after World War II did it mushroom
into a subject that received maximum attention in the
media. During the transition period, some individuals
(Gentiles as well as Jews) came to see themselves as
almost Divinely Sanctioned to carry forth the work of
explaining the event. (In an opposing camp, revisionists,
and those who are not revisionists but lean to accusing
Jews of Holocaust "hysteria," came to see themselves as
sanctioned to advise others that if genocide did occur,
it didn't occur for reasons most Jews think. But if it
did occur for reasons most Jews think, what actually
occurred can be blamed on circumstances beyond the
control of those Gentiles who made it happen. Yes, that's
the logic.)
On the face of it, given the sorry intellectual stance
of revisionists and neo-revisionists, it should by now be
a walkaway for Jewish organizational spokespersons to
argue the relevance of the Holocaust to human life, not
just to Jewish life. But what emerges from Novick's pages
is that Jewish Establishments and many of their most
dedicated adherents have shared a depressing tendency to
cut Jewish history to style (especially to the styles of
American and Israeli politicians and some Holocaust
survivors) and/or to make predictions about anti-Semitism
not proved accurate by later findings. As if this weren't
enough to cause concern among the rest of us, there has
developed a tendency to press for the Holocaust rather
than for Judaism to be the critical element in the
lives of Jews.
As a pundit, Norman Podhoretz is second to none.
Novick tells us that in 1957, Podhoretz "surveyed
contemporary Jewish attitudes in an article, 'The
Intellectual and Jewish Fate' a title that might seem to
promise a discussion centering on the Holocaust. It was
not even mentioned" (p. 105). Nor did Podhoretz mention
the Holocaust in his 1967 memoir, Making it. By
the late 1960s, however, Podhoretz became worried that a
"moral statute of limitations ran out on the Holocaust"
and that a "'golden age' [for American Jews] was
over: no longer were Jews fully accepted as equals,
indeed, even their physical safety could no longer be
assumed" (p. 171). Podhoretz has since failed to explain
how it is that the Holocaust is discussed more frequently
today than ever before (including by himself) and why
overt anti-Semitism occurs in America less frequently
than it did in the past.
Israeli lobbying against discussion of the 1915
Turkish massacres of Armenians (Turkey and Israel
maintain diplomatic ties) persuaded Elie Wiesel to
withdraw from an international conference on genocide, in
Tel Aviv. On the other hand, he helped initiate "an
intense struggle ... [with] Jewish staffers in
the White House ... [relative to] how the
Holocaust should be described [in the Holocaust
Memorial Museum]--who would be included. It was
'morally repugnant' said one presidential aide, 'to
create a category of second-class [non-Jewish]
victims of the Holocaust as Mr. Wiesel would have us
do,'" (p. 218). Wiesel finally did agree that all victims
should be remembered. Nonetheless, he insisted that
Jewish survivors constituted a sort of priesthood of
Holocaust historians, best able to relate what had
happened; "the truth of Auschwitz remains hidden in its
ashes. Only those who lived it in their flesh and in
their minds can possibly transform their experience into
knowledge. Others, despite their best intentions, can
never do so."[1]
Serving as a reader for a publishing house, Hannah
Arendt advised against publication of Raul
Hilberg's The Destruction of the European
Jews. She then used his book (issued by Chicago's
Quadrangle Books, in 1961) as a prime reference for
Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of
Evil, published after the Eichmann trial. Writers who
lauded Hilberg assailed Arendt because she considered
Eichmann a man whose very ordinariness helped make a
Holocaust possible, rather than as an evil genius who
diabolically planned a genocide. (Podhoretz wrote that
"the traditional version, pure evil versus pure good, was
preferable to her story: 'complex, unsentimental, riddled
with paradox and ambiguity,'" [p. 136].) Worse,
for several pundits, Arendt (like Hilberg) sharply
criticized Judenrat members. She believed that as leaders
of Jewish communities it was incumbent upon them to set
examples of courage. In her view, they did not do so.
Which brings us to, why now? The answer, according to
Novick, has less to do with debates about history than
with the present situation of the American Jewish
community. That it continues to disintegrate does not
surprise anyone with even a casual interest in Jewish
affairs. The 1990 National Jewish Population Survey
appalled readers, suggesting that there might only be the
remnant of an American Jewish community within a hundred
years. Pundits, academics, and the Orthodox advised that
this development had transpired because of intermarriage,
which must be strenuously discouraged. Or, if preventing
intermarriage proved impossible, non-Jewish spouses must
convert to Judaism.
As usual in such instances, however, romance proved a
stronger force than exhortations to righteous behavior.
The intermarriage rate has annually increased and there
have been no reports of overwhelming requests from
non-Jewish spouses to convert.
Thus the use of the Holocaust to hold together the
community by demonstrating the validity of Orthodox and
Zionist claims that no matter what assimilationists may
claim or intermarried couples may hope, Jews, half-Jews,
and individuals with at least one Jewish grandparent live
in a hostile world, at the mercy of Gentiles who may at
any time break loose from moral moorings. No person with
even a trace of Jewish blood or with loyalty to Judaism
can conceivably be safe--unless they live in the Jewish
State or isolate themselves from Gentile influences to
the degree possible in the modern world.
Novick responds, "There is a sense in which Emil
Fackenheim was right to say that for Jews to forget
Hitler's victims would be to grant him a
'posthumous victory.' But it would be an even greater
posthumous victory for Hitler were we to tacitly endorse
his definition of ourselves as despised pariahs by making
the Holocaust the emblematic Jewish experience" (p.
281).
Finally, a comment on Jewish giving to UJA (based on
my experience as a development professional for
forty-five years). Novick tells us that a major reason
for initial donations to Israel was guilt and remorse at
not having done more to save European Jewries (p. 75),
and I certainly saw proof of that. But what I also saw
was figurative arm-twisting. "Card-calling" that is, a
buyer of goods or services calling on suppliers for
pledges, flowered. It was the best method that
professional fundraisers could think of to inspire
prospects to actually part with cash, including those who
most loudly proclaimed their unswerving dedication to
Zionist beliefs.
Notes:
[1]. Wiesel, Elie. From the Kingdom of
Memory: Reminiscences. (New York: Simon and Schuster,
1990), p. 166.
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