The Holocaust In American LifeThis “courageous and thought-provoking book” examines how the Holocaust came to hold its unique place in American memory (Foreign Affairs). Prize–winning historian Peter Novick explores in absorbing detail the decisions that moved the Holocaust to the center of American life. He illuminates how Jewish leaders invoked its memory to muster support for Israel, and how politicians in turn used it to score points with Jewish voters. With insight and sensitivity, Novick raises searching questions about these developments, their meaning, and their consequences. Does the Holocaust really teach useful lessons and sensitize us to atrocities, or, by making the Holocaust the measure, does it make lesser crimes seem “not so bad”? Have American Jews, by making the Holocaust the emblematic Jewish experience, given Hitler a posthumous victory, tacitly endorsing his definition of Jews as despised pariahs? What are we to make of the fact that while Americans spend hundreds of millions of dollars for museums recording a European crime, while comparatively little is done to memorialize American slavery? A New York Times Notable Book |
Contents
| 1 | |
| 17 | |
THE POSTWAR YEARS | 61 |
THE YEARS 0F TRANSITION | 125 |
RECENT YEARS | 205 |
FUTURE YEARS | 265 |
Back Matter | 283 |
Back Cover | 377 |
Spine | 378 |
Other editions - View all
Common terms and phrases
AJCommittee Papers Allied Ameri American Jewish Committee American Jewish Congress American Jews Anti-Defamation League anti-Semitism April Arendt Armenian atrocities Auschwitz bombing Bosnia Catholic caust Christian claim Cohen collective memory commemoration Commentary Communist concern consciousness Council culture David Dawidowicz death Deborah Lipstadt discourse Eichmann trial eleven million Elie Wiesel ethnic Europe European Jewry event genocide gentiles German groups guilt Hitler Holo Holocaust Memorial Holocaust survivors Ibid immigration insisted Israel Israeli Jewish community Jewish identity Jewish leaders Jewish organizations John Slawson Judaism killed lessons liberated Lipstadt Lucy Dawidowicz March moral murder National Nazi Nazism Norman Podhoretz Palestine Palestinians political postwar President question quoted Rabbi refugees religious Report rescue response six million Soviet story symbol talk thought tion totalitarianism uniqueness United victims Warsaw Ghetto Uprising wartime Washington Holocaust Museum Wiesenthal World wrote Yad Vashem Yehuda Bauer Yom Hashoah York Zionist
Popular passages
Page 15 - For if once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing ; and from robbing he comes next to drinking and Sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination.
Page 140 - The whole truth was that if the Jewish people had really been unorganized and leaderless, there would have been chaos and plenty of misery but the total number of victims would hardly have been between four and a half and six million people.
Page 101 - Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group, as such...
Page 294 - If an action of good intent leads to bad results, then, in the actor's eyes, not he but the world, or the stupidity of other men, or God's will who made them thus, is responsible for the evil.
Page 4 - To understand something historically is to be aware of its complexity, to have sufficient detachment to see it from multiple perspectives, to accept the ambiguities, including moral ambiguities, of protagonists' motives and behavior. Collective memory simplifies; sees events from a single, committed perspective; is impatient with ambiguities of any kind; reduces events to mythic archetypes. Historical consciousness, by its nature...
Page 136 - the banality of evil" and meant with this no theory or doctrine but something quite factual, the phenomenon of evil deeds, committed on a gigantic scale, which could not be traced to any particularity of wickedness, pathology, or ideological conviction in the doer, whose only personal distinction was a perhaps extraordinary shallowness. However monstrous the deeds were, the doer was neither monstrous nor demonic...
Page 292 - The question of Jewish persecution in Europe is being given top news priority by the English and the Americans. ... At bottom, however, I believe both the English and the Americans...
Page 222 - First they came for the Communists, but I was not a Communist — so I said nothing. Then they came for the Social Democrats, but I was not a Social Democrat — so I did nothing.
Page 3 - An event in the subject's life defined by its intensity, by the subject's incapacity to respond adequately to it, and by the upheaval and long-lasting effects that it brings about in the psychical organization.
Page 65 - The things I saw beggar description. . .The visual evidence and the verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty, and bestiality were so overpowering as to leave me a bit sick.