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Title: The Holocaust in American Life by Peter Novick ISBN: 0-618-08232-8 Publisher: Mariner Books Pub. Date: 20 September, 2000 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.89 (28 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Will shake up your beliefs
Comment: Before reading this book, some of the things I knew about the Holocaust were that (1) the Allied military ignored the pleas of Jewish groups to bomb Auschwitz... (2) Bombing the rail lines to Auschwitz would have saved Jewish lives... (3) American guilt about failure to rescue Jews was an important factor in US support for the State of Israel in 1948... (4) The very existence of Israel was in peril during the 1967 and 1973 wars...
Novick argues (convincingly to me) that these, and a bunch of other things that I'd always assumed, are simply wrong. And I'm not just talking about the "soap factory" stories. The "political message" of the Holocaust (like most other things) often doesn't have much to do with "historical truth".
An earlier reviewer comments on the issue of the uniqueness of the Holocaust: actually, Novick does discuss this issue at some length, arguing convincingly that the whole issue is quite vacuous... uniqueness is a rhetorical rather than a historical matter.
I'm a little surprised that there hasn't been more of a media uproar over this book: it's a lot *more* controversial than Goldhagen's book of a few years ago (Hitler's Willing Executioners). Maybe the storm just hasn't broken yet?
Rating: 5
Summary: A superb critique, rigorously empirically grounded
Comment: Professor Novick has written a superb critique of the extent to which an preoccupation with the Holocaust dominates American-Jewish organizational agendas and priorities, along with a rigorous historical account of how we got here. This is really a book which should be read by all Jews who care at all about the activities of those organizations that purport to speak for the American Jewish community--and indeed, by all Jews who are concerned about American Jewish culture and society.
I'm afraid that Jew haters will find a certain amount here that will be useful to their cause.
A determination not to write anything that might potentially provide ammunition to Jew haters would only lead to a paralysis that prevented one from writing anything about Jews. Rest assured that Novick, a secularist Jew and University of Chicago historian, is the farthest thing one could imagine from a Holocaust denier. He quite properly dismisses them as "a tiny band of cranks, kooks, and misfits". Historians do not need to concern themselves with refuting Holocaust deniers any more than they would need to concern themselves with refuting Civil War deniers, slavery deniers, Roman Empire deniers, or flat-earthers.
Rating: 2
Summary: Propaganda varies with the times
Comment: For an historian, Novick seems to be little interested in real history, but is rather fascinated by the ephemeral wish and wash of the propagandized masses. This book describes in exhausting detail how Americans, Jews and Gentile, have changed their perception over time of THE assumed genocide. Such a heterogeneous lot, needless to report, have reactions all over the ball-park.
More interestingly, he shows how the shifts that have occurred over time have been driven mostly by the concerns of national Jewish organizations to present an image to the gentiles that is deemed suitable for their current purposes. Immediately after the war their concern was to present Jews as a successful heroic people, getting on with their lives, and turning the desert green. Later on it was used by them to justify Israel's aggressive wars of occupation. Then, in all the rage for identity politics, with its requisite displays of historical victimization, to out-victim every other ethnie. Finally, most despicably, to "draw lessons" for school-children, suitable for bumper-stickers.
Novick's language describing all this is scholarly and temperate, but sometimes has a discernible edge. However, his talent as an historian and writer is lamentably wasted. He has produced, analogously speaking, a 400 page monograph on how the public's perception of alien abduction has changed since Goddard's invention of rockets. He describes how some have used their alien abduction to show how brave they are, surviving and going on with their lives. Some have used it in a campaign to accuse the government of a cover-up in which all of the uninvolved, un-abducted are complicit. And others have used it as a vehicle to go on the lecture circuit, write books of nonsense, and bring in some cash.
Perhaps most interesting is his discussion of the trend of organized Jewry toward making the holocaust a theological event, beyond any rational historical discussion or revision, as an ineffable, unique, illustration of the Jews' special relation to God. He disapproves of this, of course, but recognizes its inevitability.
A remarkable omission in the book is his almost total neglect of the story of how the holocaust is used in the eternal efforts of lawyers and other greedy organization men to successfully extract billions of dollars from the gentiles, mostly enriching themselves, and sullying the memories of the victims. Their essential argument: my suffering is unique and therefore greater than yours, so give me some money--you'll feel better. The silence around this phenomenon is thunderous.
One cannot be but a little disappointed in this otherwise praiseworthy effort to examine a modern delusion and its effects on the public psyche and politic. It would have been interesting to read here an account of how the legend itself has changed over the years, mostly due to the diligent efforts of real historians, who have gradually approached the truth with its revisions in the number of victims, the recognition that Dachau and Buchenwald were not extermination camps, and the discrediting of Simon Wiesenthal's hyperbolic tales of soap manufacture.
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Title: Popular Culture and the Shaping of Holocaust Memory in America (Samuel and Althea Stroum Lectures in Jewish Studies) by Alan Mintz ISBN: 029598161X Publisher: University of Washington Press Pub. Date: 01 October, 2001 List Price(USD): $18.95 |
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Title: Selling the Holocaust : From Auschwitz to Schindler; How History is Bought, Packaged and Sold by Tim Cole ISBN: 0415928133 Publisher: Routledge Pub. Date: September, 2000 List Price(USD): $17.95 |
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Title: Indelible Shadows: Film and the Holocaust by Annette Insdorf ISBN: 0521016304 Publisher: Cambridge University Press Pub. Date: 01 December, 2002 List Price(USD): $25.00 |
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Title: Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen ISBN: 0679772685 Publisher: Vintage Books USA Pub. Date: 01 February, 1997 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
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Title: The Holocaust in American Film (Judaic Traditions in Literature, Music, and Art) by Judith E. Doneson ISBN: 0815629265 Publisher: Syracuse University Press Pub. Date: 01 February, 2002 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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