Reflections on Peter Novick's Holocaust in American Life: Two Perspectives.

WHITFIELD, STEPHEN J.

The Holocaust in American Life. By PETER NOVICK. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999.

Numbering in the millions, the victims died as the consequence of a deliberate state policy rather than as subjects of the caprice of nature or as the accidental targets of warfare. Ghasdy in scale, the catastrophe which the regime inflicted served no rational purpose. Those who suffered and died were not opponents of the regime, nor were they armed; and neither women nor children were spared. The perpetrators were dedicated and merciless members of a party which exercised all the resources and prerogatives of a state, and in its name crimes were committed which went largely unreported and which were ignored at the time. Those responsible for this extermination of human life were unpunished. Though the precise numbers of the dead are still unknown, the estimates range from thirty million to fifty million. They constituted the body count of the worst famine ever recorded, perpetrated between 1959 and 1961 in the People's Republic of China In one province alone (Sichuan), between 1957 and 1961, more people died of hunger than did the Jews who perished in the Holocaust. [1]

Yet in at least one respect, the Great Leap Forward does not resemble the Final Solution. Very few Americans are aware of the enormous scale of the atrocities which Mao Tse-tung committed, annals of horror which include millions of deaths during the Cultural Revolution of 1966-76. The mass murders for which Chinese Communism bears responsibility still have not registered in public consciousness in the United States, where neither mourning relatives nor others--publicists, political activists, religious leaders--try to arouse their fellow citizens to comprehend such waste of human life. The Communists' devastation of China does not stirmarchers to cry in the streets of America: "Never Again." Mao's successors have said, in effect: Never Remember. They have expressed no atonement; they have blocked any effort to seek justice. And no American constituency has even been mobilized to memorialize the staggering number of victims of this socially-engineered famine. They have as a result continued to suffer oblivion.

How and why did the Holocaust become the historic signature of evil of the twentieth century--and perhaps of any century? And how did the Holocaust become "virtually the only common denominator of American Jewish identity" (7)? These are the sorts of questions which spurred historian Peter Novick to write The Holocaust in American Life, and which a reading of his book invites as well. It was published in the summer of 1999, and was very widely reviewed--in large part because it constitutes an act of demystification, an effort to analyze an approach to the past which has been suffused with an aura of sanctification. To a topic which has evoked the most powerful and painful of emotions (or which, paradoxically, requires numbness to stare into the abyss), Novick has brought detachment and skepticism.

His subject is not the Holocaust, but rather how it has been acknowledged, defined, and spread as an event which requires public remembrance. His object is to explain how one terrifying phenomenon came to dominate the discussion in America of political evil. That centrality could not have been predicted in 1945, or 1955, or even 1965. No one could have imagined that a museum on the Mall in the nation's capital would be built to encourage reflection on that evil. Almost in the shadow of a Capitol which was itself built with slave labor, that museum is designed to force a confrontation with what had happened on another continent, to foreigners. Yet the more the Holocaust has receded in time, the more overt have its claims upon the nation's memory become. These are among the paradoxes which haunt the retrospective fate of European Jewry. These are among the puzzles which Novick claims largely inspired him to write The Holocaust in American Life.

Because it seems to have been reviewed by every major journal, and because its thesis has been discussed in just about every Jewish magazine (including this one), his book needs to be only briefly summarized here: Consciousness of the Holocaust did not become central to Jewish communal life any earlier than the 1960s. Indifference and omission were in no small measure due to the imperatives of the Cold War, which entailed an emphasis on the crimes of Communism rather than of Nazism and which soon reinstated West Germany into our side. But by the end of the 1960's, as the intensity of the Cold War receded, as a few survivors began to tell their stories to increasingly attentive audiences, the Holocaust became an integral part of the national conversation, with political ramifications as well as numerous eruptions within popular culture as well as journalism and scholarship. What the Nazis inflicted upon the Jews often came to be understood as "unique," a historical and moral disaster so fully embedded in both general American and Jewish-American discourse that significant misinterpretation have resulted. The "lessons" of the Holocaust have been misconstrued, its meaning abused; and its evocative power has been put in the service of dubious political objectives. Novick does not pay much attention to the Holocaust as an event which began in 1933 or 1939 and ended in 1945. What he investigates is how Americans-mostly Jews-have thought about the destruction of European Jewry, and how that thinking was shaped, influenced, disseminated and distorted. In two ways, then, Novick's brief title is something of a misnomer: the response of gentile America is not emphasized; and the freshest and fullest research the author conducted has been lavished on Jewish organizational archives. Like That Noble Dream, his 1988 study of historical "objectivity," Novick does not diagnose disembodied ideas, but implants intellectual work within institutional settings and broader historical contexts. The Holocaust in American Life demonstrat es the degree to which remembrance has been enlisted to shore up faltering Jewish identity in the United States. With the decline of ethnic distinctiveness, with the gradual disappearance of cohesive working-class neighborhoods and kinship and friendship networks, with the failure of synagogues to extract membership dues from the majority of those who identify themselves to pollsters as Jews, with the messiness of Israeli politics-especially after Likud took office in 1977-undermining the sentimental simplifications of pro-Zionism, the American Jewish civil service increasingly attached itself to the Holocaust as entwining a fragmented and assimilated community into one.

In this enterprise, such organizations were so successful that by 1989 the Shoah ranked first as a marker of identity for American Jews. Second in shaping their sense of themselves were the two High Holidays, followed by domestic antisemitism. Chugging along in distant fourth place was God. [1] The largest collection of Judaica in Washington is assembled at the B'nai B'rith Klutznick National Jewish Museum. Last year it welcomed about 50,000 visitors--compared to the two million which the nearby U. S. Holocaust Memorial Museum had to absorb. To cite a smaller example, the library of the synagogue to which I belong has announced that books about the Holocaust would be shelved in their own section, which implies that the subject is more integral--or more in demand--than engagement with the formalities of faith itself. Whatever the role of Jewish officials in instituting these sorts of disparities, popular culture did the rest. That was especially true of NBC's miniseries, entitled Holocaust(1978), which convey ed "more information about the Holocaust...to more Americans over those four nights than over all the preceding thirty years" (209), and of Schindler's List(1993), which implicitly corrected for many more millions around the globe the opinion of General George Patton--expressed in a September 22,1945 interview--that "this Nazi thing is just like a Democratic and Republican election fight." [2] In a standard text devoted to modern European history, H. Stuart Hughes' 502-page Contemporary Europe, the 1961 edition needed only 2 1/2 sentences on the extermination of the Jews, nestled in a paragraph on racial policy under Nazi occupation. Mentioned only in passing in Western history courses in the 1960s, the Holocaust would not be treated in so cursory a fashion only a couple of decades later.

Was this transformation the consequence of a conspiracy? Such an accusation has been leveled against The Holocaust in American "Ultimately, Novick turns to conspiracy theories," Hillel Levine charged in The New Leader. "Without presenting very much evidence, he attributes the most significant rise in Holocaust consciousness to the media moguls, print and celluloid, on both coasts"--thus elongating the "generations of anti-Semites" who have attributed corporate choices to the decisiveness of Jewish origins. Henry L. Feingold has Novick "believing that Jewish communal leadership conspired to instrumentalize the Holocaust, to use it to gain some kind of income the world rewards for those it has victimized." American Jewry were thus "manipulated by its communal leadership." Jack Fischel even warned readers of Hadassah Magazine that Novick's book "comes close to sharing the ... conspiratorial beliefs" of Holocaust deniers. [3] This charge of paranoia is spurious. Not only does the author himself explicitly repudi ate the notion that media-savvy Jews manipulated the Holocaust to the center of American consciousness; he insists that Jewish efficacy in influencing public opinion is how pluralism is supposed to operate. Jewish defense agencies are intended to help shape national attitudes. Were the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee and the American Jewish Congress to fail to do so, their officials should be fired. Conspiracy is not a term Novick uses and its deployment as criticism is unfair.

Since his book examines the evolution of Jewish public opinion, there can no more be a conspiracy between Jewish leaders, whose task is to persuade and inspire their audiences in the marketplace of ideas, and their constituents than a conspiracy by Ford Motor Company or Coca-Cola can be formed to sell automobiles or soda pop in the marketplace of consumer products. Sometimes, in the latter instance, there is abject failure. Think of the Edsel and of New Coke. But the relationship is to a degree reciprocal. That also means that the consumer is not quite sovereign; the forces of persuasion can marshal formidable resources. On the playing-field of ideas, they usually don't bubble up spontaneously from the masses, but are shaped. That is precisely the task of leadership in a democratic society, and there is nothing sinister about it.

There is nevertheless something problematic about Novick's portrayal of the communal spokesmen and officials who have made the Shoah so urgent. His book tends to show them in the worst possible light. They are belittled as foolish, obtuse, narrow, willing to serve as unthinking conduits of Zionist propaganda in the United States, and of the geopolitical interests of Israel, about which Novick can find very, very little good to say. Not that he has to invent instances of misguided responses; indeed, his book is sprinkled with much evidence of folly. During the Second World War, the editor of the Jewish Publication Society rejected manuscripts on the camps, in order to "call a halt to terrorizing the Jewish population in this country-the last Jewish population which still retains its self-confidence." In 1964, when the staging of Rolf Hochhuth's The Deputy threatened to weaken inter-faith relations, an ADL official dashed off a pamphlet which the agency distributed in behalf of the National Catholic Welfare Co nference. The pamphlet defended the silence and passivity of Pope Plus XII during the murder of the very people which had produced his Savior. Then there is theodicy, which is the antonym of common sense. But could Rabbi Irving Greenberg, who became the director of the President's Commission on the Holocaust, really have described divine absence during the Holocaust as follows: "In Europe, He failed to do His task" (quoted on 37, 150)? At least Greenberg did not describe the ordeal of the Jewish people, as did Pope John Paul II near Mauthausen, as "a gift to the world." [4]

Indeed, however poorly Jewish spokesmen come off, Christians fare even worse. Consider their reaction to the Eichmann trial in 1961, when "for the first time ... what we now call the Holocaust was presented to the American public as an entity in its own distinct from Nazi barbarism in general." And with the trial in Jerusalem of the former Obersturmbannfuehrer S. S., "the word 'Holocaust' first became firmly attached to the murder of European Jewry" (133). Novickis especially effective in showing how dimly and how resentfully the Catholic press treated the trial. The National Review, for instance, vehemently opposed this "studied attempt to cast suspicion upon Germany.... It is all there: bitterness, distrust, the refusal to forgive, the advancement of Communist aims." The trial revealed that "there are still some influential people around who-like Skylockof old-demand their pound of flesh," opined The Tablet. "Forgiveness is not in their makeup.... For these warped minds there is no such word as pardon." Th e past is past, the Jesuit America insisted, because "a sound and healthy world community cannot rest solidly on fear and the spirit of vengeance" (quoted on 129, 130, 313). Hannah Arendt's analysis of the defendant became famous for having diverged sharply from the prosecution's portrait of an ideologically driven antisemite. After she claimed that Eichmann had instead been a conscientious and loyal bureaucrat, Rabbi Joachim Prinz, the president of the American Jewish Congress, countered that her Eichmann in Jerusalem offered a sympathetic study of a "sweet, misguided man" (quoted on 135). (Then why hang him, which Arendt favored?)

Novick does not cut Jewish officialdom much slack in tracing how it ensured that the Holocaust would dominate the national awareness of historic atrocities overseas. His stance may explain the wariness--if not hostility--of so many reviews of the book, especially in Jewish publications. Their praise has been gingerly at best. (One exception is the Forward's Alan Mintz, who hailed The Holocaust in American Life for exhibiting "genuine critical intelligence that is grounded in wide learning and in a firm grasp of its complex subject." Novick "has done his job very well indeed." [5] A number of reviewers have tended to locate the faults of this book, however, without acknowledging its virtues, such as the usefulness of its chronology of ideological change, Novick's assured exploitation of an enormous body of material, his unflagging barrage of mordant and biting insights, and his informative demolition of myths. (One example is his account of how, thanks to the culture of complaint, six million victims got expa nded into eleven million.) This book is a remarkable compendium of instances of shoddy thinking, and against it Novick has offered an exemplary and bracing gesture of resistance.

Several reviewers have missed the great historical value of his effort to show exactly how representation of the Shoah was manifested and confronted, and to speculate how this kind of collective memory took the forms which it did. In Commentary, for example, David G. Roskies could not specify even one aspect of this book to praise, except for conceding that on the question of the salience of Zionism in the crystallization of group memory, Novick was "not wholly wrong." Yet consciousness of the Holocaust is needed to link the present to the past, Roskies warned, since collective memory is essential to communal survival. Otherwise American Jews "will be even more bereft of their own history and memory than they already are." [6] Yet oddly enough the reviewer could not take the obvious next step, which is to recommend The Holocaust in American Life as a way to understand the formation of that history and memory. This is a book which, for all the attention it has received, has been under-appreciated, which is no t to say that it lacks flaws.

Not arbitrarily, the term which ends Novick's title is "life" rather than "thought." His book rather surprisingly slights the domain of intellectual history. Almost no serious text--historical, philosophical, religious, or social scientific--is considered at any length, even though those who stoked the obsession which Novick deplores so often wrote with authority and resonance on the Holocaust. Roskies noted the absence of any mention of Lucy Dawidowicz's The War against the Jews (1975), which was widely acclaimed and admired, whereas Raul Hilberg had published The Destruction of European Jewry too early. In 1961 his book even needed a subsidy. Exactly a decade earlier, Arendt published The Origins of Totalitarianism, which Novick mentions only in a brief endnote. Yet her work was not only an early and abiding achievement in grappling with "the burden of our times" (as it was entitled in GreatBritain). Arendt's book would seem to approximate what Novick might have been expected to endorse: the persecution an d extermination of European Jewry is analyzed within the context of the history of the nation-state, the rise of racist and imperialist movements and policies in the heart of Europe, the fragility of the ideal of human rights, the triumph of ideology over both reason and common sense, the pervasiveness of a nihilism which sought to ensure the superfluity of human life itself.

Arendt hardly neglected the terrible fate of her fellow Jews; one of the three sections of The Origins of Totalitarianism is, after all, entitled "Anti-Semitism." But the larger political texture in which the Final Solution was embedded remained in the foreground; and by locating and insisting upon parallels with Soviet totalitarianism under Stalin (then still alive), Arendt also demonstrated that the imperatives of the Cold War need not blunt interest in Nazi genocide. She made the doom of European Jewry central to her conception of totalitarianism, without in any way neglecting or minimizing the depredations of Stalinism. Her magisterial volume showed that the immediate pressures of anti-Communism need not have short-circuited concern for what had befallen European Jewry a decade earlier.

Indeed Novick's speculation that the Cold War put one form of totalitarianism at the center of public consciousness, and thus minimized what came to be called the Holocaust, could be reversed. A need to come to terms with the Shoah might, just about as logically, have activated forces which anti-Communism might have intensified. It was Elie Wiesel whose report on the desperation of Soviet Jewry, The Jews of Silence (1966), influenced the movement--in the United States, in Canada, in Britain and elsewhere--to "save" Soviet Jewry. That struggle, which was often animated by an awareness of what rescuers had not done in the 1930s and 1940s, slowed down the diplomacy of detente. Those who championed the cause of Soviet Jewry aligned themselves with some of the most fervent Cold Warriors ensconced in both political parties. In rebuttal Novick might argue that such a cause was pursued well after the anxieties of the Cold War had subsided, and he would be correct. But even in the 1950s, those nations which were larg ely exempt from the anti-Communist fevers which had swept through the United States were not the sites of Holocaust consciousness. France, Italy and Great Britain, for example, did not precede the United States in putting the destruction of European Jewry near the center of recognition of why the Second World War was a "good war." Had Alain Resnais' Night and Fog (1955) actually mentioned Jews, it would have seemed almost disorienting; and not until 1985 would Claude Lanzmann's Shoah be released. If Cold War considerations tended to blunt curiosity about the Holocaust, why did they not arouse opposition to the Communist regime that through famine killed perhaps ten times the number of Chinese as the Jews whom the Third Reich slaughtered?

No reader of That Noble Dream, which brilliantly recounts the rise and fall of the ideal of historical disinterestedness, would have expected, in Novick's sub-sequent volume, so little sustained analysis of any particular primary source. The only exception whose provenance is the Holocaust is The Diary of a Young Girl, which became a Broadway play and then a Twentieth Century-Fox film, both entitled The Diary of Anne Frank In assessing her posthumous impact, Novick is characteristically eager to present as problematic what others have elevated to an aura of sanctification. He insists that the diarist was herself so removed from normative Judaism that some literary scholars (such as Lawrence Langer and Robert Alter) have now come to emphasize that distance, claiming that, as a canonical Jewish document, The Diary of a Young Girl is misleading. Cynthia Ozick has even suspected that, had the diary been lost, understanding of the catastrophe would have been enhanced. (Confinement to that secret annex at 263 Prin sengracht was comfortable compared to what happened to nearly all Jews in the east.)

But Novick, in his zest to minimize Anne Frank's Jewishness (and thus to expose a certain hollowness in the Holocaust fixation of American Jewry), is unfair. The diarist had joined a Zionist youth group but quit, he writes. Yet she did dream of visiting Palestine, even if (unlike her older sister Margot) she did not express an intention to live there. True, her diary omits mention of a seder, and does indeed record the celebration of St. Nicholas Day. But Chanukah was honored, as Novick neglects to point out; and she did hope that "it might even be our religion from which the world and all peoples learn good." And while he cites the diarist's fervent wish, were she to survive the war, to become Dutch, her remarkable essentialist credo is not quoted: "We can never become just Netherlanders, or just English, or just ... representatives of any other country for that matter, we will always remain Jews, but we want to, too." [7] This is an echo of the Covenant which Novick failed to hear.

Another weakness of The Holocaust in American Life was located by historian Tony Judt, who complained that the book does not specify "just how much Holocaust awareness...is appropriate, and in what form." [8] The objection is just. Novick clearly prefers awareness to silence; he notes that in the immediate postwar years, the subject had been wrongly neglected. But nowhere does he indicate what would constitute an undistorted status in the nation's public discourse, or how a proper balance might be struck within Jewish communal life between the affirmative and the memorial, between an historical commitment to understanding how the European Jews lived and a need to recall the planned and organized death of two-thirds of their number. Yet Novick's entire thesis depends upon his sense that, by the last two or three decades of the twentieth century, too much attention had been lavished upon the Final Solution. That view that has long been shared, with fluctuating and varying levels of explicitness, by jewish comm unal leaders as well as academicians, who complain of Jewish Studies courses dwarfed by the unsurpassed popularity among undergraduates of the history of the Holocaust.

Novick's two books demonstrate that not even hindsight is 20/20, since the past opens itself to multiple meanings and conflicting interpretations. But in The Holocaust in American Life, he is even more insistent that very few "lessons" can be learned. "Hier ist kein warum" was what a guard told Primo Levi at Auschwitz, which was in part devoted to a blankness that negates both questions and answers. Can the sheer senselessness of genocide yield hope of satisfying curiosity about the meaning of the Final Solution? No "lesson" which the Holocaust is said to offer, Novick argues, is of much value. Most of whatever the Shoah is supposed to teach, he writes, is "empty, and not very useful," something not so much "drawn from the Holocaust as brought to it" (240, 242). Even the outcry "never again" failed to prevent the establishment of killing fields in the former Yugoslavia and in sub-Saharan Africa in the 1990s. "Holocaust-fixation" (10) may have aroused concern for the unwarranted suffering of anonymous million s, but may also have created a disincentive for effective international action--since no other social catastrophes have seemed as appalling as what ended in 1945. The Genocide Convention which the General Assembly of the United Nations unanimously adopted in 1948 has never been invoked, Novick writes, for "'genocide' was a rhetorical rather than a juridical device" (100-101).

Yet he does not utterly exclude the possibility of some important conclusions which might be drawn from the Shoah. Let me suggest a "lesson" that he ignores, which is the implication for faith. The Holocaust should have shattered belief in a beneficent and all-merciful deity. If there was ever a moment in the history of the Jewish people when it had the right to ask for divine assistance from persecution, if there was ever a time for the Covenant to be upheld and when believers needed to be saved from their oppressors, it was under Nazi occupation. That relief did not come. No wonder that Shiomo Perel, whose story of survival inspired the film Europa, Europa (1991), gave a curt answer to an Israeli interviewer's theological question: "I left my God in Lodz." [9] If proof were ever needed that faith cannot terminate unwarranted agony, what happened in the camps could be cited. Perhaps the least contestable "lesson" of the Holocaust is the ineffectuality of Judaism, which--far from sparing its adherents from t he most unimaginable of torments--only incensed the torturers to become even more cruel. The Jews who had the greatest chance to escape were the least pious, those whose assimilation endowed them with the appearance and manner and language to pass as gentiles. The men and boys who did flee from ghettoes and camps also had to live with the fear that, as descendants of Abraham, circumcision would betray and doom them.

One notorious photograph shows the special fury which Nazis reserved for the observant. German soldiers have just murdered all the brothers of a Jew who is allowed to pray over their corpses, just before the mourner himself is to be killed; and two of the soldiers are shown grinning. The losses sustained by that one Orthodox family were more numerous than in the Boston Massacre of 1770, when, partly because five colonials were killed, a revolution against an empire was sparked. But when far more brutal--inconceivably more brutal--attacks on civilians were perpetrated by Nazi Germany over several years, little outrage was registered. In this respect at least, the standards of civilized behavior had terrifyingly decayed; and though Novick minimizes the influence of guilt in Holocaust consciousness, its rise may be partly due to the realization of so precipitous a decline in human sensitivity.

Because his interpretations are so sharply stated, because his research has been so energetically deployed, this book is bound to determine the course of future research on the subject, even when undertaken by scholars who may not share Novick's political views or his version of Jewish identity. Indeed The Holocaust in American Life is all the more astringent and challenging because of those perspectives and biases. By writing this book, its author has earned the right to play the bad son at the seder, asking what the ritual has to do with him-as a secularist and as a non-Zionist who wants Jewish life to be consecrated to tikkun olam. His readers may be reassured that the bad son still participates in that ritual after all. They may also be unsettled in acknowledging that his participation--and his question--are also necessary.

STEPHEN J. WHITFIELD holds the Max Richter Chair in American Civilization at Brandeis. Among his books are Voices of Jacob, Hands of Esau: Jews in American Life and Thought; American Space, Jewish Time; and A Death in the Delta: The Story of Emmett Till. His essay, "Separation Anxiety: From Founders to Fundamentalists," appeared in the Spring 1995 issue.

NOTES

(1.) Steven M. Cohen, "Jewish Continuity over Judaic Content: The Moderately Affiliated American Jew," in The Americanization of the Jews, edited by Robert M. Seltzer and Norman J. Cohen (New York: New York University Press, 1995), PP. 397, 408.

(2.) Quoted in Dwight Macdonald, Memoirs of a Revolutionist: Essays in Political Criticism (Cleveland: Meridian, 1958), P. 99.

(3.) Hillel Levine, "The Decline of the Incredible," New Leader 82 (June 14-28, 1999): 25; Henry L. Feingold, "The End of Shosh Business?," Jewish Frontier 66 (Summer 1999): 23; Jack Fischel, rev. in Hadassah Magazine 8l (October 1999): 45.

(4.) "John Paul Cites Suffering of Jews," New York Times, June 26, 1988, P. 6.

(5.) Alan Mintz, "Going for 'the Gold Medal in the Victimization Olympics,'" Forward, May 14, 1999, p. 11.

(6.) David G. Roskies, "Group Memory," Commentary 108 (September 1999): 64, 65.

(7.) Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl (New York: Pocket Books, 1953), pp. 186-187.

(8.) Tony Judt, "The Morbid Truth," The New Republic 221 (July 19 & 26, 1999): 38.

(9.) Quoted in Sharon Jedel, "Dual Identity," Jerusalem Post, March 10, 1995, p. 19.