Jewish History 14: 245–251, 2000.

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Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1999.∗ The Nazis fought two wars in World War II. The war to take over the world, they lost. But the war to make Europe almost “Judenrein”, they won. The major thesis of Novick’s fascinating account of the politics of collective memory is that the emphasis in the USA has moved from memorializing the war against the Allies to memorializing the war against the Jews. Novick regrets this development, and his regrets form the thrust of his study. The sociology of the reception of the holocaust is now an academic cottage industry.1 But in a refreshing, and very American, departure, Novick never once uses the word that most of his European and Israeli colleagues consider de rigeur, namely “instrumentalization.” It never seems to occur to Novick that memory might be pure and use-less. It seems natural and right to him that the formation of collective memory should be an arena of political contestation – that it should be a place where different groups with different narratives compete over what should be the nation’s central symbols. What Novick deplores is not that memory is put to use, but that it is put to bad use. He deplores what he sees as the banality of the Holocaust story in American society. He compares it unfavorably to the way the Holocaust is remembered in Germany, Israel, Poland, or France. Novick does not want to explain or describe the holocaust itself, but rather the “concept of the Holocaust.” Prior to the 1960s, he claims, there was no “Holocaust.” There was simply a small “h” holocaust which encompassed all the mass killings of World War II, and included the mass murder of the Jews. Novick argues that, like “child abuse,” “spousal abuse,” and other campaigns for the recognition of victims, the campaign to recognize the “Holocaust” has a visible history. According to Novick, all these histories were vitally connected to the changing status of victimhood – to its transformation from something to be ashamed of to a sign of grace and moral righteousness. And he argues further that this was tied to the rise of “identity politics” in America, which shifted the focus of political rhetoric from universal concerns to the particularistic claims of groups and subcultures. It was during these decades, when the “voicing of pain” replaced the voicing of interests in American politics, that World War II made the transition from a holocaust to “The Holocaust.” Novick argues this represented the assertion by the American Jewish establishment that it represented an ethnic group that had a special moral claim based on having suffered the ultimate victimization.

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Novick traces the emergence of this claim to a literature which started appearing in the US in the 1970s. It accused the American government of having “abandoned the Jews,” and accused the American Jewish community of having been indifferent to the suffering of Holocaust victims when they arrived in America. Novick thinks this account is ahistorical and tries to set the earlier attitudes in context. It is true, he agrees, that the mass killings of the Jews were a marginal consideration for most observers during the war years and immediately thereafter. But, he argues, it wasn’t because they were indifferent towards the Jews so much as that they perceived those events against the background of a global war that killed between fifty and sixty million people. Nazi atrocities were originally interpreted in a universalistic fashion. Jews were considered one of the many victims of Nazism. It is also true that after the war, there still wasn’t much of a public fuss made over camp survivors. The literature that Novick attacks argued that this silence, and the garrulousness that “finally” started 25 years later, was the result of the original trauma and the consequent “return of the repressed.” Novick, like most current scholars, rejects this theory and, like his colleagues, looks instead for political reasons and interests. In the case of America, he argues that the reasons lie in the end of World War II and the beginning of the Cold War. America did a 180 degree turn with the Cold War. Its former ally, the Soviet Union, became its enemy, and its former enemy, Germany, became its new ally. The galvanizing evil was no longer “Nazism” but “totalitarianism,” a theory that argued that the essence of Nazism lived on in the Soviet Union (and a theory that would have been undermined to the extent that the essence of Nazism came to be seen as German hatred of the Jews). According to Novick, official Jewry, not wanting to be accused of not being loyal cold warriors, consciously decided to downplay the German-Jewish story of World War II. Novick traces how the story of Jews and the Holocaust steadily took predominance in public notice over all other aspects of the war. Pivotal points in his narrative are the Eichmann trial of 1961, and the Israeli wars of 1967 and 1973, during which the Holocaust became an effective weapon for defending Israel in American political forums. Novick argues that while Israel might have been the initial mover of Holocaust consciousness, it was the emergence of Jewish particularistic identity that moved the Holocaust to center stage in American consciousness. The notion of “uniqueness” is central to his analysis. Again, Novick is not interested in whether the holocaust or “The Holocaust” actually was unique or not. He wants to analyze the sociological meaning of the claim for “uniqueness.” And he ends up accusing the official representatives of American Jewry of using uniqueness in order to claim preeminence. Even though there were dissenting voices (some people argued that the claim for “uniqueness” was a distasteful secular version of chosenness), the holocaust soon became the defining collective memory of American Jews. But, Novick points out, “absolute” and “unique” victimization became the main marker of Jewish identity at just the time that antisemitism was entering into decline in America and the last barriers to Jewish advancement were being lifted. The holocaust became the central Jewish American narrative at just the time when the Jews were becoming the most

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successful minority group in the United States. This stark contrast is Novick’s main evidence for his claim that the argument that the holocaust was unique was primarily a successful strategy for group advancement in the era of identity politics. Novick clearly prefers the universal terms of an earlier time, when the holocaust was something that happened to the world rather than just to the Jews. He deplores the Holocaust curricula of many schools, denies that there are lessons to be learned from the Holocaust, and is repelled by the sacralization of the Holocaust represented by figures like Elie Wiesel and institutions such as the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C. In this, Novick joins many other analysts of memory, who, having examined how collective memory is formed in real time, and having isolated moments of transformation, can’t help themselves from looking back with nostalgia on the earlier form, despite their protestations of objectivity. A very similar thing happened to Pierre Nora.2 He spent his book carefully distinguishing between “lived milieux,” or communities of memory, and “realms” of memory, or sets of signs used to communicate those memories to those who had not lived them. They both started out as necessary moments of a single process. But by the end of the book, Nora couldn’t help himself from portraying memorialization as a pale image of living memory. Or as he finally summed it up: “We speak so much of memory, because there is so little of it left.” In a similar way, Novick clearly privileges the universal memory that was dominant in the 1940s and 1950s over the particularistic memories of American Jews from the 1970s on. He protests repeatedly that he doesn’t think one is more authentic than another. It’s just that he thinks a universal memory of the holocaust is more useful. Or maybe more dignified. This brings us to the strange and central omission of Novick’s book. How can an author who is an avowed partisan of the universalization of the holocaust, and who has titled his book “The Holocaust in American Life,” entirely ignore its meaning for non-Jewish Americans, i.e., for 97% of the US population? Novick not only focuses exclusively on its meaning for American Jews, his focus is even narrower than that – he focuses exclusively on its meaning for Jewish organizational heads and intellectuals. At first glance, you might think this would bias his inquiry towards only seeing the particularistic meanings of the holocaust. And you would be right. Novick has produced a detailed account of an ethnic group’s ideology. But he has systematically missed all the ways in which this development has maintained or increased the universalization of the terms in which America understands the holocaust – a universalism that is striking in a comparative perspective, when the American discourse is compared to the German or the Israeli. There are two reasons that the particularization of the holocaust among the Jewish elite has actually contributed to the universalization of the holocaust among Americans as a whole. The first reason is that the campaign to make the holocaust a central element in American life was such a success. Yes, it arrogated to the Jews a privileged role as victims. But it gave to America a much odder privileged role as witness. And since the politics of victimization are also the politics of identification, non-Jewish Americans have come to identify en masse with the holocaust in a way that strikes both Israelis and Germans as unsettling. Non-Jewish Americans have come to count themselves among the primary keepers of the flame of remembrance. Which is why

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they have holocaust a museum in a country where there are no camps and where Jews are a tiny minority. When Novick runs into this fact, he not only misses its significance, he treats it with disdain. He writes with obvious distaste of how the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum is a “christianization” of the Holocaust. He compares it to the “stations of the cross.” But leaving aside the justice of that remark – the stations of the cross are artifacts of early Christian tour guides, and lord knows Jewish tour groups to Israel have their own parallel route of sites – why isn’t such secular christianization of the Holocaust exactly what he wants? It is the de-judaization of the Holocaust. That is what universalization is. And secular Christianity, by and large, is what the West means by secularism. Remove religion from the holocaust, invite non-Jews – i.e., secular Christians – to consider it vitally their own, and this is what you get. It’s hard to see how you could get anything else. So Novick is quite right that the establishment of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum at the center America’s symbolic life – the Washington Mall – demonstrates that the Holocaust has become part of the American secular religion. But he misses that since most of America is not Jewish, this is in itself a massive act of universalization. Of course it could be that Novick’s real enemy isn’t “uniqueness,” and that his preferred outcome isn’t universalization. It might be that he is against secular sacralization per se. But such sacralization is an unavoidable by-product of collective memory. If something becomes indelibly inscribed on the identity of a group, ethnic or national, then it is necessarily ringed round with taboos – and that is the simplest definition of the sacred. But something cannot become part of the civic religion without taking on an air of the sacred. So if it is sacralization that is distasteful, the only alternative is collective forgetfulness. In the 1950s, as Novick lays out quite brilliantly, we had universalization without sacralization – and without collective memory. Instead we had individual memory, and collective silence. The second way in which this sacralization of the holocaust led to the universalization of the terms in America understood it stems from the end of the cold war. Novick is quite right in arguing that the ideology of the heads of Jewish organizations fitted in perfectly with the needs of the American foreign policy elite during the cold war period. During the cold war, the “uniqueness” of the Holocaust warded off human rights campaigners who wanted the US to stop supporting repressive regimes. The rhetorical position of the human rights campaigners was that US clients were committing, and that the US was supporting, genocide. But the doctrine that the Holocaust was unique, and that it was wrong and shameful to compare anything to it, decisively foreclosed that line of argument, and the ramparts were defended by the representatives of the ultimate victims. For, as they clearly saw, genocide is the universalization of the holocaust. It is essential to the concept that the holocaust is but one instance of a class of (by definition comparable) phenomena. And the U.N. Declaration Against Genocide, where the idea first took shape, was the product of precisely the period when, as Novick correctly argues, the universal understanding of the holocaust was as yet unchallenged.

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The simplest amendment to Novick’s account is that the anti-communism that justified intervention during the cold war had to be replaced with something after its end. And in this new context, human rights seems to be fitting the bill. But human rights is genocide taken to one more degree of universalization. The idea of genocide contains the admonition that a moral world cannot stand idly by. Human rights, which have their modern legal origins in the same set of 1948 UN declarations, are tied up in practice with the even stronger assertion that the holocaust is a slippery slope – that every act of ethnic repression, if not checked, might prepare the way for the next holocaust. In addition, if one takes the UN human rights and genocide conventions seriously – as one must, if one is using them as a warrant to bomb people – then the development of this doctrine leads inexorably to the generalization of genocide beyond mass murder. The 1948 Convention On Genocide defines mass expulsion as a form of a genocide, and widespread cultural suppression likewise, since both can conceivably be the means of wiping out a "way of life.” It was largely on this basis – that expulsions equal genocide – that NATO claimed it was factually certain that genocide was occurring in Kosovo. And that in turn laid the basis for the first intervention using the convention as a warrant. When compared to Germany or Israel, where the uniqueness of the holocaust has much deeper roots, America was originally, and is once again, the land of the universalized holocaust. And how could it be otherwise, in a country which was neither the victim nor the perpetrator of the Holocaust? But these twenty five years were not merely an exception. It’s not only that the exception has lasted almost as long as the rule. It’s that the campaign that Novick describes has left a lasting effect. In the first place, the holocaust may have been understood in universal terms in both the 50s and the 90s, but in these latter days, it is central rather than marginal to American public discourse. And through America, it has become central to the discourse of the world. Both of these results are the unintended but world-historical effects of the in-group jockeying that Novick so finely documents. And in the second place, this twenty five year period has put a peculiar stamp on the specifically American understanding of the holocaust. What the Jewish American establishment has succeeded in accomplishing is that the holocaust is never universalized for the past. The overwhelmingly dominant narrative in America is that holocaust was a crime perpetrated against the Jews. Even when other groups, like gays and gypsies, are included in the litany of holocaust victims, their presence doesn’t dilute the Jewishness of the catastrophe; they are simply unfortunates dragged into its wake. But in the immediate future, the holocaust is universalized. Almost anyone might be the victim of the “next” holocaust. This stands out in stark reversal to Germany, where controversial comparisons are all about the past, and where assertions about a new holocaust in the immediate future have also been interpreted as stalking-horse attempts to relativize the past. This explains the striking contrast of why, during the Cold War, the “comparability of the holocaust” in Germany was the cause of the Right, at the same time that in America it was the cause of the human rights Left. The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum perfectly embodies the American split perspective. The permanent exhibit of the museum is about the past suffering of the

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Jews, and only the Jews. But the special exhibits – which, like all special exhibits, draw special attention – are about non-Jewish victims suffering somewhere in the world today. Like a huge camera obscura superimposing the image of the past onto the screen of the present, the museum is a universalization machine. And when Elie Wiesel stood next to President Clinton in front of the Museum exhibit on Bosnia and said he couldn’t sleep at night thinking about their suffering, the two sides of the narrative reached their climax. It was a perfect demonstration of how the particularist discourse of 1967–1991 had been transformed into the universalist discourse of the post-Cold War era while still preserving a privileged place for the original Jewish victims. Here the ultimate victim wielded his unique moral authority to attempt to shame the country that considers its foreign policy uniquely moral to stop the new holocaust of non-Jews. Here the chief representative of the American Jewish Holocaust could confirm himself as the world’s true moral authority by setting high moral standards for real world action. And he could preserve that authority by always setting them slightly higher than “mere realpolitik” could ever meet. While on the other hand the Americans, having erected a monument to this moral authority, now had someone to vouch for their chosenness, for the fact that their actions, unlike those of all other countries in history, were motivated first and foremost by moral concerns. If the two groups – the Jewish organizational elite and the American foreign policy elite – needed each other during the Cold War, they may need each other now even more. Their moral claims are if anything even more ambitious, and their need for mutual reinforcement and support all the greater. There are four ways the holocaust can be universalized: as far as the victims are concerned in the past (was it the Jews plus a supporting cast, or many different peoples that suffered?); as far as the victims are concerned in the future (is the lesson Never Again for the Jews, or Never Again for Anyone?); as far as the perpetrators are concerned in the past (were the Nazis uniquely evil, or were they only different in quantity from other mass murderers?); and as far as the subjects are concerned in the present (who remembers? I.e., who has the right to pronounce the truth of the holocaust?) What has happened in America due to the 25 years of politics that Novick lays out so clearly is that the Holocaust past is now considered entirely in particularistic terms: the Nazis were uniquely bad, the Jews uniquely innocent victims, and everyone else in the story played a secondary role. But the Holocaust future is now considered in absolutely universal terms: it can happen to anyone, at anytime, and everyone is responsible. And yet this universality is considered a form of fealty to the holocaust, a way of magnifying its importance rather than diminishing it – a way of making it a moral touchstone, a call to action, and a sign of liberal and patriotic virtue. As Novick might say, this can be put to good or bad use. But it definitely distinguishes the meaning of the Holocaust in America over the last 55 years from the meaning it has had in Israel or Germany. And to that end, Novick’s book has made a very valuable contribution to the comparative sociology of the holocaust.

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Notes * Many thanks to Michael Pollak, with whom I discussed the ideas of this essay. 1. See, for Germany: Mary Fulbrock, German National Identity after the Holocaust (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999); for Israel: Tom Segev, The Seventh Million. The Israelis and the Holocaust (New York: Hill & Wang, 1993); and for France: Henry Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France Since 1944 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), among the by now numerous examples of this literature. 2. Pierre Nora, Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996–1998).

The Academic College of Tel-Aviv-Yaffo

Natan Sznaider