The Holocaust in American Life

A prizewinning historian offers a groundbreaking look at the changing fortunes of Holocaust memory in America and provocatively questions the prominent role it now plays in our political and cultural life.

In recent years the Holocaust has become an important and prominent symbol in American life. It is a cornerstone of how Jews understand themselves and would have others understand them as well as a moral reference point for all Americans, embodied by Washington's Holocaust Museum, now a national shrine and the repository of lessons all must learn.

While ordinarily historical memories are most vivid in the immediate aftermath of events and fade with the passage of time, in the case of the Holocaust the reverse has been true. During the decades following World War II the Holocaust was not much talked about -- even by American Jews. Historian Peter Novick explores with piercing insight the reasons for this long silence, describing the impact of new cold war alliances and Jews' desire not to be seen by their fellow Americans as victims. He recounts the events and decisions that in later decades moved the Holocaust from the margins of American life to the center, including the desire of Jews to define what made them distinctive and the search for moral ground on which increasingly divided Americans could stand. What, Novick boldly asks, are the costs -- for Jews and for all Americans -- of making the Holocaust a defining symbol? Are there really "lessons of the Holocaust" as many presume? A path-breaking book, The Holocaust in American Life is sure to be widely discussed and hotly debated.

Peter Novick is professor of history at the University of Chicago. He is the author of The Resistance Versus Vichy and That Noble Dream: The Objectivity Question and the American Historical Profession, which won the American Historical Association's prize for the best book of the year in American history.

"In this meticulously researched and vigorously argued book, Peter Novick performs a courageous and much needed task: he charts the fascinating history of the postwar response to the Holocaust, and asks how that event has to come to occupy its seemingly central place in the American psyche. Written with candor and sensitivity, "The Holocaust in American Life" is a work that, in its very skepticism, goes a long way to reclaim the authentic meanings of the Holocaust from the pieties and politics of memory, which only serve to obscure its tragic truths. An important and thought-provoking work." -Eva Hoffman, author of Shtetl: The Life and Death of a Small Town and the World of Polish Jews