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Instead, he casts the causes of the Holocaust's prominence largely in
pejorative terms: the replacement of integrationists with identity- and
victim-celebrating politics, the rise of Jewish particularism linked to a
move to the political right centered on anti-Communism and efforts to
deflect all criticism of Israel, and the erosion of religious and cultural
sources of Jewish identity that turned the Holocaust into "virtually the
only common denominator of American Jewish identity." Novick finds
the idea that the Holocaust was unique to be "quite vacuous" and
"deeply offensive" because it underemphasizes non-Jewish suffering.
"Turning the Holocaust into the emblematic Jewish experience" has
been "closely connected to the inward and rightward turn of American
Jewry in recent decades"-as an expression of regrettable ethnic partic–
ularism and a retreating from a more distinctively Jewish, universalist
message.
Novick's angry book, however, is not without some insights and
interesting research. Unfortunately, he consistently undermines some of
his better points with overstatement. Novick perceives aspects of
"recent Jewish Holocaust commemoration as 'un-Jewish'," even Chris–
tian: "I am thinking of the ritual of reverently following the structured
pathways of the Holocaust in the major museums which resemble noth–
ing so much as the Stations of the Cross on the Via Dolorosa....The
way suffering is sacralized and portrayed as the path to wisdom-the
cult of the survivor as secular saint. These are themes that have some
minor and peripheral precedent in Jewish tradition, but they resonate
more powerful with major themes in Christianity." There is something
to this, but in his desire to separate Jewish tradition from memory,
Novick goes too far.
It
is wrong to claim, as he does, that Judaism fos–
ters memory of God's handiwork but not of past suffering, as if the Old
Testament had only the book of Genesis but not Exodus. The story of
the Exodus, commemorated every year at Passover, calls on Jews to cul–
tivate the memory of the bitterness of slavery and the joy of liberation.
Novick writes as if this religious and then secularized largely liberal and
leftist Jewish tradition of anti-redemption did not exist and had not con–
tributed to the emergence of memory of the Holocaust.
Novick takes on the argument that de-emphasis of Nazi persecution
of the Jews amounted to their "abandonment." He cites officials in the
Roosevelt administration 's Office of War Information who sought to
convince the American public that the Germans "were everyone's
enemy" and in that effort sought "to broaden rather than narrow the
range of Nazi victims." To have suggested that American intervention
amounted to a war to save the Jews would have, they believed, narrowed
