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support for the anti-Nazi struggle, played into the hands of isolationists,
and appeared to confirm Nazi propaganda about Jewish influence on
Roosevelt. But the Republican Party of 1940 also had slogans such as
"It's Your Country-Why Let Sidney Hillman Run it?" while some can–
didates attacked the "Jew Deal" and "President Rosenfeld." Moreover,
in light of the German control of the continent from 1940-1944, practi–
cal prospects for rescue were "dim." As Robert Dallek, the leading his–
torian of FDR's foreign policy has argued, his failure to intervene
decisively to open possibilities for immigration or rescue was Roosevelt's
most serious shortcoming. Yet, given the degree of anti-Semitism in
American society-the Gallup poll indicated that it peaked around June
1944 and began to decline after the revelation of the death camps in June
1945-Novick agrees that a reduced wartime focus on the Holocaust
was not necessarily an expression of anti-Semitism.
At times, Peter Novick is so mean-spirited and insensitive that he
undermines his own reasonable arguments. For example, he notes that
the Yiddish press had much greater coverage of the Holocaust than the
Anglo-Jewish press and that wartime memorial activity was concen–
trated in immigrant centers like the Lower East Side and the Williams–
burg section of Brooklyn. The reason: "recency of immigration-which
meant stronger family connections to Europe-was closely tied to the
depth of feeling the Holocaust evoked among American Jews. Baldly
stated, it was the difference between contemplating that abstraction
'European Jewry' being destroyed and imagining Aunt Minnie at Tre–
blinka." The choice of the endearing "Minnie," a relative who is close,
but not too close, introduces a tone of inappropriate levity. Perhaps
Novick did not intend callous humor, but he should have been more
careful to avoid such distractions.
While Novick sees benign causes for the relative lack of prominence
of the Holocaust during World War
II,
he focuses on what he views as
the regrettable causes of marginalization during the Cold War. As the
United States mobilized to contain its former wartime ally, the Soviet
Union, and to reintegrate its former enemies into the Western alliance,
"talk of the Holocaust was not just unhelpful but actively obstructive."
It was the "wrong atrocity" with which to mobilize anti-Soviet senti–
ment. Novick stresses the contribution made by the theory of totalitar–
ianism to marginalizing the Holocaust-focusing attention to the
political rather than ethnic identity of Nazism's victims. "Conversely,
any suggestion that the Nazi murder of European Jewry was a central,
let alone defining, feature of that regime would undermine the argument
for the essential identity of the two systems."
