Word: holocaust
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Perhaps. But as Peter Novick recounts in his provocative book The Holocaust in American Life, the century's signature cataclysm has been regularly applied in places as diverse as Iraq, Rwanda and Bosnia, to mixed effect. Some may argue that the Holocaust talk regarding Kosovo was justified, rallying support for a long bombing campaign. Now that this particular Hitler is at the bargaining table, however, the rhetoric, and its harsh implications, will most likely be quietly dropped as inconvenient...
Should there be some sort of penalty for promiscuous use of the Holocaust? Or does it exert such a hold on us that merely suggesting its limits as a model seems a sacrilege? Novick, a University of Chicago historian and a self-described secular Jew, is no Holocaust denier. But he is a ferocious chronicler of the way various agendas and accidents have conspired to make the Shoah ever more central to our consciousness. And he wonders whether this attention "is as desirable...as most people seem to think it is." It's a controversial thesis, made more...
Novick asserts that the Holocaust as we know it today--a transcending event with unique world-historical significance--is largely a "retrospective construction" that would have been unrecognizable just after World War II, when both Jews and Gentiles had reasons to avoid focusing on it. (Jews didn't want to be perceived as victims; America as a whole had embraced West Germany as a cold war ally.) Our current concept of the term, he writes, began to emerge with the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann and became ingrained when American Jewish organizations found it a potent metaphor for their fears...
Later, as Israel's policies became more controversial, the Holocaust was left as "virtually the only common denominator of American Jewish identity in the late 20th century." It was dragooned in support of such Jewish preoccupations as the (bogus, claims Novick) "new anti-Semitism" of the 1970s and the real (but bloodless) threat of intermarriage. Its appeal to Americans at large grew as the nation's post-Vietnam mood turned dystopian and identity politics put a premium on victimhood. The best example of the resulting crossover appeal was the influential nbc mini-series Holocaust in 1978, intensively promoted by Jewish...
Novick criticizes the bloating and misuse of the Holocaust in the 1980s and is scathing on what he calls "deeply offensive" claims of Holocaust uniqueness. He agrees with author Leon Wieseltier that survivors have become "the Jewish equivalent of saints and relics," and suspects that the growing cadre of "Holocaust professionals" assures that such trends will not reverse anytime soon...