Word: novick
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...perfectly appropriate ("worthy") responses to the Holocaust. My quarrel is with the notion that all these tears accomplish much. This, and not their worthiness, is the reason I ask in the book "why the eliciting of these responses from Americans is seen as so urgently important a task." PETER NOVICK Chicago...
...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...
Attending Schindler's List, Novick writes that he wept along with everyone else, but wondered "why the eliciting of these responses from Americans is seen as so urgently important a task." The remark betrays a certain tone-deafness. The Holocaust's memory, in this country far from the death camps, may be inflated and abused. But it seems perverse to argue on that basis that it is unworthy of American tears. This book should be read as a corrective to dutiful hype and dubious comparisons, not as an injunction against feeling...