Word: novick
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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 takes on a formidable list of received truths. The claim that America could have saved hundreds of thousands of Jews from death, but chose not to, he says, is "simply bad history." The estimate that the Nazis slaughtered 5 million Gentiles in addition to the (well-documented) 6 million Jews, for a total of 11 million, is arbitrary, probably "invented" to combine "maximum inclusiveness with the preservation of a Jewish majority" in the death camps. Contradicting reports that the Nazis killed 500,000 homosexuals, Novick puts the number murdered because they were gay at a startlingly...
...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...
...action was brought by the employees "for the severe life threatening allergies and physical reactions caused by their work place exposure to various hazardous chemicals and compounds," according to the suit field by Robert A. Doyle, a partner in the firm of Kehoe, Doyle, Playter and Novick, which represents four employees...