Is It Good for the Jews? : THE HOLOCAUST IN AMERICAN LIFE By Peter Novick; Houghton Mifflin: 320 pp., $27

A pedestrian ambling in New York’s Riverside Park will probably miss the foot-high wrought-iron fence that frames a small stone plaque near 83rd St. But should he pause to read the inscription, he will find something rather quizzical:

“This is the site for the American memorial to the heroes of the Warsaw Ghetto Battle April-May 1943 and to the six million jews of Europe martyred in the cause of human liberty.”

As Peter Novick explains in his unusually judicious history of Holocaust consciousness in America, in 1946, 1947 and 1948, a consortium of Jewish groups, including the American Jewish Committee, the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Congress, the Jewish Labor Committee and the Jewish War Veterans, rejected plans to erect a monument on this site to the slain Jews of Europe, holding that such a thing would be a perpetual memorial to the weakness and defenselessness of the Jewish people. Almost 50 years later, the United States Holocaust Museum, our national cathedral of Jewish pain and mortification, was unveiled to great fanfare on the Mall in Washington, D.C. Whereas Jews in the postwar period sought to evade the memory of the old country and its manifold disasters, by the end of the century, commemorating the massacre of European Jewry had become job No. 1 for the American Jewish community.

“The Holocaust in American Life” tells the riveting story of this transformation. A professor of history at the University of Chicago who has written books on Vichy France and the problem of objectivity in American historiography, Novick begins with a skeptic’s question: Given that great historical events are usually digested and dispensed with shortly after their occurrence, why is it that the Holocaust took on such importance at least a generation after the events had transpired?

Novick is quick to dispense with the Freudian theory of trauma, which holds that occurrences too awful for the conscious mind undergo repression and return some time later in the form of symptoms. For Novick, the Holocaust cannot be understood to have been properly traumatic for Americans, the great majority of whom were removed both spatially and temporally from the death camps. Rather than adhere to trauma and Freudian nachtraglichkeit, or delayed action, Novick appeals to the notion of collective memory, which chooses what to remember as a result of ideological and pragmatic considerations. It is not so much our incapacity to remember the Holocaust that fascinates Novick; rather, he seeks to understand how and why this awful event has been represented so variously over the last 50 years. Novick’s tone is disciplined, and his research is meticulous, yet it is clear that his book wants to pick a fight with the guardians of Holocaust memory, as he argues that the current obsession with the Holocaust is bad for the Jews on both moral and pragmatic grounds. Although we would hope that commemoration would teach us all to be kinder, gentler citizens, Novick wonders whether the barrage of awfulness does not finally anesthetize us to smaller scale suffering. Concomitantly, Novick questions whether centering the representation of Jewish experience on the Holocaust does not in the long run confirm the ancient stereotype of the Jew as a persecuted pariah.

The book’s opening section on World War II carefully unsettles various received theories about Jewish knowledge and American responsibility in the face of the Final Solution. To speak of the Holocaust during the war years is to consign oneself to a certain anachronism, for from early 1933 until at least 1942, the Jews were seen as one group among many chosen by the Nazis for persecution. As to the question of American Jewry’s response to the European catastrophe, Novick argues that to conceive of the American Jewish community as one united monolithic block is specious, as the Jews in America were fissured along many lines: Orthodox versus Reform; German Jews versus Eastern European Jews; within the latter group, Galitzianers versus Litvaks, et cetera. The key claim here is that despite the insularity of Jewish enclaves in the United States, American identity took precedence over Jewish identity for the vast majority of Jews, and the desire to assimilate was more powerful than the desire to conserve shtetl traditions.

In addition, Novick defends the Franklin Roosevelt administration against its detractors on a number of fronts. To those who cavil about immigration quotas, Novick replies that Roosevelt’s hands were tied, for the general sentiment in the country was largely against expanding quotas, as the Depression had not yet abated and jobs were coveted. Given the large number of Jews in his administration, which was sometimes tagged with the caustic epithet “The Jew Deal,” Roosevelt did not want to deal a card to home-grown isolationists by changing the numbers for Jewish immigration.

Novick reminds us that even at the end of the war, Americans did not really confront the Holocaust as such. The Allies liberated such German camps as Dachau and Buchenwald, where the prisoners were in fact much more various than those in the extermination camps of the East. These had been either closed before the arrival of Allied forces or liberated by the Russians, and there were few American photographers or reporters to document the atrocities of Auschwitz.

Meanwhile, the dizzying calendar of events at the end of the war kept perceptions of the particularity of Jewish fate in Europe at bay too: On April 11, 1945, Buchenwald was liberated. The next day, Roosevelt died after 15 years in office. The Allies reached Dachau on April 29 and Mauthausen a week later. On May 7, Germany surrendered unconditionally. Reading the daily newspaper during these months must have been a hallucinatory affair, and news of the camps must have blended in with news of the denouement of an utterly horrific conflagration that took the lives of more than 50 million people worldwide.

Immediately after the war’s conclusion, America began an epochal ideological shift, as our erstwhile ally in the quashing of Hitler’s dreams of world conquest became our mortal enemy during the Cold War. The continuity of totalitarian ideology from Nazi Germany to Soviet Russia was a mainstay of American Cold War ideology, and this forced a certain elision of the Holocaust as too particular to Nazism. Meanwhile, Jews in 1950s’ America didn’t want to rock the boat, especially given the popular association of Jews with Bolshevism and the discomforts occasioned by the trial and conviction of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for espionage in the service of the Soviet Union. American Jews, many of whom were reaping the benefits of their assimilation and living the good life, wanted to be part of triumphal America and accentuate the positive, as a popular tune from the period had it. Indeed, as Novick presents it, Anne Frank’s diary, the most influential representation of the Holocaust to appear during the 1950s, was notable more for its upbeat universalism in the face of catastrophe than for its Jewishness per se.

John Slawson, head of the National Community Relations Advisory Council, opined in a paper he delivered in 1944 that “[w]e must normalize the image of the Jew.” Even as dialectically rigorous a mind as Max Horkheimer argued that “harping on the atrocity story . . . might have an undesirable effect on the unconscious mind of many people.” In the postwar period, there was no public martyrology for the Jews, for they did not yet engage in the kind of comparative victimology that has become de rigueur among ethnic groups of all stripes in the ‘90s.

By the early ‘60s, Cold War ideology was thoroughly institutionalized, and with the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem, the Holocaust was presented to the American public more thoroughly than it ever had been before. It was during the Eichmann trial that the word “Holocaust,” a Hellenic translation of the Hebrew word shoah or catastrophe, came into common parlance in the United States. Novick shows how Hannah Arendt’s coverage of the trial in The New Yorker opened up a wound in the self-image of such pious conservatives as Norman Podhoretz, for whom the notion of the banality of evil was simply too much to bear. Meanwhile, Stanley Milgram was carrying out his shocking psychological experiments at Yale, during which average citizens from New Haven showed themselves only too willing to administer apparently dangerous levels of electrical current to human guinea pigs when told to do so. The controversy surrounding Arendt is essential to Novick’s account of Holocaust consciousness in America, for her presentation of Eichmann as a petty bureaucrat on the make removes the nimbus of satanic grandeur from the Holocaust. For Arendt and for Novick, dire events do not necessarily reveal the truth about humanity; indeed, Novick has nothing but contempt for what he calls the “absurd maxim, In extremis veritas.” Such skepticism arrives as a refreshing tonic amid the pieties of contemporary Holocaust discourse.

As the Holocaust entered everyday consciousness in the United States and American Jews achieved unparalleled success in their adoptive land, Jewish anxiety began to focus on embattled Israel, which the Arabs famously wanted to drive into the sea. The Holocaust had always been a linchpin of public support for Israel; even though Novick firmly contends that the 1947 United Nations agreement to partition Palestine in order to make way for the state of Israel was first and foremost a matter of Realpolitik and not a kind of melancholy recompense granted by the world for the fate of European Jewry, he acknowledges the symbolic coupling of Israel and the Holocaust in the minds of both Jews and anti-Semites.

Everything changed after the 1967 Six-Day War, which Novick terms “a folk theology of ‘Holocaust and Redemption,’ ” as plucky little Israel revealed itself to be a formidable military machine. Novick shows how the old anxieties about Jewish vulnerability resurfaced during the Yom Kippur War of 1973, only to change again in 1982 with the Lebanon War, during which Israel assumed the mantle of colonialist power.

“In the 1970s,” writes Novick, “American Jews’ anxiety about Israel’s security, and their viewing Israel’s situation within a Holocaust framework, was the single greatest catalyst of the new centering of the Holocaust in American Jewish

consciousness.”

Novick’s discussion of the dovetailing of American identity politics and Jewish Holocaust consciousness is sure to ruffle lots of feathers. In the 1980s, many American Jews undertook an inward turn that led them away from the legacy of universalist progressivism to the particularism of identity politics. Novick dislikes this turn, and he shows how Jews spearheaded American neoconservatism, which he views as a rear-guard action to reassert control over turf and power already won. Novick is unequivocal in his claims about Jewish material success and power in the United States, and perhaps this leads him to undervalue the legacy of 2,000 years of persecution in the West. And given the series of U.N. resolutions of the 1970s equating Zionism with racism, Novick’s argument that the discourse of anti-Semitism had exhausted itself by the 1970s and 1980s comes across as a bit blithe. Still, the facts and figures he adduces paint a pretty picture of contemporary Jewish life in America.

So why the obsession with the Holocaust? Here Novick unveils two great paradoxes: First, in contemporary America, it is precisely the relative absence of hostility to Jews (isolated incidents such as the recent attack on a Granada Hills Jewish day care center notwithstanding) that is most threatening to Jewish identity. With assimilation and intermarriage, Judaism in America is leaching out, and though the Orthodox maintain the traditions of the religion, most Jews in America are in the process of shedding their Jewish markers. Second, it is the Holocaust, more than anything else, that allows American Jews to assert their Jewish identity now that religious doctrine and shtetl experience have faded. “There but for the grace of my grandparents’ decision to leave the shtetl for America would have gone I . . . .” In a dreary historical turn, it is the Holocaust that binds American Jews together as victims in a culture that apparently celebrates victims of every kind. So it is that American Jews can assert their Jewish particularity (the Holocaust was the catastrophe of catastrophes) and their American-victim universality (my group suffers, therefore I am) at the same time. Ideologically speaking, this is the function of the United States Holocaust Museum: It allows Jews to be perfectly Jewish and perfectly American simultaneously.

Novick wants something else from his Jewishness. But just what that is remains unspoken, implicit in his argumentation. He disdains the piety of Elie Wiesel, for whom the Holocaust is unspeakable, “an ontological event” “equal to the revelation on Sinai.” He scorns the transcendental bathos of Rabbi Irving Greenberg, who would change the Jewish liturgy to include the eating of rotten potato peelings on Passover. He has no time for the selfish paranoia of Lucy Dawidowicz, who claimed that the Holocaust was incomparable to any other catastrophe and who suggested that the Turks had “a rational reason” for doing their best to exterminate the Armenians in 1915. Above all, Novick believes that by offering an image of themselves to the world as victims, Jews will grant Hitler a kind of posthumous victory. As Leon Wieseltier puts it, “In the memory of oppression, oppression outlives itself.” The scar does the work of the wound. With its stringent critique of transcendental humors and its steely-eyed allegiance to critical thinking, “The Holocaust in American Life” should change the terms and the tone of Holocaust debate in the United States. Novick has produced an altogether admirable Jewish book.*