Review: Deconstructing Holocaust Consciousness
Reviewed Work(s):
The Holocaust in American Life
by Peter Novick
The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering
by NormanFinkelstein
Elie Wiesel and the Politics of Moral Leadership
by Mark ChmielJoseph Massad
Journal of Palestine Studies
, Vol. 32, No. 1. (Autumn, 2002), pp. 78-89.
Journal of Palestine Studies
is currently published by University of California Press.Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available athttp://www.jstor.org/about/terms.html. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtainedprior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content inthe JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained athttp://www.jstor.org/journals/ucal.html.Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printedpage of such transmission.The JSTOR Archive is a trusted digital repository providing for long-term preservation and access to leading academic journals and scholarly literature from around the world. The Archive is supported by libraries, scholarly societies, publishers,and foundations. It is an initiative of JSTOR, a not-for-profit organization with a mission to help the scholarly community takeadvantage of advances in technology. For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.http://www.jstor.orgFri Aug 24 18:09:54 2007
The Holocaust
in
American
We,
by Peter Novick. New York: Houghtonand Mifflin, 1999. 281 pages. Notes to p. 352. Index to p. 373. $27.00 cloth.
The
Holocaust
Industq?
Reflections
on
the Exploitation
of
Jewish
Suffering,
by Norman Finkelstein. New York: Verso, 2000.
ix
+
150 pages.$23.00 cloth.
Elie
Wiesel
and
the
Politics of Moral Leadership, by Mark Chmiel. Phila-delphia: Temple University Press, 2001. xii
+
171 pages. Notes to p. 215. In-dex to p. 225.In recent years, and after a long academic and political silence about therise of the Jewish holocaust to public and media attention and popular con-sciousness, a number of books have appeared that attempt to historicize theprocess through which we came to know of the holocaust and how it wastransformed into an American memory. Peter Novick's
The Holocaust inAmerican Life
is
in
a class of its own in this regard on account of its compre-hensive and intelligent examination of most aspects of the rise of holocaustconsciousness and the sheer wealth of information contained in it. NormanFinkelstein's
The Holocaust Industry
is a short but important and necessaryaddendum that advances important critiques of Novick and makes its owncontribution to the debate by discussing aspects that Novick did not include.Mark Chmiel's
Elie Wiesel and the Politics of Moral Leadership
is a casestudy illustrating the politics of holocaust memory through examining thelife of its prime architect, Elie Wiesel, who has made a successful and profita-ble personal career of the holocaust. The three books therefore are comple-mentary and shed light on an important matter long left undiscussed andopen a debate that has been taboo until now.
JOSEPH
MASSAD
is assistant professor of modem Arab politics and intellectual history atColumbia University.
Journal
of
Palestine
Studies
XXXII,
no.
1
(Autumn
2002),
pages78-89.
ISSN:
0377-919X;
online ISSN:
1533-8614.
Q
2002
by
the hsdmte for Palescine Studies.
AU
rights
reservedSend requests for permission to reprint to:
Rights
and Permissions, University of California Press,Journals Division,
2000
Center St., Ste.
303,
Berkeley,
CA
947041223,
Novick's work is an exploration of how the Jewish holocaust came to beviewed as central to American life (as opposed to life in Europe, where itoccurred) after it had been marginalized following World War
11
(p.
6),
andindeed, how it came to be the basis for a shared sense of Jewish identity inthe United States. Novick insists that in the late twentieth century, the holo-caust, as the only common denominator of American Jewish identity, "filleda need for a consensual symbol
.
.
.
well designed to confront increasingcommunal anxiety about 'Jewish continuity' in the face of declining religios-ity, together with increasing assimilation and a sharp rise in intermarriage, allof which threatened demographic catastrophe" (p.
7).
According to Novick, the belated centralization of the holocaust in Ameri-can life was the result of a number of developments, including the rise ofethnic-based identities as an explicit part of public discourse and a change inthe attitude toward victimhood from contempt to empathy and identifica-tion. In an American context, where African Americans, among others, finallyhave been able to narrate part of their story of victimization, the Jewish dis-course on the holocaust insists that "we have not just a competition for rec-ognition but a competition for primacy"
@.
9).
This insistence on theuniqueness of the holocaust is prominent in what Finkelstein calls the "Holo-caust industry." Novick sees the claim of holocaust uniqueness as an attemptto downplay the catastrophes of others as ordinary in comparison.Of Jewish commemoration of the holocaust, Novick comments on how"'unJewish'-how Christian-it is. I am thinking of the ritual of reverentlyfollowing the structured pathways of the Holocaust in the major museums,which resembles nothing so much as the Stations of the Cross on the ViaDolorosa"
@.
11). Novick is concerned as to whether the centralization ofthe holocaust in American life is "good for the Jews" (p.
11)
and whetherthere are "lessons of the Holocaust" to be learned
(p.
12). He asserts that,pedagogically, the holocaust seems dubious as a source of historical lessons"not because of its alleged uniqueness, but because of its extremity." Headds, "There are, in my view, more important lessons about how easily webecome victimizers to be drawn from the behavior of normal Americans innormal times than in the behavior of the SS in wartime"
@.
13). He alsoclaims that the lesson of the holocaust may not be to sensitize "us to oppres-sion," because "making it the benchmark of oppression and atrocity worksin precisely the opposite direction, uivializing crimes of lesser magnitude"and resulting in "truly disgusting" debates such as whether the Bosnian con-flict was "truly holocaustal or merely genocidal" (p. 14).Novick's ultimate concern is how the claims of holocaust uniqueness andincomparability function in American life to promote
evasion
of moral and historical responsibility. Repeated as-sertions that whatever the United States has done to Blacks,
of 00
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