Novick, Peter. The Holocaust in American Life. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1999. 373 pages.

University of Chicago history professor Peter Novick, himself a Jew, takes on a career-killer of a topic in this book. He makes a strong case that in recent years Jews have milked the holocaust, and the guilt it engenders, for their own political purposes. Novick does not deny the holocaust occurred. Rather, he argues that the historical record has been distorted, perceptions skewed, and emotions manipulated for the greater good of Jewish identity in America, and for the support of Israel.

For example, after all the holocaust hype of the last twenty years, who remembers that Jews accounted for just one-fifth of those liberated from concentration camps in Germany by American troops? (While camps in the East were almost all Jewish, these were either closed by the time the Allies arrived, or were liberated by the Russians.) Yet by now American photographs are invariably associated with Jewish suffering exclusively, even though it didn't start out that way in 1945. And until late 1938 there were few Jews, as Jews, among those in the camps. They were filled with Communists, socialists, trade unionists, and others opposed to Hitler. It's not that the holocaust didn't happen; obviously it did. Novick is simply uncomfortable with the fact that the holocaust has been unfairly appropriated by American Jews as their exclusive preserve.
ISBN 0-395-84009-0

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