Related articles and links |  1 of 3

In 1999, the historian Peter Novick published a valuable contrarian book called The Holocaust in American Life (Houghton Mifflin). It seeks to answer "why in 1990s America—fifty years after the fact and thousands of miles from its site—the Holocaust has come to loom so large in our culture." Asking questions that few others have raised in print, Novick brings his skeptical intelligence to bear on a subject that is too often obscured by unctuous pontification and self-serving myths. His account of the evolution of discourse about the Holocaust, from the immediate postwar years to the present, is particularly helpful and frequently surprising.

Still, when all is said and done, Novick misses something vital. He argues against the notion that there are "'lessons of the Holocaust,'" asserting that "lessons for dealing with the sorts of issues that confront us in ordinary life, whether public or private, are not likely to be found in this most extraordinary of events." But by that argument, we would have no "lessons" to learn from much of the great literature of the world, so often concerned precisely with extraordinary situations that highlight the drama of human freedom to choose good or evil.

Above all, Novick the resolute secularist is scornful of those who, like Elie Wiesel, Irving Greenberg, and many others, both inside and outside the Jewish community, see a profound religious significance to the Holocaust, a metaphysical dimension. "Even many observant Jews are often willing to discuss the founding myths of Judaism naturalistically," Novick writes. "But they're unwilling to adopt this mode of thought when it comes to the 'inexplicable mystery' of the Holocaust." He just doesn't get it.

Another hardheaded secularist who nevertheless is a superb guide is Yehuda Bauer, whose book Rethinking the Holocaust was published last year by Yale University Press. Bauer's book is quite unusual in its weighing of evidence and counterevidence; as you read, you feel you are looking over a historian's shoulder, able to see how he arrives at his judgments rather than having them served up ready-made. He is blunt and refreshingly clear.

In his chapter "From the Holocaust to the State of Israel," Bauer shows in some detail how the shifting political goals of Britain, the United States, the Soviet Union, and other players ultimately led to the foundation of the State of Israel—an event that was by no means inevitable, nor to be explained primarily in humanitarian terms. (Novick makes the same point.) He adds that the outcome of the Jewish-Arab war in 1948 was very much in doubt, and that were it not for an infusion of arms from communist Czechoslovakia at a crucial point, the Jews would probably have been defeated. As it was, the victory came at a high cost: 1 percent of the Jewish population in Palestine. "In the United States there are, say, 250 million inhabitants. One percent would be 2.5 million. I need say no more."

Earlier, in his introduction, Bauer writes that, because his parents "had the good sense to escape in 1939, I grew up in Mandatory Palestine, where I went to school and played soccer while my relatives and everyone else in my former home were being murdered. I studied in Britain, participated in the Israeli War of Independence (and a few other Israeli wars, as all my friends did), and came to the study of the Holocaust because I wanted to be a historian of Jews." He acknowledges that this experience shapes his outlook, yet he strives for objectivity.

next page... |  1 of 3

April (Web-only) 2002, Vol. 46