Dear Philip,
Thanks for the thoughtful and pointed response to Peter Novick’s new book–and for all the insightful questions you raise. As fine a historian as Peter Novick is, and I’m a great fan of his classic That Noble Dream: The ‘Objectivity Question’ and the American Historical Profession, with his new book, The Holocaust in American Life, I would have to agree that he has also become somewhat of an “in-your-face” historian. On the one hand, you and I share most of Novick’s own distaste for the commodification of the Holocaust, its use as a fund-raising tool, and its growing centrality in American Jewish life and consciousness. At the same time, I think, we both find ourselves bridling a little at the book’s pugnacious tone, its swagger and implied dare to come after it. This is actually a side of recent Holocaust discourse that I find hard to swallow–and which explains my own preference for the measured, less combative writings of Saul Friedlander, Christopher Browning, and Marion Kaplan, among others. Holocaust without hyperbole. Or as museum professionals would remind us, “the hotter the topic, the cooler its treatment.”
Your own outline of Novick’s book makes clear its central issues and arguments, as well as its argumentativeness. And here, I also find myself very sympathetic to many of Novick’s objections to the popular commemoration of the Holocaust in America–its seeming sacralization at the expense of 3,000 years of Jewish history, its altogether Christian veneration of artifacts and fragments, what I have also called “the fetishization of ruins.” And I also liked very much Novick’s central methodological premise: going back to show us how the Holocaust was grasped at the time of its unfolding, how it was apprehended and misapprehended by both the victims and bystanders, pundits and organizational professionals at the time. This is the historian at his best, reminding us of the ways people were literally blinded by events we now expect them to remember so well. Here he shows us all the good reasons the Holocaust was not regarded as “an event” in and of itself during its unfolding, how it was necessarily understood as part of a much larger world war, how institutional responses to it at the time were necessarily conditioned by the needs of the political moment–whether by American Jewish leaders and Israel’s founders, or by President Roosevelt and other non-Jewish leaders of the Allied powers.
But here, I also find a second, more troubling premise. In addition to restoring the ways the Holocaust was understood at the time, Novick seems to suggest that this is how we should remember it now, as well, that almost any evolution of Holocaust memory over time is a distortion of the authentic (if narrower) understanding people had of it at the time. As sympathetic as this impulse may be, it’s also a kind of nostalgia for an unrecoverable past. We can describe that particular time and place in retrospect, but as a model for contemporary memory of the Holocaust, it must remain only a “noble dream.” For we can no more remember the Holocaust as it was known at the time, than we can turn the clock back. Part of history, too, is the way its significance necessarily changes over time, the way that every generation will find its own meaning in the Holocaust, whether we like it or not. It is one thing to show us, as Novick does, how the Holocaust went from a small “h” catastrophe to a large “H” Holocaust. But it is another thing, a kind of unhistorical longing, to wish that it hadn’t changed over time. Or maybe Novick is just wishing that the memory of the mass murder of European Jewry had evolved into something else altogether, something which he never quite spells out, as you say.
Which leads you and me back to several of our own mutual preoccupations. I’m especially interested in Novick’s and your own thoughts on lessons to be learned from the Holocaust. Novick rightly questions whether we can learn anything about ordinary, daily life from something as extraordinary as the Holocaust. But in fact, we may well have learned something, however belatedly in the case of Kosovo, about responding to other, contemporary genocides. Or could it be that the recent genocides in Bosnia and Kosovo, or that in Rwanda, tell us more about how and why the Holocaust unflolded as it did than the Holocaust can tell us about present persecutions? As author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning account of the recent genocide in Rwanda, how would you answer this, Philip? After I hear from you, I’ll try my own hand at explaining why there is a Holocaust museum on the Mall in Washington, D.C., but no national memorial there to American slavery, our greatest shame.
Til next word, try to stay cool, Philip.
James
