The Holocaust and Collective Memory - The American Experience

How and when did the Holocaust come to loom so large in postwar Jewish and American and international life? Peter Novick''s controversial new book sets out to answer this question. In the first decades after World War II, the Holocaust was little talked about, but after the Six-Day War (1967) and the Yom Kippur War (1973) it began to assume central importance as a defining factor of Jewishness. With the release of Claude Lanzmann''s documentary Shoah (1985), the Holocaust had become the moral issue of the twentieth century. In a book likely to provoke heated debate, Novick asks whether defining Jewishness in terms of victimhood alone does not hand Hitler a posthumous victory, and whether claiming uniqueness for the Holocaust does not render other atrocities (Biafra, Rwanda, Kosovo) ''not so bad''.>

About the author

Peter Novick is a professor of history at the University of Chicago. He is the author of THE RESISTANCE VERSUS VICHY: The Purge of Collaborators in Liberated France (1968) and THAT NOBLE DREAM: The Objectivity Question and the American Historical Profession, which won the American Historical Association's book Prize in 1988.

Product details

• Authors: Peter Novick, Novick Peter
• Publisher: Bloomsbury
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 05.02.2001
• EAN: 9780747552550
• ISBN: 978-0-7475-5255-0
• No. of pages: 372
• Dimensions: 129 mm x 197 mm x 23 mm
• Series: Bloomsbury Paperbacks
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > History > General, dictionaries; Non-fiction book; Europe, European History, HISTORY / Europe / General, Jewish Studies, Second World War, The Holocaust, c 1938 to c 1946 (World War Two period), Modern warfare, c 1940 to c 1949, Relating to Jewish people and groups, Social groups: religious groups and communities