American History

American History

David Stannard's book, American Holocaust

The Holocaust has become--who knows for how long--a part of American mass culture. Like all discussions based on memory, it can evoke great amounts of narcissism. Most American Jewish teenagers are probably learning more about Auschwitz than about the Hebrew prophets. Some aspects of Holocaust education in the schools may teach lessons that are trivial. Examples of lobbying groups using and misusing the memory of the Holocaust for contemporary political purposes ought to be examined (David,1993).

David Stannard's has placed himself in a paradoxical situation. He is a distinguished historian who bemoans the entry of the story of absolute evil in modern world history into a prominent place in American society and culture. But any agenda of scholarship to suit the political needs of the moment is objectionable. Aside from the debate about American policy during the Holocaust, Novick does not examine the historiography of the Holocaust written by American historians. This would have been the reasonable thing to do to see if the lessons they drew were profound or vacuous, narrowly ethnic and/or universal, intellectually and historiographically enduring or the stuff of transient propaganda. I cannot recall another recent example of a prominent American historian objecting so vociferously to the growing prominence of a history of persecution into public consciousness and seeing that emergence as due only to narrow, self-interested, and regrettable motives. Especially in light of long-standing complaints about complacent optimism and disinterest in history and memory in our country and our culture, one would have hoped for recognition that the emergence of the Holocaust also represents a growing decency, cultural diversity and intellectual and moral maturation of an America less innocent of history's darkest time (David,1993).

Argument about how the Holocaust became so prominent in American life. But, he does not examine other possible explanations for this relatively greater attention given to the Holocaust in America: the decline of anti-Semitism, the cosmopolitan understanding of what World War II was about, the growing sensitivity to all kinds of racism following the civil rights struggles of the 1960s, the aging survivors of the Holocaust and their determination to see that its memory will not die with them, the ability and willingness of an economically successful and highly educated American Jewish community to bring these issues to a broader public and, finally, a reception of the message because non-Jewish Americans recognized more than immediately after the Holocaust that this was the nadir of absolute evil in the twentieth century. In other words, it is possible and plausible to view the interest in the Holocaust as evidence that American society has become more tolerant, more pluralist, and indeed even more multicultural in the best sense of that term. Just as Novick pointed out that in the 1960s marginalized groups had found a voice, he could argue that now the centrality of the Holocaust in European and American history represented a similar advance of knowledge (David,1993).

The Slave Ship by Marcus Rediker

The slave ship, Marcus Rediker tells us, was "a diabolical machine, ...