Thank God for Peter Novick. Many Jews, including those whose lives have been touched by the Holocaust, have longed for someone to analyse this phenomenon of the inexorable growth of the Holocaust's importance as its historical closeness diminishes. Why, for instance, is it always described as unique? Why is it fashionable to claim victimhood? Many of us have been disturbed by the use of the Holocaust to justify Israel's actions in some circumstances, notably with the Christian Phalangists in the refugee camps of Sabra and Chatila in 1982, where Israeli soldiers either actively encouraged them, or looked on as they wrought havoc and destruction.
So Novick has analysed, from an American point of view, why the Holocaust has loomed so large in the Jewish-American psyche, and in the culture more broadly; and whether the collective memory is an accurate one. He argues that the Holocaust did not have the traumatic effect on American Jews at the time that it is now assumed it must have had. There were undoubtedly some refugees, and some other Jews, traumatised by what was happening to family members and friends. But if one examines contemporary documents, it emerges that people were shocked, saddened, sickened, and upset - but not traumatised.
Yet the Freudian argument, that people must have been traumatised, so that memories must therefore have been repressed only to emerge now, has tended to hold sway. Novick condemns this as just so much nonsense, and suggests a different psychological explanation, more to do with definition as Jews, and also with definition as a minority. He suggests that American Jews are not strongly bonded with each other through religion, nor by politics, nor strongly bonded together by peoplehood as they so frequently marry non-Jews - but that they have become bonded together by Holocaust memories, by the sense that, but for their great-grandparents going to the US, they too would have perished in the destruction of European Jewry.
As other senses of mutual belonging have diminished, that sense has grown. There are parallels with the importance of the memory of the Famine in the Irish-American psyche as well, as other bonds slacken. One might argue that defining oneself as a Jew purely by relationship with the Holocaust (or as Irish purely by relationship with the Famine) is not much of a definition. But Novick suggests that, thus far, as children at Bar Mitzvah are twinned with children who perished at their age, or learn about what happened, it appears to hold them, to give them a sense of belonging. Add into that the plethora of Holocaust memorials, and the centrality of Washington's Holocaust Museum in American life, and you begin to get a picture of what is happening.
There is much more, meticulously researched and challenging in the telling. If the Holocaust is seen as different in kind from any other genocide - and it is strange to many of us that it should be - what will Jews say about other genocides? If the Holocaust is so special, why are Jews in the US prepared to share this historic sense of suffering with the Irish, and with African Americans, as they increasingly do in a variety of ways?
NOVICK begins to explore these issues, as he tackles the role of the Catholic Church and the way the Poles have been miscast as permanent and perpetual anti-semites (some of them were), which explains why the Germans put the extermination camps in Poland. Nonsense, says Novick roundly: the extermination camps were there because that is where the bulk of the Jews were.
Peter Novick has injected some sense into a fraught debate, and asked questions of the Jewish communities of the US, and elsewhere, that will make hard reading. As the UK too moves towards its Holocaust Day, for no apparent reason, Novick's book gives us pause for thought. It should be required reading for all those who believe that the memorialising of the Holocaust is because its memory is only now surfacing amongst the survivors. Wrong. They wanted to talk, and we would not let them. Shame on us, then and now. Contemporary Holocaust memorialising is for different reasons, to do with emotions we must begin to examine and understand.
Julia Neuberger is a rabbi and chief execu- tive of the King's Fund, London