Response to Eva Fogelman (response article)

Some (not all) of Dr. Fogelman’s criticisms of my The Holocaust in American Life seem to be based on misunderstandings of what I wrote. She says that my book is based on the assumption that “Holocaust awareness is ubiquitous”—an assumption which she then proceeds to question, basing her argument largely on various public opinion surveys. I am less impressed than she is with how much one can infer from what I term in the book this “blunt and flawed instrument,” and I reiterated this caveat on the occasions when I cited them. In any case, on a number of occasions I distinguished between the frequency of references to the Holocaust—increasing diffuse awareness of the Holocaust—and any substantial knowledge about the Holocaust. Indeed, so far as gentile Americans are concerned, I argue that concern with the Holocaust is “a mile wide and an inch deep.” So, I don’t see that we have any quarrel on this point, and I don’t understand why she’s trying to create one.

There are issues on which Dr. Fogelman offers social (or are they psychological?) explanations of what she sees as the deficiencies in my book. She finds inadequate my treatment of American Jewish religious responses to the Holocaust. This, she says, is because I am “a secular Jew … an ‘outsider’….” Others will have to judge whether the several pages I devote to religious matters are inadequate, but if they are, is the explanation so simple? Are Dr. Fogelman’s writings on Polish Catholic rescuers devalued because she is not a Polish Catholic? This kind of offhand reductionism seems to me deplorable—the sort of thing that gives psychology (and psychohistory) a bad name.

In a similarly reductionist fashion she explains why it is “not surprising” that I conclude that “most American Jews are dependent on the Holocaust for their identity.” My conclusion, she says, derives from the fact that “Novick himself is an assimilated Jew who is not involved in Jewish communal or religious life.” For starters, where does she get this “assimilated” stuff, and what is it supposed to mean? And in any case, Dr. Fogelman misstates my conclusion on the question of identity. I wrote, summarizing the long chapter in which the matter is discussed, that “so far as self-understanding is concerned, there’s no way of knowing just how many American Jews, and which American Jews, ground their Jewish identity in the Holocaust, but the number appears to be large.” I immediately added, “It’s clear that the Holocaust has less relative importance for those Jews with an identity firmly rooted in Jewish religious belief or who are otherwise grounded in Jewish culture, but that’s a rather small percentage of American Jewry.” (Does Dr. Fogelman disagree?) Then, after briefly reviewing the myriad factors I’d previously discussed in the chapter—factors which, in my view, led to the centering of the Holocaust in American Jewish consciousness—I wrote the following:

For those who prefer “harder” data, and for what it’s worth, there are the results of the American Jewish Committee’s “1998 Annual Survey of American Jewish Opinion.” Those responding were asked to rate the importance of various listed activities to their Jewish identity. The year 1998 was the first in which “remembrance of the Holocaust” was included in the list. It won hands down—chosen as “extremely important” or “very important” by many more than those who chose synagogue attendance, Jewish study, working with Jewish organizations, traveling to Israel, or observing Jewish holidays.

Dr. Fogelman goes on to say that my treatment of “Righteous Gentiles” is “insensitive and uninformed.” To demonstrate this, she quotes very selectively from my book. She cites my conclusion about the institutional use of the commemoration of Righteous Gentiles while omitting the context of that conclusion. Let me demonstrate this by quoting the relevant passage from my book.

Some individuals who pressed for recognition of Christian rescuers wanted to combat blanket condemnation of gentiles; in the words of one such individual, to break down the “fortress-like mentality” of American Jews. But the institutional use of the commemoration of Righteous Gentiles as “the exceptions that prove the rule” has

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usually been in the service of shoring up that mentality—promoting a wary suspicion of gentiles.

(I then proceed to illustrate this wary suspicion by noting the frequency with which American Jews observe that they repeatedly ask themselves which of their gentile acquaintances would hide their children, “if it came to that.”)

As proof that “institutional” commemoration of rescuers does not serve the function I said it did, Dr. Fogelman cites the Anti-Defamation League’s support of her “Jewish Foundation for Christian Rescuers” and her own writings (which she mistakenly assumes I do not know). But, in fact, the example she gives supports my contention. Dr. Fogelman is, as it happens, one of those individuals I had in mind. In discussing her book, Abraham Foxman, head of the ADL, which promoted it, illustrates my point about institutional use, by publicly insisting that “what is important about the book is that the reader comes away understanding that rescue of Jews was a rare phenomenon. [The fact is] that 700 million people lived in Nazi-occupied Europe; to date 11,000 have been honored by Yad Vashem for rescuing Jews.” (I also cite the director of Yad Vashem’s Department of the Righteous, who explained that “spicing” the history of the Holocaust with stories of rescuers was indispensable in showing the delinquency of European Christians “against the background of the righteous.”)

Readers of this exchange will understand my difficulty in framing a satisfactory response to various adjectives Dr. Fogelman applies to me—“glib,” “cynical,” “ahistorical.” To decide whether these terms are accurate, as in reaching judgments on the issues which I have briefly addressed above, they’ll have to read the book and compare it with Dr. Fogelman’s characterizations.

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