SOURCE: Levine, Hillel. “The Decline of the Incredible.” New Leader 72, no. 7 (14 June 1999): 23-5.

In the following review, Levine questions Novick's methodology and use of sources in The Holocaust in American Life, noting some significant omissions in his argument.

In 1967 George Steiner, the British literary critic, predicted and also urged:

We cannot pretend that [Bergen] Belsen is irrelevant to the responsible life of the imagination. What man has inflicted on man in very recent times has affected the writer's primary material—the sum and potential of human behavior—and it presses on the brain with a new darkness.

Last year, a Steiner less sanguine about how much that “responsible life of the imagination” could do with the “new darkness”—or possibly overwhelmed by the newer darkness of the 1990s—warned of an epoch defined by the “decline of the incredible.”

Now [in The Holocaust in American Life,] University of...