SOURCE: Judt, Tony. “The Morbid Truth.” New Republic 221, no. 324 (19-26 July 1999): 36-40.

In the following review of The Holocaust in American Life, Judt observes that Novick's account of the historical development of Holocaust-awareness in America is accurate and well-researched, but comments that Novick's treatment of the Holocaust itself is superficial.

The Holocaust today is as much an argument as a memory. When the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, and Marek Edelman, a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, expressed their support for NATO attacks on Serbia recently, they did so with an explicit analogy with Hitler's attempted extermination of the Jews. The latter has become a metaphor, a moral lesson, a practical warning, an admonition. The argument-from-the-Holocaust has acquired an almost a priori character: it does not need to lay out its premises because these are familiar and understood. We know and understand what happened, and who did...