SOURCE: Roskies, David G. “Group Memory.” Commentary 108, no. 2 (September 1999): 62-5.

In the following review, Roskies argues that The Holocaust in American Life fails to take into account broader cultural and historical factors that affect Jewish-American conceptions of the Holocaust.

Must every major city in the United States boast its own museum of the Holocaust? Must every high school offer a mandatory curriculum on the destruction of European Jewry, every college campus have an endowed chair of Holocaust studies? Should a so-called Week of Remembrance in mid-April be observed, as Martin Luther King Day is now observed in mid-January? How many movies and books are enough?

To Peter Novick, the point of saturation has already been reached. A professor of history at the University of Chicago, Novick has set out to write the story of Holocaust consciousness in America [in The Holocaust in American Life,] beginning in the war...