SOURCE: Ellis, Marc H. “Ending the Era of Auschwitz.” Christian Century 116, no. 26 (6 October 1999): 938-40.

In the following review, Ellis compares The Holocaust in American Life to Emil Fackenheim's To Mend the World, asserting that Novick's work raises important questions about the significance of the Holocaust to current Jewish-American attitudes about Israel.

As part of a delegation meeting in 1992 to discuss the future of Auschwitz, I walked the camp's terrible terrain with such notable Holocaust scholars as Richard Rubenstein, David Roskies and Alvin Rosenfeld. There I heard the most radical thought about Holocaust remembrance that I had encountered in many years. A conservative rabbi in our group proposed that, instead of preserving and augmenting the Auschwitz site and revising the museum's materials to emphasize the particularity of Jewish suffering, Jewish leaders should invoke a statute of limitations on the memory of the Holocaust.

I was immediately struck by his...