SOURCE: Review of The Holocaust in American Life, by Peter Novick. Virginia Quarterly Review 76, no. 3 (summer 2000): 102-03.

In the following review, the critic offers a mixed assessment of The Holocaust in American Life, noting that Novick fails to adequately address the questions he poses in regard to American conceptions of the Holocaust.

Why has the Holocaust become, in the last several decades, the central symbol in reflection on human depravity and cruelty in modernity? And why has this reflection occurred centrally in the United States rather than Europe? These are the questions with which Peter Novick began his investigations into the development of the Holocaust as a central moral symbol of American moral and political imagination. But while Novick begins with these questions, he doesn't answer them; they go missing when his historian's conscientiousness distracts him from the deeper questions into the surface narrative of events. What we...