SOURCE: Popkin, Jeremy D. “Holocaust Memory: Bad for the Jews?” Judaism 50, no. 1 (winter 2001): 112-17.

In the following review of The Holocaust in American Life, Popkin questions whether or not Novick sees any value in the maintenance of a distinctive Jewish identity in American culture.

Imagine a well-meaning person—Jewish or non-Jewish—who has been moved by a visit to the Holocaust Memorial Museum, who has waded through historical accounts and memoirs on the topic, and who then picks up Peter Novick's The Holocaust in American Life. How will he or she react to the discovery that a prominent Jewish American historian now condemns the entire effort to remember and comprehend the Jewish catastrophe of 1933-1945 as yet one more trend that is “bad for the Jews”? Just when Jews and Gentiles seemed to have agreed that knowledge of the Holocaust should be part of every modern citizen's moral...