SOURCE: Baron, Lawrence. “Experiencing, Explaining, and Exploiting the Holocaust.” Judaism 50, no. 2 (spring 2001): 158-75.

In the following excerpt, Baron discusses several recent books on the Holocaust, including The Holocaust in American Life, commenting that Novick's book represents a warning against using the memory of the Holocaust as a means of advancing Jewish identity or other political agendas.

The number of Holocaust memoirs being published has increased dramatically in the last few years as more and more survivors feel an urgent obligation to document their wartime experiences as concentration camp inmates, ghetto dwellers, hidden fugitives, partisans, or refugees before they die. Similarly, the corpus of scholarly literature about the Holocaust grows unabatedly as the event itself recedes further into the past. A quick look at the Amazon.com website under the subject heading of “Holocaust” lists over 3,000 titles on the topic.

This proliferation of publications about the Shoah recently prompted...