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  • Holocaust: An American Understanding by Deborah E. Lipstadt
  • David Slucki
Deborah E. Lipstadt, Holocaust: An American Understanding. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2016, pp. 220. Paperback, $27.95. ISBN: 978-0813564760.

The latter half of 2016 saw a steep rise in overt and coded antisemitism in the United States, with the rise of the increasingly vocal "altright," a neat euphemism for diffuse groups of white supremacists and neo-Nazis. The election of Donald Trump to the highest office in the country emboldened groups that previously sat on the margins. Part of the arsenal of such groups is to harass and threaten Jewish writers, commentators, and leaders, making regular reference to the gas chambers and Hitler. Not only the altright was abusing the memory of the Holocaust: In criticizing media coverage of his father's campaign, Donald Trump Jr. claimed that if the Republican Party had behaved as he claimed the Democrats had, "they'd be warming up the gas chamber right now." In 2016, the Holocaust has become firmly entrenched as a convenient meme in the political sphere.

Deborah Lipstadt's contribution to Rutgers University Press's series Keywords in Jewish Studies is a timely and important contribution to the growing body of literature on the American Jewish response to the Holocaust. It complements and captures historians' recent efforts to debunk what Hasia Diner described as the "myth of silence," the notion that American Jewry, survivors, [End Page 227] and Americans more broadly failed to adequately memorialize the Holocaust. Not only does the book add to this burgeoning field, it helps to provide important context as to how and why the Holocaust gets so routinely deployed in contemporary political discourse.

In this succinct and readable volume, Lipstadt skillfully interweaves a range of disciplinary approaches that have developed and been reshaped over the past seventy years. She describes debates among historians, sociologists, philosophers, and psychologists, and shows how these debates are intertwined with literary, television, and film representations of the Holocaust. Organized chronologically, Lipstadt begins with discussion over how the term "Holocaust" came into broad usage, before going on to develop three overarching themes that run through the book, overlapping at various points.

The first of these threads charts development of the interdisciplinary, scholarly field of Holocaust studies. Beginning with survivor-historian Phillip Friedman and trailblazer Raul Hilberg, she traces the various debates among historians, theologians, and public intellectuals, from debates over Jewish responses to Nazism to the ongoing controversy around the Holocaust's uniqueness. Most useful is the way Lipstadt deftly historicizes these debates, recovering the nuance that often gets lost in the recounting of such controversies. Lipstadt effectively demonstrates, for example, the way that Hannah Arendt's controversial positions on the Jewish Councils and on the Eichmann Trial have for decades been mischaracterized by scholars and commentators. She makes interesting observations about many of the non-Jewish scholars at the forefront of the field of Holocaust studies, showing how the Holocaust is a universal concern, not only limited to scholars in Jewish studies.

A second theme Lipstadt explores is how artistic and pop cultural representations of the Holocaust emerged and shifted since the immediate post-war period. She examines novels, films, and television series, devoting extended discussion to the production and reception of key texts such as John Hersey's The Wall, The Diary of Anne Frank, the television miniseries Holocaust, and of course, Schindler's List.

The third broad theme that runs through this book's pages is how the Holocaust has been politically instrumentalized, at both communal and governmental level. She describes how the baby boomer generation of American Jews drew political lessons from the Holocaust; how the Holocaust provided a backdrop for the movement to free Soviet Jewry; and how presidents including Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton dealt with the increasing presence of the Holocaust in American public life. On this topic, the question of the Holocaust's uniqueness comes up a number of times, as scholars and politicians have tried to see more recent genocides and conflicts through its lens.

As readers of Lipstadt might expect, the author does not shy away from taking strong positions on the historical debates...

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