Word: holocaustal
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Elie Wiesel visited the refugee camps in Macedonia last week, a few days before the prospect of peace broke out. Wiesel explicitly refused to compare the Kosovo tragedy to the Holocaust, saying, "I don't believe in drawing analogies." But there can be little doubt that the Clinton Administration, which has repeatedly invoked parallels between Kosovo and the Shoah, had exactly that in mind. As a U.S. embassy spokesman in Macedonia told the New York Times, Americans were losing focus on the reasons for our Balkan mission, and so "you need a person like Wiesel to keep your moral philosophy...
Perhaps. But as Peter Novick recounts in his provocative book The Holocaust in American Life, the century's signature cataclysm has been regularly applied in places as diverse as Iraq, Rwanda and Bosnia, to mixed effect. Some may argue that the Holocaust talk regarding Kosovo was justified, rallying support for a long bombing campaign. Now that this particular Hitler is at the bargaining table, however, the rhetoric, and its harsh implications, will most likely be quietly dropped as inconvenient...
Should there be some sort of penalty for promiscuous use of the Holocaust? Or does it exert such a hold on us that merely suggesting its limits as a model seems a sacrilege? Novick, a University of Chicago historian and a self-described secular Jew, is no Holocaust denier. But he is a ferocious chronicler of the way various agendas and accidents have conspired to make the Shoah ever more central to our consciousness. And he wonders whether this attention "is as desirable...as most people seem to think it is." It's a controversial thesis, made more...
Novick asserts that the Holocaust as we know it today--a transcending event with unique world-historical significance--is largely a "retrospective construction" that would have been unrecognizable just after World War II, when both Jews and Gentiles had reasons to avoid focusing on it. (Jews didn't want to be perceived as victims; America as a whole had embraced West Germany as a cold war ally.) Our current concept of the term, he writes, began to emerge with the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann and became ingrained when American Jewish organizations found it a potent metaphor for their fears...
...role by advocating justice and tolerance by directly addressing controversial issues. The Islamic Society held an Awareness Week, and Hillel sponsored events throughout the year that discussed religious tolerance. A December panel, for example, discussed the difference between religious tolerance and religious pluralism. Hillel also helped students remember the Holocaust's 50th anniversary with a panel discussion of Kristallnacht and screening of a movie on Auschwitz...