The Holocaust in American Life Add a review

The Holocaust in American Life is a book of cultural history written by historian Peter Novick. Published by Houghton Mifflin in 1999, the book examines the historiography and remembrance of the Holocaust in the United States, with a focus on what Novick claims was a growing amount of attention paid in the latter decades of the 20th century. The question Novick seeks to answer is "why in 1990s America – fifty years after the fact and thousands of miles from its site – the Holocaust has come to loom so large in our culture." He also expresses skepticism that Holocaust preoccupation is "a healthy phenomenon for American society, its Jewish minority, and a balanced understanding of the Holocaust itself."

The book was reviewed by many Jewish magazines and other publications. While generally praised, it drew controversy because of its thesis that Holocaust commemoration in the U.S. was influenced by what has been termed the "politics of memory", and that the salience of the tragedy waxed and waned due, in part, to political calculations. The Holocaust in American Life was sometimes linked with Norman Finkelstein's even more controversial The Holocaust Industry (2000), which expanded on Novick's analysis and explicitly argued that "Holocaust memory" had become "an ideological construct of vested interests."