Dawidowicz's starting point in this survey of historical writing on
the destruction of six million European Jews is the observation
that this unprecedented event has been generally glossed over. The
Holocaust, she argues, was unique even within the context of the
million killed in World War II because Hitler aimed at total
annihilation of the Jews and because this was a central element in
Nazi ideology, for her, indeed, it was the central aim. Proceeding
to a review of the literature on this period, Dawidowicz (The War
Against the Jews) divides her study by national boundaries; her
chapters cover English and American, German, Soviet, Polish, and
Jewish historiography - and general histories as well as those
dealing more specifically with the Jews. The historian's attitude
toward the Jews, she maintains, is largely shaped by a national
perspective (which makes her omission of a chapter on France both
curious and regrettable). In surveying the English writings, she
attributes the general failure to give anti-Semitism due prominence
in explanations of Nazism to upper-class British anti-Semitism,
while the same oversight in the Polish and Soviet writings is seen
to stem from both official ideological fluctuations and
deeply-rooted anti-Semitism within the national cultures. In
discussing the differences between various Jewish histories of the
Holocaust, Dawidowicz uses a variety of approaches; in the case,
for instance, of Raul Hilberg - whose The Destruction of the
European Jews charged Jewish Council leaders with complicity in the
Holocaust - the contention is that Hilberg, not being a historian,
didn't know how to use documentary sources. Though Dawidowicz
solidly establishes her main point, her own perspective is skewed,
since she discounts any effort to discuss the political uses to
which Nazism put its ideology; for her, Nazism was not a
counterrevolutionary or rightist movement, but a movement to
destroy the Jews, and any other view is regarded, in one way or
another, as anti-Semitic. So while her survey is a useful (if
patchy) one, it doesn't tell the whole story. (Kirkus Reviews)
The renowned author of The War Against the Jews sets out to solve a
historiographical mystery. Why has the mass murder of European Jews
been overlooked or trivialized by historians throughout the world?
In a forceful, outspoken work, Lucy Dawidowicz looks for
explanations.
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