Review of The Holocaust and Collective Memory: The American Experience by Peter Novick, Bloomsbury and The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering by Norman G Finkelstein, Verso

The horror felt at the Nazi crime of exterminating six million European Jews, simply because they were Jews, surely needs no explanation. The puzzling question is, in the words of Prof Novick, "Why now?" Why should so much more have been done to commemorate the Holocaust in the last 20 years than in the 35 years after World War II, when more of the survivors, and far more of their near relations, were still alive?

Norman Finkelstein is surely right to claim that commemoration has grown to the size of an industry with several thousand employees. Not only was a Holocaust museum inaugurated in the US by President Carter and subsidised by Federal funds. But smaller versions have sprouted in many parts of the United States and a few in some other countries as well. Why do we not leave it to the genuine memorials on the spot? For instance, the Ninth Fort at the top of a green hill outside Kaunas, Lithuania. This was established by the Czars, but is now mainly known as the place where the Nazis took tens of thousands of Jews and others to to be shot. Against the skyline is a modern style memorial of three jagged metallic pieces standing bare against the blue horizon. This is intrinsically more moving than anything that high powered American publicity efforts can establish.

The two books have many themes in common. The authors often agree and Finkelstein acknowledges his indebtedness to Novick's research. Temperamentally I was more drawn to Novick's historical and philosophical reflections than I was to Finkelstein's two-fold indictment:- of the state of Israel for using the Holocaust memories to drum up American support, and of Jewish representative organisations in America and their lawyers and advisers who have made a very good living out of their efforts to secure compensation and restitution from Germany, Switzerland, Austria and other countries. He understandably contrasts the $3,500 which his mother received in compensation immediately after World War II with the large sums by those now leading or representing American Jewish organisations. But to discuss his angry accusations fairly and effectively one would need to know about the intricacies and in-fighting among American Jewish organisations and personalities.

Alternatively one would have to have knowledge and strong views about the minutiae of the Arab-Israeli conflict. On the latter I am not prepared to go beyond saying that the Israel "doves" who would make concessions to attain an honourable peace settlement are acting in the best interests of Israel as well as the wider international community.

Neither writer can really tell us "Why now?" Even if all Finkelstein's accusations are true, this does not explain why the exploitation of the Holocaust for political and personal gain did not take place over half a century ago. Indeed, although my own maternal grandmother and her family were killed by the Nazis, I do not remember the word "Holocaust" coming into circulation until several decades later.

Novick, as a good historian, knows that he cannot give a simple historical monocausal explanation of this or any other puzzling phenomenon. What he gives us is an illuminating partial history of organised American Jewry from World War II onwards, with attitudes to the Holocaust as its main focus.

My own cynical view is that American presidents can now safely wax indignant because not only is the massacre of European Jewry a long distant event about which they are not called on to take any action; but so are many of its immediate consequences, such as the problem of the displaced persons who emerged from the camps and the arguments about whether to establish a Jewish state in what was Palestine.

Interestingly enough, Zionist leaders were initially very cautious about making too much of the problems of displaced persons, who found so many parts of the civilised world closed to them. For the fear was that if America or Britain or other Western countries opened their doors wider the displaced would be less inclined to go to what was then Palestine and the argument for establishing Israel as a state as a refuge would be weakened. An additional factor - which perhaps both authors emphasise a little too much - is that when at the height of the Cold War, when American leaders were concerned to enlist the German Federal Republic as an ally, they did not choose to dwell on Nazi crimes. In my own precocious youth I can remember being opposed to German rearmament - not because of the Holocaust but because I thought it a sin to snuff out the anti-militarist reaction that had developed in Germany in order to secure a few extra divisions which would, in any case, be of little use against an all-out Soviet attack.

In the early post-War years, Nato politics was not the only factor. Many of the concentration camp survivors wanted to rebuild their lives without dwelling on the past. Moreover the emphasis was on Nazi barbarism which claimed many millions of other victims. Indeed in World War II itself American Jews were anxious to rebut the accusation that the war had been entered into on their behalf.

I myself could not imagine that the killings perpetrated by either side in a modern war could be justified by the usual disputes over frontiers and political regimes; and the only remotely plausible excuse for bombing German cities was that their rulers were responsible for barbarities extending far beyond any one ethnic group - as indeed they were, considering their treatment of the Roma, millions of civilians in the Slav countries and social democrats and trade unionists, not to speak of handicapped people, in Germany itself. It was for vaguely articulated reasons of this kind that I felt reluctant to join other infants who fraternised with German prisoners of war who were being used to repair bomb damage in the London suburbs.

According to Novick's account, the beginnings of the present focus on the Holocaust came during the Six-Day war of 1967. Although the Israelis won it and then secured their hold over the occupied territories, there was at the outset the fear that they might lose and that a new Holocaust would be perpetrated in the Middle East.

The Yom Kippur War of 1973 was a shock of a different kind. Although the Israelis won, the unexpectedly good showing of the Arab countries made American Jews realise just how vulnerable even a strongly armed Israel was; and by this time American foreign policy had switched from fear of alienating Arab opinion to relying on Israel as one of its few dependable allies in the Middle East.

In conversations both then and now, my Zionist friends have never ceased to emphasise how, for instance, German or Dutch Jews, who may have been remote from traditional observances and considered themselves solid citizens of their own country, were swept into the gas chambers. But as Novick points out and a glance at a map of the Middle East will confirm, in today's world Israel is one of the places where Jews are least secure.

Subsequent events were not part of any coherent plot or story. The sensitivities of non-Jewish Americans were aroused by NBC's four part series Holocaust in 1978. which was seen by a hundred million Americans. After that came the film Schindler's List which reinforced the lessons.

From then on events seem to have acquired a momentum of their own. In several American states the teaching of the Holocaust is compulsory; there are, as Novick remarks, many chairs in the subject and there is no early danger of it being forgotten.

The impact of more recent events in the former Yugoslavia, in Rwanda and, a little earlier, the Pol Pot killings in Cambodia. pointed in two directions. It kept the propensity of human beings to genocide in the headlines; but it weakened Jewish claims to be unique victims.

An additional factor supporting the American Jewish emphasis on the Holocaust is the decay of traditional religious belief, the growth of intermarriage and the fading in many places of Zionist enthusiasm.. The Holocaust memories have thus emerged as the best available unifying factor to keep together the American Jewish community.

Both authors finds many aspects of the Holocaust industry distasteful. Novick's own views are given in his introduction: he does not pretend that they are "lessons of history". He notes that the cultivation of sacred relics of suffering is far more in the Christian than in the Jewish tradition. Both writers condemn the tendency to play down the suffering of millions of other victims of Hitler - and of Stalin and Mao for that matter. Yet those who query the uniqueness of Jewish suffering have been accused of being "Holocaust deniers"; and legal actions have been taken over the matter.

Even while I write this the British Home Secretary, Jack Straw, has been investigating whether "Holocaust denial" should be an offence under British law. If it ever were to become an offence, there would soon be plausible demands by all kinds of other groups to make denial of their sufferings an equal offence. Before long the virtues of free speech and unimpaired historical enquiry would be cast aside in favour of the bogus virtue of the self righteous, thus giving the philosophers of totalitarianism a posthumous victory.