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This analysis critiques Novick's insights on victimhood in history, suggesting implications for understanding competitive narratives.
Peter Novick is a fine historian who has written a fine, if flawed, study. In The Holocaust in American Life he asks many of the right questions and offers some insightful answers. As I read along, I found myself nodding in agreement at many points while imagining the howls of outrage provoked by his several challenges to current orthodoxies. For example, Tony Judt—an unusually balanced scholar and one of my favorite historians—found Novick’s book to be “dense, carefully researched, and rather irritating” (“The Morbid Truth,” The New Republic, July 19 and 26, 1999). The book stirred up my own thoughts on competitive victimhood.
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David Beisel (1999) studied this question.
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