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One of the sadder spectacles of our time is the growth of a victimization industry. Beginning with the initial discussions to build a Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., groups representing the victims of Nazi conquest demanded that they be included in any memorial. Even the meaning of the word Holocaust which, after the opening of the death camps was synonymous with the murder of European Jewry, was redefined to mean the murder of 6 million Jews and 10 million others.
The trivialization of the term Holocaust has reached a point where many scholars have begun to eschew the word and substituted the Hebrew Shoah in an effort to protect the history of the European Jews who were murdered by the Nazis. It would appear that one objective of Katz's superb first of a projected three-volume work is to set the historical record straight by not only examining in what ways the Shoah was unique but also to provide direction so that reasonable people can distinguish between the historic Novum known as the Holocaust and other historic examples of mass murder.
From its opening pages Katz, who is professor of Jewish history and thought at Cornell University, make it clear that the unprecedented nature of the Holocaust derived from Hitler's intention to rid the planet of its Jewish population. It was Hitler's determination to murder every Jewish man, woman, and child simply because of the accident of their birth that gives the Holocaust its unique meaning. Katz makes it clear through his historical survey of state-sponsored mass murder that the Nazi policy to immolate world Jewry had no precedent in history. Actually, much of Katz's meticulously researched book focuses on the causes and objectives of mass murder from ancient times to the present and concludes...