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THE YEAR 2005 MARKS THE SIXTIETH ANNIVERSARY OF the end of the events we now know as the Holocaust or the Shoah. Called upon for a book-jacket blurb for Gunnar Paulsson's Secret City, one of the books reviewed here, however, well-known Holocaust historian Michael Marrus admitted, "For many of us in this field, it is difficult to imagine something new," and it has been some years since any new publication on the subject has captured public attention beyond the academic arena the way Daniel Goldhagen's controversial Hitler's Willing Executioners did in 1996. Are the new publications that continue to appear merely adding a few more brushstrokes to a picture that is essentially complete? And in particular, does the latest historical scholarship on the Holocaust have anything new to say about issues of concern to Jewish readers and scholars?
It is true that the most fundamental questions about the Holocaust are still the same as those that were asked at the time: how could anyone have committed such horrendous acts, and how should we judge the behavior of the victims?
Of the six books discussed here, three-Claudia Koonz's The Nazi Conscience, Christopher Browning and Jürgen Matthaus's The Origins of the Final Solution, and Robert Jan Van Pelt's The Case for Auschwitz-fit into the category of "perpetrator history"-the attempt to understand those who carried out the Holocaust. The others focus on parallel issues, especially psychological and motivational ones. These however explore Jewish responses. Recent scholarship thus shows that the lessons of the Holocaust are changing: the connection between genocide and bureaucratic structures now seems less self-evident, the status of Jewish resistance perhaps more ambivalent, the commonality of Jewish fate inflected by gender differences. Even if Eva Hoffman is correct in claiming that the Jewish community's obsession with the Holocaust has begun to wane, however, it is clear that the events of the Shoah still loom large in the definition of Jewish identity. Pondering the rise in antisemitism since September 11 and the American invasion of Iraq, Hoffman laments the fact "that my generation has not attained full freedom from the constrictions of Jewish history after all" (263). But simple analogies with the Hitler period can be dangerous. Like the Jews of the Holocaust era, we have to...