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different technologies, including gas chambers. This concise definition is provided by Michael
Shermer and Alex Grobman in Denying History: Who Says the Holocaust Never Happended and
Why Do They Say It? (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2000), p.xv. During the 1960s the
term Holocaust came to be universally accepted as a term for this process. The meaning of the
Greek original of the word is "destruction by fire" and its original meaning was the burnt
offering of an animal on an altar. The Hebrew term is Shoah.
The details of the Holocaust have been debated by historians, and mortality figures have
been fine-tuned, revised upward or downward depending on the situation. Some matters have
been rejected as myths--for example, the production of soap from Jewish corpses was largely an
unsubstantiated rumor--and a few survivor accounts have been exposed as inaccurate or even
spurious, such as the book Fragments, by Binjamin Wilkomirski, which purports to be the
author's childhood experiences at Auschwitz but actually he had never been there.
Others have raised questions about the political and cultural exploitation of the
Holocaust, including Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (1999), Tim Cole, Selling
the Holocaust: From Auschwitz to Schindler, How History Is Bought, Packaged, and Sold
(1999), and Norman G. Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of
Jewish Suffering (2001). Issues here include museums that edit out the sufferings of non-Jewish
victims, the propagation of Holocaust education programs that take the topic out of history where
it belongs and transport it into realms of mysticism and identity definition, Holocaust speakers
and writers who have profited through large lecture honoraria and book royalties, and economic
pressures--reparations from Germany, American financial support of Israel, and Swiss banks
turning over World War II accounts of Jewish victims. Marc H. Ellis, Beyond Innocence and
Redemption: Confronting the Holocaust and Israeli Power (1990), suggests that Israel has gone
down the wrong track by utilizing the Holocaust to justify state power without acknowledging
the moral costs of so doing.
Another controversy is that of the "uniqueness" of the Holocaust, a question that is
examined by various scholars in the symposium edited by Alan S. Rosenbaum, Is the Holocaust
Unique? Perspectives on Comparative Genocide (2001). Is this genocide of such unique quality
that it can only be the experience of the Jewish people, and it may not be analyzed or explained
but simply viewed as the Tremendum, something so awesome and terrible that non-Jews cannot
identify with it? Can other genocides such as in Armenia, Cambodia, or Rwanda-Burundi be