Peter Novick, a (non-practicing) Jewish professor at the University of Chicago, wrote the ground-breaking (and earth-shaking) The Holocaust in American Life in 1999. With insight massively confirmed in the 13 years since its publication, Novick delineated how that group of events, imagined and real, now packaged under the rubric of "the Holocaust" acquired outsize influence in American discourse among both Jews and non-Jews alike.