ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses a long-standing question in the study, and wider public discussion, of the Holocaust, and proposes an answer to it. It explores the suggestion that this question is not worth pursuing, subject as it is to the influences of identity and political context and to evaluative judgements that serve them. The chapter sets out the principal reasons generally offered in support of the claim that the Holocaust was unique, and the objections to them. Resuming the earlier discussion of the meaning of the question itself, the chapter proposes that a resolution is possible if we focus on what can sometimes be involved in the existence of a conceptual category boundary. Philosopher, Laurence Thomas – an African American and a Jew – has argued similarly, in comparing the Holocaust with American slavery. For Novick, remember, insistence on the uniqueness of the Holocaust is 'an intellectually empty enterprise'.
