If it is in any way possible for genocide to have had a heyday, the Holocaust surely once had such a moment in time. The world’s greatest mass murder, which for decades had succumbed to the shrill sounds of global silence – in part due to shock, and the rest to embarrassment – “enjoyed” a period when it was the atrocity du jour, the anthem to man’s inhumanity to man. This period began toward the end of the 1970s (exemplified by the hit 1978 miniseries Holocaust) and reached its zenith by the mid-1990s. During that improbable time, the Holocaust had bizarrely become a cultural touchstone fashioned from the ashes of Auschwitz.