If you're a Jew, this book is invaluable. I believed myself to be a rather skeptical Jew as these things go, but Finkelstein's moral and intellectual clarity nevertheless helped me to order my thoughts considerably.

I will bring up only one particular thread of many I found interesting, which is that The Holocaust has become a distorted image of Judaism itself and something like a "secular" religion. I had assumed, perhaps until reading this, that I had had a secular Jewish upbringing, but I no longer believe this to be true. In many ways, I did grow up in a religious home, but the religion was The Holocaust.

Finkelstein mentions the importance of the "uniqueness" and "unknowableness" of The Holocaust, promulgated by Wiesel and others. I remember asking—at first others, then only myself—Why did the suffering of other people not compare? What did it mean for suffering to be incomparable? Why did the Roma not matter as much as the Jews? Why did all the Soviet dead never get brought up? How was it that this historical event—unlike, say, the nature of the divine—was beyond human understanding?

Such questions are deemed inadequate—It is resorting to mere human reason!—and that true understanding comes not from reasoning, but from accepting paradoxes and contradictions, from inhaling the mystery deeply. Not understanding was understanding, you see... All nonsense, of course.