An argumentative edge is a risky thing, especially in a book of history, even popular history. We want authors to have views—to see their material in a fresh light, to tell us what’s important, and to impose a frame on the raw facts that deepens our understanding of the past. Some readers even seek out history told from a particular point of view—Marxist history, for example, or postmodern history. But it’s easy for a historian to go too far, for a point of view to start to feel like a tendentious slant. Readers looking for truth quickly come to mistrust a writer who they feel has an ax to grind—especially when the case being made is an argument about genocide.
Eugene Finkel, now a professor of international affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, was born in Lviv, in western Ukraine, into a Jewish family deeply scarred by the Holocaust. As he tells us in his new book, Intent to Destroy, his grandfather Lev Finkel returned home from fighting in World War II to find that his extended family—parents, sisters, brothers-in-law, nieces and nephews—had perished. Eugene, born in 1977, went on to become a scholar of the Shoah, studying first in Israel, then the U.S. In 2017, he produced a well-received scholarly book, Ordinary Jews: Choice and Survival During the Holocaust. Clearly, he knows a great deal about genocide and has some authority to make a case about the violence being perpetrated by Russia in Ukraine.
What he doesn’t seem to grasp is just how overused and muddy the word genocide has become, and how it might undermine rather than strengthen his case about Russia’s brutal aggression against Ukraine.
