Revenge of the Tipping Point: Chapter 7 Summary & Analysis

During World War II, Fred “Freddie” Diament was one of the first to be sent to a concentration camp, where many of his family members died. He survived, and years later in the 1950s, he ended up as CEO of a women’s clothing store. Rachel Lithgow met Diament as part of a circle of Los Angeles Holocaust survivors. Diament also remained good friends with Siegfried Halbreich, who was at the concentration camps with him. Diament and Halbreich often argued loudly but in a friendly way.

When Diament died in 2004, many fellow Holocaust survivors showed up at his funeral. But while Holocaust survivors themselves had long commemorated the past, it took official museums much longer to catch up, with the first Holocaust museum in the United States not appearing until 1961. Diament, along with friends like Lithgow and Halbreich, played a major role in helping found the Holocaust Museum LA. More Holocaust museums in the United States didn’t appear until the 1980s, with even more appearing in the 1990s.

Gladwell explains that this strange pattern in Holocaust museum foundings is related to an overstory, which is a concept similar to the German concept of zeitgeist, the spirit of the times.

Most historical events follow a pattern of collective memory like World War I did. In 1928, 10 years after the war ended, Erich Maria Remarque published All Quiet on the Western Front, which became the definitive novel of that war. The Vietnam War was similarly followed in about 10 years by Apocalypse Now, and shortly after that by the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. Holocaust depictions followed a different pattern. While Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl and its adaptations were an early example, other media generally avoided the Holocaust or targeted only a niche audience. Indeed, some history books in the 1960s and 1970s even seemed to minimize the topic of genocide.

Up through the 1970s, many people hesitated to discuss the Holocaust, even within the Jewish community. The topic was painful, and some survivors were even vague when telling their own children about the Holocaust. Notably, until 1978, it was more common to render “holocaust” in lowercase, and then all of a sudden, the capitalized “Holocaust” became more common. That change occurred in same year that a television miniseries called Holocaust: The Story of the Family Weiss debuted. The series starred James Woods and Meryl Streep and was inspired by real-life events. While filming at the actual site of a death camp, some extras in the film couldn’t believe that such terrible events really happened, believing the director must have been exaggerating the story.

The Holocaust miniseries had its critics, including Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, but it nevertheless played a massive role in helping people visualize what the Holocaust would have really looked like. Today, Gladwell admits that it’s hard to imagine a single television show having such a profound impact, but he argues that television made up a much larger share of the total media back then, when over 45 percent of Americans tuned in to watch the 1983 series finale of M*A*S*H. One survey found that television played a big role in shaping people’s worldview, perhaps even more significant than political affiliation.

While it took a long time for Holocaust museums to come about, discussions about memorials begin as early as 1946. Many Holocaust survivors and other Jewish people supported these memorials, while others feared that monuments would just make Jewish people seem like victims. Many survivors tacitly agreed that what happened to them was too horrible to memorialize and that blocking it from their minds was the only way to continue. Indeed, soldiers who liberated the extermination camps were often baffled, unable to comprehend what they saw, which didn’t even formally have the name of Holocaust yet.

Despite these challenges, when Lithgow contributed to making a small Los Angeles Holocaust museum in the 1960s, she found that many survivors were inspired by how openly the museum addressed their past. Meanwhile, in 1978, the airing of Holocaust in Germany caused a public reckoning, doing more to draw attention to the issue than public intellectuals in the United States ever could do. While the term “Holocaust” as a proper noun existed before the TV show, Gladwell believes that TV was the tipping point and the reason why people adopted the word for that period in history, showing the power that storytellers can have.