text: I read this book with an open mind.  I am familiar with the tremendous criticism that has arisen from claims that survivors of child abuse may use their backgrounds to claim some sort of privileged status.  In a few cases, I think this criticism may be legitimate; in other cases, not.  So I was interested to see if there were perhaps legitimate reasons to criticize survivors of the Holocaust or their advocates in the Jewish community.  
  
  (Note:  I am not equating child abuse and the Holocaust.  I am saying that when people speak up about terrible things, there is often a tendency to see them as whiners who are shirking their responsibilities.  All things do not have to be equally terrible to promote this societal reaction.)
  
  I didn't find anything in this book to convince me of that.  What I found was to me an unconvincing and highly subjective summary of the Jewish reaction to the Holocaust, in which the author claims that it did not become a big deal until a long time after it was over, and that it was made into a big deal for illegitimate reasons, but this discussion is so subjective and brief that I was not persuaded to adopt his point of view.  
  
  The bulk of the book consists of complaints that Jewish organizations unfairly extorted money from countries such as Switzerland.  The argument becomes fairly technical here and evaluating it is beyond me because I have never read the reports ("audits," etc.) to which the author refers.  But I think that focusing so narrowly on money misses the point.  I expected to see a general discussion of the ways in which the author alleges that an emphasis on the Holocaust caused some Jews to "play the victim card," and what I got was a very indepth discussion of several fights about money about which I have no way of determining the truth of the author's allegations.
  
  To me it seems obvious that the Holocaust was a terrible atrocity with devastating consequences for the Jews, and many lives were destroyed or damaged as a result.  It seems reasonable to me that the Jewish community would insist that society recognize the destruction and damage, and to the extent that this book detracts from this, I think it is unfortunate
  