Yom HaShoah

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Today is the Jewish Holocaust Memorial Day. I don't have a lot to say about it but I want to note that it exists, and also link to a couple of articles about the pitfalls of Holocaust education. Both are US-focused but applicable elsewhere too. Yom HaShoah itself originates as an Israeli national day, and I don't know enough to have an informed opinion about Holocaust education in Israel, but for my context, in the anglophone diaspora, outside the main countries where mass murder was carried out:

Sarah Ellen Zarrow, an American professor of Holocaust history, writes in the Forward on Why we are teaching the Holocaust wrong.

And along similar lines but in much more detail, Dara Horn at the Atlantic asks: Is Holocaust education making anti-semitism worse? (This article is sort of paywalled but readable with JavaScript turned off.)

I really need to read Horn's books both fiction and non-fiction, because every time I come across an essay or a comment by her I go, wow, yes, she's really onto something. Horn agrees with Zarrow that making the Holocaust a kind of stand-in for moral education in general is harmful. Studying the actual history is worthwhile, using the Nazis as a synechdoche for ultimate evil is counterproductive for lots of reasons. Horn also has a lot to say about focusing exclusively on Jewish suffering and persecution and none of the positive things about Jewish history and culture. Both these are problems in intra-community Jewish education as well as secular education about the Holocaust aimed at non-Jews.

I don't agree with all of Horn's conclusions, mainly because I see very little value in using VR for any sort of education, particularly not making animated holograms of historical figures speaking words generated by LLMs and pattern matching. Ugh!

Comments

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Thanks for the links. If you'll excuse some comparisons in the context of history teaching methods, I don't generally do the Holocaust as a history instructor, but I do have to teach a handful of subjects with some similarities (genocides in the nineteenth and early twentieth century Balkans/Middle East in my field, and because grad students in my program usually end up TAing American history classes even if they don't study it, American slavery and lynching, and Indian Removal). I think there are broad issues where, first, there's a need to engage past "it was bad and it really happened" level stuff that is not always met when the instructor is not an expert and there's nothing about it in the lesson plans and what is demanded in curriculums is that It Was Bad message, and second, it can be very difficult to know how to approach a subject like a genocide in a survey course or a high school classroom where you get maybe a week or two, all the more so if you're not an expert in the specific period or the topic of genocide. Having to avoid "uncomfortable" or "political" subject matter can make that much worse, but unfortunately in the context of US K-12 education in conservative states, that's its own separate battle right now.

(FWIW, I disagree with a lot of the conclusions of the second article, though! I think some broad picture context is helpful when you're teaching genocide, but emphasizing it too much leads to the same People Just Intrinsically Hate X Group thing; I think what is really helpful is specific, recent context that focuses on the political/cultural factors that led to genocide occurring at a specific time. This is an issue especially in the context of the Balkans, where the traditional narrative is "intrinsic tribal hatreds" and/or "centuries-long battle against The Turks" the latter of which awkwardly transitions into "but actually massacring the Bosnian Muslims was obviously Not Good;" the impression that teaching long-term hatred as its own force, without other cultural/historical context, gives is generally "diversity intrinsically causes genocide." That is also a terrible takeaway!)

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Thank you so much for this commentary, it's really fascinating to hear from someone who teaches genocides at college level. I don't the Holocaust is unique in the sense that it's the Ultimate Evil and no other historical event must ever be compared to it. But I do think it's unique from a pedagogical perspective precisely because it sometimes is presented as the Ultimate Evil. If someone's actually taking American history or modern history classes at college level, it's not a given that their engagement with the topic will be more sophisticated, but there's at least a chance that they will have some sense of context that's more likely to be missing when it's K-12 with a generalist teacher and the Holocaust is the only historical It Was Bad that they hear about.

But with all that preamble, absolutely, the problems with teaching this material very much do translate. Very sensitive and political topics covered in a survey course by a non-expert. Lack of appropriate curriculum material that goes beyond 'bad and really happened' but doesn't go into excessive depth (compared to other topics in the course) to the point where people start thinking there's nuance as to whether it was actually bad.

I agree with your second paragraph and to a large extent I read Horn as agreeing with you, not disagreeing. My takeaway was yes, you need to explain that there's a long history of antisemitism and the Nazis didn't just pick an arbitrary group of people to scapegoat for no reason other than pure abstract hatred. But that doesn't mean there's something about the Jews that makes them deserving of persecution and genocide, and your example about long-standing western European attitudes to the Turks versus genocide against Bosnian Muslims being bad really illustrates that well. I think, and I read Horn as arguing, that we need some context in terms of what's unique and positive about Jewish culture (or other persecuted minorities), otherwise, yes, you end up teaching "diversity causes genocide", which is really crap.

[yrieithydd]

Ooh, I wish I'd seen this before we reflected on Yom haShoah at our Franciscan group tonight (led by someone who is involved in the Council of Christians and Jews)