Yom HaShoah
Apr. 18th, 2023 11:31 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livToday 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!
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!
