Abstract
Demsky recommends that American and western European educators retool their Holocaust curriculum and delivery methods. Observing that increasing numbers of “Generation Z” students lack meaningful connections to this past, he argues that assigning more relatable—if less historically faithful—materials can rejuvenate students’ interest. Demsky presents a bifurcated analysis that separately examines American and western European goings-on. He presents numerous examples taken from contemporary literature, film, and television that demonstrate how teachers can repurpose traditional Holocaust lessons by adapting them to the modern representations. In addition to integrating new learning materials, Demsky argues that educators should shift the focus of Holocaust lessons away from eliciting students’ empathy toward more critical analyses that interrogate producers’ intent when depicting this past.
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Notes
- 1.
Beau Yarbrough, “Holocaust Denied by Students in Rialto School Assignment,” San Bernardino Sun, July 11, 2014, http://www.sbsun.com/social-affairs/20140711/exclusive-holocaust-denied-by-students-in-rialto-school-assignment#disqus_thread.
- 2.
N. Ann Rider, “The Perils of Empathy: Holocaust Narratives, Cognitive Studies and the Politics of Sentiments,” Holocaust Studies 19, no. 3 (2013): 46.
- 3.
Victoria Aarons and Alan Berger, Third-Generation Holocaust Representation: Trauma, History, and Memory (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press), 28.
- 4.
Martin Hoffman, Empathy and Moral Development: Implications for Caring and Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 47.
- 5.
Megan Conway, “Justin Bieber on Anne Frank: Reactions from Twitter and Beyond,” Rolling Stone, April 15, 2013, https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/justin-bieber-on-anne-frank-reactions-from-twitter-and-beyond-183172/.
- 6.
Karen Riley, “The Holocaust and Historical Empathy: The Politics of Understanding,” in Historical Empathy and Perspective Taking in the Social Studies eds. O L Davis, Elizabeth Anne Yeager, and Stuart Foster (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001), 143.
- 7.
Beau Yarbrough, “Rialto Unified Teachers on Second Holocaust Assignment: There Wasn’t a Dry Eye in the Room,” San Bernardino Sun, December 11, 2014, http://www.sbsun.com/social-affairs/20141211/rialto-unified-teachers-on-second-holocaust-assignment-there-wasnt-a-dry-eye-in-the-room.
- 8.
Ibid.
- 9.
Sara Horowitz, “Literary Afterlives of Anne Frank,” in Anne Frank Unbound: Media, Imagination, and Memory eds. Barbara Kirschenblatt-Gimblett and Jeffrey Shandler (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), 249–253.
- 10.
Nicholas Kinloch, “Learning about the Holocaust: Moral or Historical Question?” Teaching History 93 (1998): 44–6.
- 11.
Simone Schweber, Making Sense of the Holocaust: Lessons from Classroom Practice (New York: Teachers College Press, 2004), 6.
- 12.
Grant Rodwell, See Whose History?: Engaging History Students through Historical Fiction Book (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 176.
- 13.
Elaine Culberson strongly disagrees, characterizing decisions to teach the book as the “exact opposite” ambition to which Holocaust educators should strive. See “A Reflection on the Use of Iconic Holocaust Resources,” in Essentials of Holocaust Education: Fundamental Issues and Approaches eds. Samuel Totten and Stephen Feinberg (New York: Routledge, 2016), 136.
- 14.
Rodwell, Whose, 178.
- 15.
J. Spencer Clark, “Encounters with Historical Agency: The Value of Nonfiction Graphic Novels in the Classroom,” The History Teacher 46, no. 4 (2013): 490.
- 16.
Slavoj Žižek, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce (New York: Verso, 2009), 1.
- 17.
Barry Richards, “What Drove Anders Breivik?” Contexts 13, no. 4 (2014): 43.
- 18.
Ahmed Hashim, “Terrorism as an Instrument of Cultural Warfare: The Meaning of Anders Breivik,” Counter Terrorist Trends and Analyses 3, no. 8 (2011): 3.
- 19.
Larissa Allwork, “Holocaust Remembrance as “Civil Religion”: The Case of the Stockholm Declaration,” in Revisiting Holocaust Representation in the Post-Witness Era eds. Tanja Schult and Diana Popescu (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 288.
- 20.
Andres Breivik, “2083: A European Declaration of Independence,” accessed July 19, 2019, http://www.deism.com/images/breivik-manifesto-2011.pdf.
- 21.
Jan Selling, “Between History and Politics: The Swedish Living History Project as Discursive Formation,” Scandinavian Journal of History 36, no. 5 (2011): 555.
- 22.
Masako Shibata, “Holocaust Education in Transition: A Transnational Perspective,” in Equity in and Through Education: Changing Contexts, Consequences and Contestations eds. Stephen Carney and Michele Schweisfurth (Boston: Brill, 2018), 31–2.
- 23.
Andy Pearce, “The Anatomy of a Relationship: The Holocaust, Genocide, and Education in Britain,” in Remembering the Holocaust in Educational Settings ed. Andy Pearce (London: Routledge, 2018), 53–4.
- 24.
Kyrre Kverndokk, “Negotiating Holocaust Memory in School Trip Reports,” in Negotiating Pasts in the Nordic Countries eds. Anne Eriksen and Jón Viðar Sigurðsson (Chicago: Nordic Academic Press, 2010), 267.
- 25.
Ibid, 265.
- 26.
Ibid., 280.
- 27.
Irene Levin Berman, We Are Going to Pick Potatoes: Norway and the Holocaust, The Untold Story (Lanham, MD: Hamilton Books, 2010), 4–5.
- 28.
Krisitn Wagrell, “Cosmopolitan Memory in a National Context: The Case of the ‘Living History Forum,’” in Revisiting, eds. Popescu and Schult, 272.
- 29.
Karin Kvist Geverts, “The Challenges of Holocaust Education and Remembrance in Sweden,” in Bystanders, Rescuers, or Perpetrators?: The Neutral Countries and the Shoah eds. International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (Berlin: Metropol Verlag, 2016), 267.
- 30.
John Gilmour; Sweden, the Swastika and Stalin: The Swedish Experience in the Second World War (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 206.
- 31.
Michael Landzelius, ‘Homo Sacer’ out of Left Field: Communist “Slime” as Bare Life in 1930s and Second World War Sweden,” Human Geography 88, no. 4 (2006): 453, 463.
- 32.
Lucy Russell, Teaching the Holocaust in School History: Teachers or Preachers? (New York: Continuum, 2008), 7.
- 33.
Ibid.
- 34.
Debora Hinderliter Ortloff, “They Think It Is Funny to Call Us Nazis: Holocaust Education and Multicultural Education in a Diverse Germany,” in As the Witnesses Fall Silent: Twenty-First Century Holocaust Education in Curriculum, Policy and Practice eds. Zehavit Gross and Doyle Stevick (Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2015), 216.
- 35.
Ruth Wittlinger, “The Merkel Government’s Politics of the Past,” German Politics & Society 26, no. 4 (2008): 9.
- 36.
Esra Ozyurek, “Rethinking Empathy: Emotions Triggered by the Holocaust among the Muslim-Minority in Germany,” Anthropological Theory 18, no. 4 (2018): 457.
- 37.
Ibid., 458.
- 38.
Ibid., 457.
- 39.
Ibid., 466.
- 40.
Jørgen Nielsen and Jonas Otterbeck, Muslims in Western Europe (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 67.
- 41.
Ibid.
- 42.
Marcus Leonardus van Berkel, “Plotlines of Victimhood: The Holocaust in German and Dutch History Textbooks, 1960–2010,” (Ph.D. thesis, Erasmus University, Rotterdam, 2017), 55.
- 43.
Jewish Telegraph Agency, “Dutch Muslim Pupils Resist Holocaust Education,” Times of Israel, March 6, 2015, https://www.timesofisrael.com/dutch-muslim-pupils-resist-holocaust-education/.
- 44.
Ibid. For a wider discussion of Muslims’ Jewish victim blaming, see Joseph Spoerl, “Muhammad and the Jews According to Ibn Ishaq,” The Levantine Review 2, no. 1 (2013): 94.
- 45.
Remco Ensel and Annemarike Stremmelaar, “Speech Acts: Observing Antisemitism and Holocaust Education in the Netherlands,” in Perceptions of the Holocaust in Europe and Muslim Communities eds. Günther Jikeli and Joëlle Allouche-Benayoun (New York: Dordrecht Springer 2013), 153.
- 46.
Dan Diner, “Memory and Restitution: World War II as a Foundational Event in a Uniting Europe,” in Restitution and Memory: Material Restitution in Europe eds. Dan Diner and Gotthart Wunberg (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007), 11–2.
- 47.
Evelien Gans, “Hamas, Hamas, All Jews to the Gas: The History and Significance of an Antisemitic Slogan in the Netherlands, 1945–2010,” in Perceptions eds. Jikeli and Allouche-Benayoun, 97.
- 48.
Manfred Gerstenfeld, “Anti-Israelism and Anti-Semitism: Common Characteristics and Motifs,” Jewish Political Studies Review 19, no. 1/2 (2007): 101.
- 49.
Evelien Gans, “They Have Forgotten to Gas You”: Post-1945 Anti-Semitism in the Netherlands,” in Dutch Racism eds. Philomena Essed and Isabel Hoving (Amsterdam: Rodopi B.V., 2014), 72.
- 50.
Gans, “Hamas,” 90.
- 51.
Jytte Klausen, The Cartoons that Shook the World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 18.
- 52.
Gans, “Hamas,” 90.
- 53.
Thomas Fallace, The Emergence of Holocaust Education in American Schools (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 104.
- 54.
Ibid, 105.
- 55.
Flawed teaching materials may have damaged these efforts. Scholars’ review of Holocaust curricula assigned to public school students in California, Connecticut, Virginia, and Florida reveals “rife inaccuracies.” See Samuel Totten and Karen Riley, “Understanding Matters: The Holocaust and Social Studies Classrooms,” Theory and Research in Social Education 30, no. 4 (2002): 541–62.
- 56.
Fallace, Emergence, 93–97. See also Gary Brock and Marvin Prosono, “Holocaustism: The Emergence of a New Religious Movement,” Perspectives on Social Problems 7 (1995): 228.
- 57.
Fallace, Emergence, 40, 106.
- 58.
Omar Bartov, Murder in our Midst: The Holocaust, Industrial Killing, and Representation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 170.
- 59.
As quoted in Michael Andre Bernstein, “The Schindler’s List Effect,” The American Scholar 63, no. 3 (1994): 431.
- 60.
Sherry Posnick-Goodwin, “Teaching through Trauma,” California Educator 24, no. 1 (2019): 43–6.
- 61.
As quoted in Bartov, Murder, 170.
- 62.
Donna Rosenthal, “Did Cultures Clash Over Schindler’s?” Los Angeles Times, January 24, 1994, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1994-01-22-ca-14266-story.html.
- 63.
Laurence Thomas, “American Slavery and the Holocaust: Their Ideologies Compared,” Public Affairs Quarterly 5, no. 2 (1991): 197–8.
- 64.
Richard Aquila, The Sagebrush Trail: Western Movies and Twentieth-Century America (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2015), 329–30.
- 65.
Black filmmaker Spike Lee disagrees, noting, “All I’m going to say is that it’s disrespectful to my ancestors.” As quoted in Joi Carr, “Django Unchained—Disrupting Classical Hollywood Historical Realism?” Black Camera 7, no. 2 (2016): 40.
- 66.
Glenda Carpio, “I Like the Way You Die, Boy,” Transition 112 (2013): 10–11.
- 67.
Henry Louis Gates, “Tarantino ‘Unchained’: Django Trilogy,” in Quentin Tarantino: Interviews, Revised and Updated ed. Gerald Peary (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2013), 184.
- 68.
Chappelle’s Show, season 2, episode 11, “Mandela Boot Camp & The Time Haters,” Neal Brennan, March 31, 2004, Comedy Central.
- 69.
Kendra Bryant, “The Making of a Western-Negro-Superhero-Savior: Django’s Blue Velvet Fauntleroy,” Studies in Popular Culture 38, no. 1 (2015): 65.
- 70.
Chappelle’s, “Mandela.”
- 71.
David Lindquist, “Developing Holocaust Curricula: The Content Decision-Making Process,” The Clearing House 82, no. 1 (2008): 30–1.
- 72.
Key and Peele, season 1, episode 3, “Episode #1.3,” Sean Conroy and Rebecca Drysdale, aired February 14, 2012, Comedy Central.
- 73.
Ibid.
- 74.
Marvin Edward McAllister, Whiting Up: Whiteface Minstrels and Stage Europeans in African American Performance (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014), 182.
- 75.
Key and Peele, “Episode.”
- 76.
Ibid.
- 77.
John Hartigan, “Establishing the Fact of Whiteness,” American Anthropologist 99, no. 3 (1997): 497.
- 78.
Karen Spector, “God on the Gallows: Reading the Holocaust through Narratives of Redemption,” Research in the Teaching of English 42, no. 1 (2007): 45.
- 79.
Ibid.
- 80.
Ibid., 42.
- 81.
Ibid.
- 82.
Ibid., 21.
- 83.
As quoted in Rider, “Perils,” 60.
- 84.
Ibid.
- 85.
Tova Reich, My Holocaust: A Novel (New York: Harper and Collins, 2007), 197.
- 86.
Linda Raphael, “Representing the Holocaust in Literature: Diaries, Memoirs, Fateless, and Other Fiction,” Colloquia Germanica 36, no. 3/4 (2003): 231.
- 87.
Jeffrey Demsky and N. Ann Rider, “A Complicated Curriculum: Teaching Holocaust Empathy and Distance to Non-Traditional Students,” in New Directions in Jewish American and Holocaust Literatures: Reading and Teaching eds. Victoria Aarons and Holli Levitsky (New York: SUNY Press, 2019), 251–2.
- 88.
Imre Kertész, Fatelessness (New York: Random House, 2004), 1.
- 89.
Demsky and Rider, “Complicated,” 251–2.
- 90.
Rider, “Perils,” 57. Key and Peele similarly developed this idea. Positioning the African American comedians as slaves at auction, their initial anger at being sold to bidders soon yielded to anger at buyers’ lack of interest in owning them. See Key and Peele, season 1, episode 3, “Episode #1.3.”
- 91.
Rider, “Perils,” 58.
- 92.
Ibid.
- 93.
Ibid.
- 94.
Alexander Karn, “Toward a Philosophy of Holocaust Education: Teaching Values without Imposing Agendas,” The History Teacher 45, no. 2 (2012): 227.
- 95.
Henry Theriault, “Denial of Ongoing Atrocities as a Rationale for Not Attempting to Prevent or Intervene,” in Impediments to the Prevention and Intervention of Genocide vol. 9 ed. Samuel Totten (New York: Transaction Publisher, 2013), 48.
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Demsky, J. (2021). Irreverent Instruction: Considering New Approaches in Twenty-First-Century European and American Holocaust Education. In: Nazi and Holocaust Representations in Anglo-American Popular Culture, 1945–2020. Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79221-3_6
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