Teaching the Shoah: Mandate and Momentum, Zev Garber and Kenneth L. Hanson, edd. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2023.
Review by Seth Ward
Teaching the Shoah tackles the difficult task of approaching this challenging subject with effective pedagogy.[1] The importance of Holocaust education is painfully obvious: multiple surveys show that many of our contemporary junior high, high school and college age people either lack any awareness of the Shoah or blindly accept various Holocaust-denying falsehoods. One hopes that this will change: Twenty U.S. states have some form of mandated Holocaust education, and many others have recommendations or a strong tradition of including this topic in high school curriculums. Shoah education should be a crucial corrective to the ongoing rise in anti-Semitism and the weaponization of racism. In the context of today’s environment in both popular and academic debates—and unfortunately in the public sphere and in interfaith forums—it’s increasingly important to counteract simplistic comparisons of the Nazi plan of racial-based extermination to other genocides or racisms in ways that trivialize the Holocaust.
How can we even begin to weigh the extent to which one can and should parse an odious worldview in the classroom or assess unspeakable horrors? This volume brings together a highly varied group of authors who offer multiple responses to this question, with varied perspectives on how to shape the educational endeavor, the uniqueness of the Holocaust, and techniques for formulating the questions a course must address. Although teaching about the Holocaust on the college level often comes from Jewish Studies or History, Teaching the Holocaust addresses approaches from disciplines such as Literature, Philosophy, Politics, Religious Studies, and more. Moreover, the articles in this book are not primarily oriented towards “course contents”—Teaching the Shoah is not “about the Shoah” so much as it is, as the title says, about teaching the Shoah. Readers contemplating teaching this subject will find thoughtful questions to guide classroom planning, and strategies to increase student engagement. Indeed, the methods and strategies in this volume can be useful for anyone contemplating teaching any complex topic. Some of the most accessible chapters exemplify creative approaches: using historic fiction and role-playing, a play, a short story, and references to using films. The individual chapters are well-referenced, with numerous paths for those seeking further reading. Complete with personal narratives, discussions of choices, and helpful hints about diverse goals, for anyone teaching this crucial subject at this point in history, Teaching the Shoah is the essential guide.
Zev Garber contributed the Introduction and the first three chapters. In the Introduction, Garber mentions four waves in Holocaust Studies. The first concentrated on the horrors of Nazi treatment, and religious and secular antisemitism. The second focused on an indictment of those who perpetrated the Holocaust or inspired it, and critique of those who did not act to preclude it, as well as questions of theodicy and theology. The third wave focused on combatting Holocaust denial. The fourth and presumably present stage reflects Jewish-Christian discussions on this theme and efforts to interface regarding post-Holocaust morality. The introduction makes clear how important the Jewish-Christian interaction is to this volume. In this and any other chapters, we find discussions of the degree to which traditional Christian thought was part of the worldview that shaped the emergence of Nazi ideology, and the impact of the Holocaust on the Christian world.
In the first chapter, Garber gives a comprehensive analysis of the term Holocaust, briefly discusses other terms such as Ḥurban “destruction,” and explains why he prefers the term Shoah. Garber provides a concise introduction to some of the best-known approaches to the uniqueness and meaning of the Shoah, discussing perspectives offered by Elie Wiesel, Irving ”Yitz” Greenberg, Richard Rubinstein, Emil Fackenheim and others. In the second chapter, Garber lays out his course on the Holocaust, complete with the topics for a fifteen-week course and a compelling description of the assignments he gives (book review, Journal, Article Review, and synthesizing project) and how they advance the course goals. To prepare the course, Garber lays out a detailed specification of purpose and objectives for the course, emphasizing thoughtful consideration of just what is at stake in the course and the complexity of the goal structure required.
Chapter Three is a lengthy discussion of the career of Steven T. Katz. Katz is liveliest, according to Garber, when reviewing the Christian teaching of contempt for Jews and its role in sustaining antisemitism. Garber commends Katz for avoiding the pitfalls of relating to the Shoah as a rehearsal of mere numbers and historic facts. He also notes—in what seems to be an approving tone—Katz’s disagreements with and critiques of noted writers, many of whom are frequently mentioned elsewhere in this volume.
In Chapter Four, Henry F. Knight develops a theory of respectful, constructive interruption and hospitality in discourse. As a teacher, Knight wants “others to be engaged with me as active conversation partners, fully aware of our shared responsibility to face and interpret the world in which we live—especially a world capable of being violated so fundamentally as it was during the Shoah.” Knight’s ideal interruption is exemplified by a student comment: Knight “almost never let me be wrong” but instead challenged the student to rethink and rephrase statements—in a gentle and respectful way. He also comments on the importance of dealing correctly with interruptive behavior that is not part of the pedagogic goal, and addressing the reality that many students are not particularly engaged in the subjects of their classes. Knight’s advice about classroom management has broad application, far beyond the context of teaching the Shoah.
Jonathan Arnold, Esq., addresses the Nuremberg Laws in Chapter Five, composed of The Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor, and The Reich Citizenship Law, which led to the complete dispossession of German Jews and ultimately not merely to the Shoah but to the carnage of World War II. Arnold reviews European and American antecedents and notes how sudden and catastrophic the Nuremberg legislation was—and that the response to these laws after the end of World War II informed the core principles of the Charter of the United Nations and international law. To illustrate, he quotes in full the Principles of International Law recognized by the Charter of the postwar Nuremberg Tribunal and in the judgement of the Tribunal. To illustrate the lasting ramifications of the Tribunal, he references the development of the idea of “Universal Jurisdiction” that allowed a Syrian terrorist to be tried in Germany in 2022.
David Patterson’s argument in Chapter Six is two-fold: The Nazis did not merely want to annihilate Jews but Judaism, God, Torah, and the very essence of Jewish tradition, and that this makes the Shoah part of Jewish Sacred History. Post-Shoah, we must read the Torah through the Shoah and the Shoah through the Torah. The Nazi goal was to destroy the very idea that all humans are created in the Divine image, a central teaching of the Torah, and to do so, to annihilate the Jews who are so closely connected to that concept. “The Nazis were not antisemites because they were racists– they were racists because they were antisemites.” Patterson uses manifold references from Jewish texts to illustrate his points, and most notably illustrates the idea through a rereading of the Biblical creation narrative. Patterson references a passage in the Pesikta de-Rab Kahana in which Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai quotes God as saying that “if you are not my witnesses then I am not the LORD.” Patterson concludes that we are on the journey from Auschwitz to Jerusalem, a journey that transforms us all into sacred witnesses, called upon to answer and testify.
Mehak Burza turns to Holocaust Awareness in the world’s largest democracy, India. The events of the Second World War period are understandably viewed in India from the lens of the struggle for freedom there, and the partition of the British Raj. According to Burza, the Presidency University in Kolkata is the only Asian university to offer a proper course on the Holocaust, and sensitivity to the real nature of the Shoah is sorely lacking in contemporary India. Hitler is often portrayed in a neutral or even positive light, Mein Kampf is a best-seller, there are Hitler comics, shops and products, and Hitler is often associated with Gandhi and the Independence movement in a positive way. Burza argues that Indian culture and textbooks need to be revised to recognize the Shoah’s transnational impact, and to emphasize its genocidal nature. Holocaust education must become a compulsory subject at primary and university levels.
Angela Berliner contributed a play in three acts: The Songbird. It aspires to be a play for all ages, an entertainment to be sure, but one that captures the dark and terrifying nature of the Holocaust while giving homage to writers, performers and musicians who offered moments of respite during those terrifying times. Interestingly, The Songbird opens with a lyric from “Dona, Dona” Sholom Secunda’s famous song from a Yiddish musical written by Aaron Zeitlin that opened in Brooklyn, NY, in 1940. “Dona, Dona” contrasts a calf bound for slaughter with a bird flying free, and this motif recurs throughout the play. Nevertheless, Berliner suggests that those producing her play may substitute any other Jewish song written before 1945. The play has useful notes that bring home the meaning and references in the script and should be well received by school audiences.
“Raisins and Almonds: Remember Us” is a short story by Susan Garber (Zev Garber’s wife). It is set at the beginning of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, and a time about 50 years later. The title refers to Rozhinkes mit Mandlen (“Raisins and Almonds”), a reworking of a folk song by Avraham Goldfadn for the Operetta Shulamis, whichpremiered in 1880, and is easily recognizable as one of the most familiar Yiddish lullabies. The song provides an entrance into the memory of the main character many years after the war, but the main part of the story involves the Uprising, mentioning the fighting units, the work of Emanuel Ringelblum, and other characters both real and fictional. The story is particularly well suited to inspiring readers to search for more information about the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, and to determine what is factual and what is fictionalized reconstruction.
The final chapter, by Kenneth Hanson, details how Hanson came to portray Lutheran Pastor Martin Niemöller on video, and in Holocaust centers, Jewish Community Centers, civic groups and more—before Jewish and general audiences. Hanson’s set of questions for his classes—gathered from training at Yad Vashem—respond to the likelihood that students might not take away anything more than “the Nazis were bad” from the course. These are yet another example of the rich source of material for Holocaust education in this volume. Hanson also addresses the reality of the increasing reliance on asynchronous on-line education and discusses how he has adapted to it. Like the play and story of the previous chapters, this essay shows that bringing a key character to life is a dramatic way to bring the material home to our students.
A volume of this nature must limit the perspectives offered, but given the references to the songs “Dona, Dona” and “Raisins and Almonds,” it seems appropriate to mention that there easily could have been a chapter about using music in Holocaust education. After all, there is already philosophy, history, Torah study, theatre, short story, role-playing, references to film, and more. For full disclosure, this reviewer is the board president of a small choral organization (and husband of its founder and artistic director) that has presented numerous programs on the theme of “Music of the Holocaust: History and Hope.” There is a storytelling element to these programs: one of the Members is a child survivor who tells her story in the middle of the program—and she is usually the soloist in the final number on the program. Music and survivor narratives provide rich, accessible material about the Holocaust, the society in which it occurred, and Jewish responses to it.
This volume appeared at a time in which COVID has changed the priorities and methodologies of teaching. The social issues that inform our society have dramatically changed from those of a decade or two ago. Racism and genocide are very much part of public discourse, political debate, religious dialogue, and social activism. Often voices of critical substance are drowned out by hot-button slogans and mottos. Teaching the Holocaust is a careful and thoughtful examination of multiple ways in which a complicated subject may be approached with both rigor and creativity in the third decade of the twenty-first century. And much is at stake: issues of antisemitism, racism, genocide, inter-group violence and debate, and attacks on human values are very much a part of our world. The mandate to teach the Shoah remains crucial, and the present value should add momentum to the very best teaching.
Seth Ward
[As of the date of this posting, this review is scheduled for publication in SHERM (Social and Historical Examination of Religion and Ministry) Journal 4.2]
[1] Cambridge provided the review copy electronically using Kortext. At least on the devices available to this reviewer, negative reviews of this platform found on the internet are justified. My thanks to Zev Garber for drawing my attention to this volume.
Coffeecups 