Edited by Rochelle L. Millen, with Timothy A. Bennett, Jack D. Mann, Joseph E. O’Connor, and Robert P. Welker.
New York: New York University Press, 1996. 382 pp. $55.00, $19.95 (paper).
More than five decades after the end of World War II and the defeat of Hitler’s Nazi forces, educators continue to struggle with how to responsibly teach the complexities of the Holocaust. Public monuments and memorials to the victims of the Holocaust have been built in various cities throughout the world, museums (the largest and best-known of which is the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC) have been constructed to house both permanent exhibits and education programs, and curricula (such as Facing History and Ourselves) have been developed both to educate students in the elementary through high school grades about the causes, events, and effects of the Holocaust and to stimulate discussion of these topics among students and teachers today.
Films have been a means for the populace to learn about the Holocaust, and Hollywood has long struggled with how to present and represent the Holocaust on screen. In 1993, Schindler’s List presented, with stark intensity, the story of Oskar Schindler, a businessman who saved thousands of Jews from death at the hands of the Nazis by employing them in his factory. More recently, Hollywood took a step backward with its production and celebration of Roberto Benigni’s Life Is Beautiful. Benigni relegated the Holocaust and those suffering through it to the background as he played the comic fool in the foreground. While Benigni claimed he was trying to find hope and optimism within the most desperate of circumstances, his ahistorical buffoonery teaches exactly the wrong lesson. The Holocaust is no laughing matter, and mass dehumanization should not be seen as a comedic challenge.
Against this backdrop of continued efforts to teach the Holocaust responsibly to succeeding generations, New Perspectives on the Holocaust: A Guide for Teachers and Scholars is a welcome addition to the educational literature. Edited by Rochelle L. Millen, along with Timothy A. Bennett, Jack D. Mann, Joseph E. O’Connor, and Robert P. Welker, this collection was developed from a series of papers presented at a conference at Wittenberg University in Springfield, Ohio, in 1993, titled “Teaching the Holocaust: Issues and Dilemmas.” The editors are all faculty at Wittenberg University, and the conference was cosponsored by Yad Vashem, the memorial to the Holocaust located in Jerusalem, Israel.
This collection is valuable in at least two important ways: first, for its attention to the complexities of both the Holocaust and the teaching and learning of the Holocaust, and second, for its inclusion of papers that approach the teaching and learning of the Holocaust from multiple perspectives and with varied points of focus. The chapters in this volume are controversial, risk-taking, thoughtful, and thought provoking.
For example, Franklin Bialystok, in “Americanizing the Holocaust: Beyond the Limit of the Universal,” indicts curricula and museums, such as the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles, that try to “Americanize the Holocaust” by making simplistic analogies between the Holocaust and rampant racism in the United States. Bialystok argues that this kind of “Americanization” ignores the complexities of the Holocaust, as well as the multiple events and ideologies that led to it. It is not a simple jump from racism to extermination. Bialystok (citing Emil Fackenheim) points out that the Nazis did not see Jews as members of the human race; therefore, an understanding of the Holocaust as an act of racism is far too simple. Carlos C. Huerta and Dafna Shiffman-Huerta argue in “Holocaust Denial Literature: Its Place in Teaching the Holocaust” for the inclusion of revisionist historical pieces — the Holocaust denial literature — in the teaching of the Holocaust. Their argument centers on the controversial point that it is important to expose students to the Holocaust denial literature for two reasons: first, this literature has become extremely widespread on an international scale, and second, students should read this literature and analyze it so that they can reject it cohesively and comprehensively. Elisabeth I. Kalau writes in “Teaching the Holocaust: Helping Students Confront Their Own Biases” of her efforts — as the daughter of a Nazi army colonel — to teach the Holocaust responsibly. Other chapters provoke thought on how to teach the Holocaust: Jacqueline Berke and Ann L. Saltzman provide a framework and argument for teaching the Holocaust in an interdisciplinary way; Michael F. Bassman writes about his experience in teaching the Holocaust to non-Jewish students; in “Education after Auschwitz: Teaching the Holocaust in Germany,” Matthias Heyl struggles with teaching the Holocaust at the geographical center of the atrocities.
The editors divide the book into three sections: “Viewing the Holocaust in Context,” “Considering Issues of Teaching and Curriculum,” and “Teaching toward Dialogue: Spiritual and Moral Issues.” In this way, they effectively present the Holocaust from a number of perspectives — historical, pedagogical, intellectual, spiritual, and moral. The editors and authors do not settle for easy or simple paths, tackling the complexities of both the Holocaust and the teaching of the Holocaust.
Robert P. Welker, in his introduction to the second section of this volume, asserts that “in the study of the Holocaust, knowledge cannot be separated from being; what one knows and learns has implications for who one is as a person” (p. 92). In this statement, Welker captures both the power of and the struggles inherent in educating about the Holocaust: who one is and what one knows are unavoidably and inseparably linked.
E.M.