A Social Justice Newsletter for Educators

Recovery.

As Spring Break has finally arrived, recovery is the word that is top of mind for me. The imperative of rest follows me from room to room; beckons with blankets, books and hot tea. And still there’s the screen; there are devices holding the threads of so many curated networks which present their own demands. How do we recover in a world designed for persistent overwork? All the elaborate self-care schemes, either individual or corporate, are not enough to cure us of the shame many of us feel if we are not performing beyond our most recent achievement.

Arriving at a scheduled break is often the opportunity many of our educator bodies take to finally succumb to illness. Have you ever had that happen: vacation at last, then here come the sniffles, sore throat and cough? I hope this is not the case for you, but it turns up as a familiar pattern in our population. During the peak of pandemic measures, several of our systems had their eyes peeled for the sprouting and spread of illness. Now that those measures are being, or have been, rolled back, I’m wondering how we will demonstrate our learning from this period. Have we become wiser in how we mitigate the spread of illness and cater to the full recovery of community members? I wonder.

One of my plans for the break is to spend time reading. I have an encouraging selection of fiction, poetry and nonfiction titles. Reading is restorative for me and holding a book in my hands allows me to step away from my backlit devices for a time and just be. This in addition to long walks in green spaces and/or a bit of inline skating will be my methods. What are your best strategies for coming back to yourself?

Holocaust Remembrance and the Purpose of Learning History

April 17 -18, 2023 marks Yom Hashoah in the Jewish calendar. It is the Holocaust Memorial Day which commemorates the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Although established by the Israeli government in 1953, the day is recognized among Jewish communities across the globe. The day should not be confused with the International Holocaust Remembrance Day established by the United Nations in 2005.

Very interesting the reasoning for Yom Hashoah in the 1950s:

“In the early 1950s, education about the Holocaust emphasized the suffering inflicted on millions of European Jews by the Nazis. Surveys conducted in the late 1950s indicated that young Israelis did not sympathize with the victims of the Holocaust, since they believed that European Jews were “led like sheep for slaughter.” The Israeli educational curriculum began to shift the emphasis to documenting how Jews resisted their Nazi tormentors through “passive resistance”—retaining their human dignity in the most unbearable conditions—and by “active resistance,” fighting the Nazis in the ghettos and joining underground partisans who battled the Third Reich in its occupied countries.”

The goal had to do with shaping the perceptions of young people; with shifting the orientation of historical emphasis from the exclusive role of victims to a broader depiction of Jews who actively resisted.

It’s an important reminder that the writing and sharing of historical narratives relies as much on collected evidence as on the specific interpretation of that evidence in a given context. I think it also gets at what makes the study of History an area of ongoing contestation. Who is writing the History? From whose perspective is that History being recounted? The current backlash against the accurate teaching of (African-) American History in the United States has everything to do with particular groups ( especially Conservative, white Christians) wanting to shape the narrative to their cultural and political benefit as they have been allowed to do for centuries.

Given that, I find it helpful to delve into arguments around Holocaust education of young people, Jews and non-Jews, alike. Author, Dara Horn, recently published a long form essay that raises critical questions about the effectiveness of Holocaust education in reducing the likelihood of anti-Semitism. The clickbait-inspired title, “Is Holocaust Education Making Anti-Semitism Worse?” attracts the necessary popular attention but the actual text requires much more staying power and active discernment than the title implies. Please, please read the full article!

Horn wonders if the last few decades of Holocaust education in museums and schools, particularly in the US, has fulfilled the widely accepted aim of sensitizing young people and adults to the dangers of unbridled hate. Based on myriad data on the rise of anti-Semitic hate crimes in the last 6 years, her conclusion is that no, the intended results are not being achieved.

That said, Horn goes to substantial lengths to illustrate what’s missing and where there’s room for improvement. Above all, she asserts that the focus on the massive impact of the Shoah, diminishes more recent acts as far less noteworthy:

“When anti-Semitism is reduced to the Holocaust, anything short of murdering 6 million Jews—like, say, ramming somebody with a shopping cart, or taunting kids at school, or shooting up a Jewish nonprofit, or hounding Jews out of entire countries—seems minor by comparison.”

She sees the greater challenge as one where relating of past events is connected to the lives of present day Jews. Horn welcomes projects where an appreciation for the complexity of Jewish identity, an understanding of how anti-Semitism works in society and a more nuanced approach to post-Holocaust Jewish history are part and parcel of the whole undertaking.

“The holocaust educators I met across America were all obsessed with building empathy, a quality that relies on finding commonalities between ourselves and others. But I wondered if a more effective way to address anti-Semitism might lie in cultivating a completely different quality, one that happens to be the key to education itself: curiosity. Why use Jews as a means to teach people that we’re all the same, when the demand that Jews be just like their neighbors is exactly what embedded the mental virus of anti-Semitism in the Western mind in the first place? Why not instead encourage inquiry about the diversity, to borrow a de rigueur word, of the human experience?”

It feels important to quote Horn’s words at length because her take requires mental effort on the part of readers. If, like me, your comprehension of the dimensions of anti-Semitism and Jewish identity are limited at best, then sitting with the range of questions Horn’s piece throws into relief requires more than adding a word to our vocabulary or a date to our busy calendars.

Here are three topics I know that I need to investigate more thoroughly as a result of reading the Horn’s essay:

• What are the consequences when most of the people teaching Holocaust remembrance are non-Jews?

• How do we normalize conversation around faith communities in schools generally? Who is doing this well and successfully?

• Which tools are we using to evaluate our approaches to teaching the Histories of marginalized people?

At the same time, I am grateful to have been introduced to useful resources to begin to address some of my burning questions.

• Facing History and Ourselves is an excellent go-to space for historical inquiry. And specifically this one-pager on anti-Semitism provides clarity for students, from middle school up.

• Trying to garner beginner information on Jewish beliefs and customs, I found My Jewish Learning helpful in providing plenty of basics.

• Learning for Justice offers access to a webinar series and blogs on exploring religious diversity in the classroom.

• Finally, I benefited from reading the work of Jewish writers, Phoebe Maltz Bovy and Dr. Alyssa Sepinwall who voiced concerns about Horn’s approach and the clickbait title of her essay.

This 2nd week of April, 2023 marks one of only three times this century that Passover, Easter, and Ramadan overlap with each other. Cultivating our understanding of faith traditions represented in our communities is yet another step we can take to enhance our capacity for cultural responsiveness in school and beyond.

Last month I apologized for the delay in publication. It was mid month and I felt bad. But I realized that is not the kind of relationship we have here. You are not staying up late on the first days of the month waiting for Bending the Arc to hit your inbox and we both know by now that I will manage it when I manage it and we are all fine with that. Even with a voluntary act, it’s possible to apply unnecessary tenets of hyperproductivity to our own labors of love. I mention all this to remind you and me, that we can choose our responses to ambient pressures of modern society. So let’s practice. Let’s cut ourselves and each other more slack rather than less. Let’s learn to recover as a matter of course.

Wishing you every good thing in this season of growth and blossoming,

Sherri