Holocaust
Studies: A Journal of Culture and History
Abstracts of
articles in Issue 13.1
- Holocaust Education for the New Millennium: Assessing our Progress
by Mary J. Gallant and Harriet Hartman
- This article reviews some of the highlights of Holocaust
education, suggesting that there is a need now for assessment of existing
programmes. Since 1945, Western scholars and policy makers have become
increasingly sensitive to the need for educating society about the dangers of
exclusionary institutional structures and genocidal social policies. State
systems of education have prepared curricula and pedagogies, which, in addition
to teaching historical facts specific to the Holocaust, focus moral awareness
and enhance the capacity for social criticism. Scholars both in the United
States and Britain nevertheless have a growing concern that we do not know the
kind or degree of effect our work has had on students. Objectives, goals and
curricular strategies discussed in the literature are reviewed and suggestions
tendered for an assessment of Holocaust education, which will give us some
direction for future initiatives.
- Holocaust Curricula in Israeli Secondary Schools,
1960s–1990s: Historical Evaluation from the Moral Education
Perspective by Yuval Dror
- The article deals with the ‘curriculum history’ of
Holocaust studies in Israeli secondary schools, from the 1960s
to the 1990s, with an emphasis on the moral perspectives of pedagogy.
It analyses the complex
relations between the Israeli (Jewish) society and its educational
frameworks, in comparison to some of the studies on the impact of the
Holocaust on Israel.
The article discusses eight findings, which raise controversial
moral questions about the way in which the Holocaust is taught in Israel.
These include, for
example, the contentions that Holocaust curricula stimulate deep
emotions, without enough balance being given to the cognitive and emotional
aspects of
learning, and that Holocaust studies are compulsory, while other
important parts of the Jewish heritage remain unknown to the majority
of non-religious
students.
- Does the Singularity of the Holocaust make it
Incomparable and Inoperative in Commemorating, Studying and Preventing
Genocide? Britain’s
Holocaust Memorial Day as a Case Study by David Cesarani
- This article is a response to the controversy surrounding the
first national Holocaust Memorial Day in Britain, held on 27 January 2001. The
discussion is centred on the British experience, but it is intended to have a
wider resonance and relevance. It begins by summarising the aims of Holocaust
Memorial Day and then looks at some of the significant interventions in the
nationwide debate about it. Much of the discussion was informed by the work of
the American historian Peter Novick, so the article examines his influential
argument about Holocaust commemoration and education. It concludes with an
attempt to answer the question set out in the title, showing briefly that
researching and teaching about the Holocaust as well as the work of remembrance
and memorialisation are crucial to commemorating, studying and preventing
genocide.
- An Educational Legacy: Pedagogical Approaches in Teaching about
the Fate of Jewish Children during the Shoah by Richelle Budd
Caplan
- This article focuses on pedagogical approaches in teaching the
Holocaust, placing a particular emphasis on the fate of Jewish children during
the Shoah. The author accepts that an intensive study of this complex
and difficult subject matter is not an easy task for teachers and their
students, and argues that the Shoah, a human story with universal
implications, should be taught utilising archival material rather than fiction
or composite characters. The author includes extracts from the testimony of
child survivors and briefly explores themes that might usefully be drawn out in
classroom study.
- Comment: Four Days in April 2000: The 55th
Anniversary of the Liberation of Ravensbrück by Neil Gregor
- In April 2000 the author accompanied a group of
survivors of Ravensbrück concentration camp for women, who had also been deployed as
forced workers at Daimler-Benz Motoren Gmbh, on the occasion of the 55th
anniversary of its liberation. In a short comment article he describes the
women’s experience in revisiting the memorial site and their rather
unsatisfactory encounter with a representative of Daimler-Chrysler,
part of ongoing but as yet unresolved negotiations with the successor company
regarding
compensation for the work the women did during the Second World
War.
- Student Section: Holocaust Exhibitions On-Line: An
Exploration of the Use and Potential of Virtual Space in British and American
Museum Websites by Elisa Miles
- The history of the Holocaust presented within national museums,
such as the Imperial War Museum Holocaust Exhibition and the United States
Holocaust Memorial Museum, is often uncritical and not focused upon the role of
the country in which they are located. The internet, as a flexible and more
radical medium, has greater potential for the representation and teaching of
the Holocaust as a complex history with a variety of chronologies and
experiences. On-line display and interaction could be used to allow national
museums to escape their conservative, apparently factual, narrative that serves
to artificially remove the history of Holocaust from the geographic locale of a
museum and from its visitors.
- Book Reviews