My Journey Studying and Teaching the Holocaust

1997

Every November, as the world remembers the devastation of Kristallnacht, I teach the Stories of the Holocaust course. The idea of teaching the Holocaust through first person narratives of victims, perpetrators, bystanders, and rescuers took shape during a visit to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum with my father, a survivor of the Holocaust. It was in this visit that I fully realized the power of narratives as I uncovered the hidden narrative I share with my father. His inability to speak his experiences shaped my personal vision of who I am, of my father, and of the world. My father's silence kept me from fully knowing him and myself. In the absence of my father's stories, I shaped him in the image of Holocaust stereotypes. I perceived his silence in my life as the helpless weakness of the victim. Amidst the haunting images housed in the museum, my father began to tell me his escape stories. In his stories, I encountered my father the hero, and saw him as I had never seen him before, through eyes of compassion and deep admiration. This encounter with my father's heroism put me in touch with my own and I was moved to create the Stories of the Holocaust course.

Australian Journal of Jewish Studies, 2020

This book is a collection of seventeen scholarly articles which analyze Holocaust testimonies, photographs, documents, literature and films, as well as teaching methods in Holocaust education. Most of these essays were originally presented as papers at the Millersville University Conferences on the Holocaust and Genocide from 2010 to 2012. In their articles, the contributors discuss the Holocaust in concentration camps and ghettos, as well as the Nazis’ methods of exterminating Jews. The authors analyze the reliability of photographic evidence and eyewitness testimonies about the Holocaust. The essays also describe the psychological impact of the Holocaust on survivors, witnesses and perpetrators, and upon Jewish identity in general after the Second World War. The scholars explore the problems of the memorialization of the Holocaust in the Soviet Union and the description of the Holocaust in Russian literature. Several essays are devoted to the representation of the Holocaust in film, and trace the evolution of its depiction from the early Holocaust movies of the late 1940s – early 1950s to modern Holocaust fantasy films. They also show the influence of Holocaust cinema on feature films about the Armenian Genocide. Lastly, several authors propose innovative methods of teaching the Holocaust to college students. The younger generation of students may see the Holocaust as an event of the distant past, so new teaching methods are needed to explain its significance. This collection of essays, based on new multi-disciplinary research and innovative methods of teaching, opens many unknown aspects and provides new perspectives on the Holocaust

Language Arts Journal of Michigan

Anxious Histories: Narrating the Holocaust in Jewish Communities at the Beginning of the Twenty-First Century, by Jordana Silverstein.

In geveb, 2017

The International Journal of Humanities Education, 2017

Although facts about the Holocaust are generally known, many adults find it difficult to convey this information to children, as it is often considered too disturbing for them (Epstein, Andrews, Gray & Maws, 2013). Teachers, in particular, need new ways to introduce students to the Holocaust and other disasters (Wooding & Raphael, 2004; Salmons, 2003). Based on a document study of children’s drawings from the Terezin concentration camp, and research into the Holocaust and pedagogy for presenting difficult issues to children, this paper presents a strategy for teachers to introduce the Holocaust to students in the middle school years of Grades 6 to 10. We begin with a discussion about how to introduce sensitive historical material, such as the Holocaust, to young children. Current teaching models about the Holocaust are based on factual texts (Keith, 2013) or fictional writings (Epstein, et al., 2013). This is followed by a poem, developed out of the first author’s research, introducing the Holocaust while conferring facts about the life of a fictitious child in the Terezin concentration camp. Teacher notes elaborate on how to implement this poem in class. We found that art, such as poetry, can be utilised to teach children about sensitive issues like the disaster of the Holocaust.

Journal of Jewish Education, 1968