Holocaust history as modern American morality play

Dara Horn's rambling essay in the current Atlantic magazine, Is Holocaust Education Making Anti-Semitism Worse? seems to be getting some plaudits and some pushback. That's not surprising; a lot of very earnest people teach in this field, doing their best. And Jewish people and Jewish institutions want and need some force that runs against our current eruptions of Jew-hatred. We all do; very few of us want the Nazis among us to run about unchecked.

When we don't know what else to do, a humane, classically liberal, society defaults to attempting education ... but does it work?

I want to summarize some of Horn's points in this post and follow up with another post about what I can remember about how I learned about the Holocaust many moons ago. That was long before there was such a thing as a formal curricular field, and yet the vaguely Christian institution where I went to high school did offer a chance to learn something about the then-recent Nazi genocide.

Horn introduces her article with a clear assertion:

... The bedrock assumption that has endured for nearly half a century is that learning about the Holocaust inoculates people against anti-Semitism. But it doesn’t. ... I have come to the disturbing conclusion that Holocaust education is incapable of addressing contemporary anti-Semitism.

The article is a kind of travelogue through this apparently burgeoning elementary and high school academic field. Her picture of the endeavor brought me up short:

... Benjamin Vollmer ... has spent years building his school’s Holocaust-education program. He teaches eighth-grade English in Venus, Texas, a rural community with 5,700 residents; his school is majority Hispanic, and most students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. ...Vollmer is not Jewish—and, as is common for Holocaust educators, he has never had a Jewish student. (Jews are 2.4 percent of the U.S. adult population, according to a 2020 Pew survey.)

My surprise shows my Christian obliviousness. I live now and always have lived in places where Jews are visible citizens. Before recent hyper-affluent times, San Francisco meant frontier opportunity and welcome to misfits who don't quite fit in with mid-America. In 2011, six percent of San Francisco's population was Jewish, likely mostly imports like the rest of us weirdos. In my line of work, I've long noted that well-curated political voter lists attempt to identify who is Jewish; somehow they know Erudite Partner is Jewish, despite her Scots last name. The world notices where the Jews are. And, mostly under wraps, there's plenty of Jew-hating in oh-so-sophisticated Northern California.

San Francisco anti-Semitic graffiti spotted in 2015

Horn explores what might be buoying Holocaust education in mid-American venues where there are no Jews. The answer she gets from teachers is obvious, if you think for a minute: the victims of the Shoah are conveniently dead on another continent some distance in the past.

Why not focus on something more relevant to his students, I asked Vollmer, like the history of immigration or the civil-rights movement? I hadn’t yet appreciated that the absence of Jews was precisely the appeal.“Some topics have been so politicized that it’s too hard to teach them,” he told me. “Making it more historical takes away some of the barriers to talking about it.”

Where there are no living, breathing Jews, a focus on the Holocaust serves as a safe morality play.

The point was to teach morality in a secular society. “Everyone in education, regardless of ethnicity, could agree that Nazism was evil and that the Jews were innocent victims,” [education historian Thomas D.] Fallace wrote, explaining the topic’s appeal. “Thus, teachers used the Holocaust to activate the moral reasoning of their students”—to teach them to be good people.

Horn concludes:

... One problem with using the Holocaust as a morality play is exactly its appeal: It flatters everyone. We can all congratulate ourselves for not committing mass murder. This approach excuses current anti-Semitism by defining anti-Semitism as genocide in the past.

Horn makes a solid case that if we want a society that rejects Jew-hating, we have to start by helping students with some prior questions before we get to anti-Semitism: Who are the Jews? Where did Jews come from? What cultures have Jews lived in? What cultures have Jews created? Only after exploring those questions can educators usefully approach why are Jews objects of hatred? and why have both Christian and secular modern cultures generated anti-Semitism?

She quotes J. E. Wolfson of the Texas Holocaust, Genocide, and Antisemitism Advisory Commission:

... [he] told the teachers that it was important that “anti-Semitism should not be your students’ first introduction to Jews and Judaism.” ... “If you’re teaching about anti-Semitism before you teach about the content of Jewish identity, you’re doing it wrong.”

That seems right to me -- and a lot more politically and culturally demanding than teaching the Holocaust as a distant morality play whose enormity reinforces contemporary innocence.

Horn's essay prompted me to try to recall how I was taught and learned about the Holocaust as a young person of the 1950s and 60s. To be continued ...