Tuesday, April 24, 2018

Holocaust education and how it distances Jews from Israel - by Evelyn Gordon

...And that is the tragic irony of Holocaust education in America today: Young Jews are being taught that the only way to internalize the Holocaust’s lessons is by becoming indifferent to the possibility of a second one. For the destruction of Israel, with its 6.6 million Jews, would assuredly be nothing less.

Evelyn Gordon..
JNS.org..
23 April '18..

Holocaust Remembrance Day is observed in Israel just a week before Independence Day, and for Israelis, those days are thematically as well as temporally connected: One of many reasons why a Jewish state is needed is to save Jewish lives. Young American Jews also acknowledge a thematic connection. Shockingly, however, the connection many have been taught to see is the exact opposite: that the Holocaust is why a Jewish state shouldn’t exist—or at least, why they as Jews shouldn’t care about it.

Two weeks ago, I wouldn’t have believed this. But then I read the column Haaretz published on April 11, the eve of this year’s Holocaust Remembrance Day.

In it, Steven Davidson described the standardized Holocaust-education curriculum he teaches his sixth-grade Hebrew-school class in Brooklyn, N.Y. As he noted, he is just “one of hundreds of Jewish educators across Canada and the U.S. to utilize the Holocaust curriculum developed by the nonprofit organization, Facing History & Ourselves.” Since 1976, this curriculum “has educated over half a million students in the U.S. and Canada about the Holocaust.”

So what does it teach Jewish students?

(Continue to Full Column)

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