Playing Political Football with Holocaust Education

 

Watching this battle transpire is both enlightening and pathetic. One of the most tragic occurrences in modern history has become the focus of groups who have decided their particular agenda for teaching in Florida about the Holocaust is the only one that counts. After researching the subject, I am sickened by the tug-of-war that is taking place and wonder how the Florida Department of Education will resolve this fight.

To be fair, I must begin with my strong bias that this topic should be covered in the schools. The evils that were perpetrated as part of Holocaust history is the source of the statement that many support, “Never Again.” The Holocaust stands as a reminder of the horrors that can be perpetrated when long-standing hatred and evil power join forces, and is a lesson that we seem to have to learn, over and over again.

And yet, there can clearly be too much of a good thing, in my opinion, and too many political agendas to satisfy in regard to the Holocaust. That Florida has decided to include the Holocaust in its school curriculum is admirable, but the way they are going about it reflects a poorly planned strategy and process for selecting the content.

*     *     *

The first mistake the Florida DOE made was in not limiting the amount of classroom content and time that would be spent on this topic. I have no doubt that those who responded to the Dept.’s request for proposals were dedicated to making sure that all the content that represented the most important aspects of the Holocaust should be included. The content that is proposed by the Dept. as a result of these proposals might be reasonable, in terms of limited depth and time requirements for grades 5, and 6-8, but by the time students reach grades 9-12, an inordinate amount of time has been allotted to Holocaust studies.

I object for a couple of reasons. The level of detail included at these grade levels is not necessary to understand the origins and practices of anti-Semitism that led to the Holocaust, for starters. In addition, students are already being deprived of adequate instruction on social studies and civics (although a significant effort is being made to improve those areas of study). But by the time both areas are expanded, there will be little time to address other relevant areas for high school education. Unless the Dept. intended to propose to the public everything that could be included, they would have been wiser to be more discerning in setting limits. I suspect their agenda was to try to please everyone in the process, and instead, no one will be satisfied.

The second problem is the motivation of the groups that were selected in the final selection process. I think that the statement from Yael Hershfield, interim regional director of the Anti-Defamation League Florida in a letter to Education Commissioner Richard Corcoran, suggests part of the problem in curriculum goals:

‘Any legitimate Holocaust education expert’ would advise that students learn what happened from 1933-45 and about antisemitism and also be encouraged to make connections between the past and their own roles and responsibilities today. [Italics are mine.]

The following viewpoint suggested by others who submitted proposals comes closer to the overall criticism of the Dept.’s goals:

Experts tapped by the state to help write or review new Holocaust standards say Florida’s proposal fails to connect the horrors of the Holocaust to lessons that would encourage today’s students to understand the ‘ramifications of prejudice, stereotyping and racism.’ [Italics are mine.]

So, there is a larger agenda, after all. The Holocaust will just be one more vehicle to focus on systemic racism and prejudice that goes beyond anti-Semitism.

Finally, probably the biggest controversy was regarding the selection of an organization called Proclaiming Justice to the Nations, an Evangelical Christian group that includes Holocaust training in its outreach. You can guess at how many buttons were pushed selecting a group that doesn’t have a primary Holocaust focus and is also Christian (which many Jews would find unacceptable); rejecting their proposal came easily to some groups. Oren Stier, a professor of religious studies and director of the Holocaust and genocide studies program at Florida International University, protested the group’s involvement. (Professor Stier’s comment that his university’s proposal was largely ignored may have been a factor in his reaction.) He made the following statement:

PJTN was ‘ostensibly founded to combat antisemitism in education,’ but its ‘true agenda is to establish a foothold in the nation’s public schools to promote religious indoctrination and their selective, revisionist, conservative Christian conception of American history,’ he added.

Sounds pretty anti-Christian to me, especially with no evidence.

The Southern Poverty Law Center added its two cents by calling PJTN an anti-Muslim hate group. (Please note that the Orlando Sentinel article didn’t add that SPLC removed  PJTN from its hate list in January 2021.)

But PJTN was also demanding inclusion of content that they thought should be in the curriculum:

Proclaiming Justice to the Nations, which says its goal is to educate Christians about their ‘biblical responsibility to stand with their Jewish brethren and the state of Israel against the global rise of antisemitism,’ is unhappy with the state’s proposal, too.

The group said the state proposal ‘falls dismally short’ of what it wanted because it does not include its suggested lessons on Jewish traditions, symbols and beliefs, from lighting Sabbath candles to the star of David to the biblical story of Mordechai and Esther, among other problems.

Expecting that level of detail about Jewish practices is excessive. This approach reflects precisely the problem with demands made by other organizations’ proposals and the unwillingness of the Dept of Education to take a targeted and incisive approach to curriculum development. The Department has put its own curriculum proposal together, and on July 14, 2021, a public meeting will be held to discuss the Department’s proposal.

Someone should attend and bring the popcorn.

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  1. Susan Quinn Contributor
    Susan Quinn
    @SusanQuinn

    Ironically, I just realized that by “educating” students on the Holocaust/Shoah, we seed the potential of causing more resentment by students, teachers and parents for spending any classroom time on the topic. That resentment would likely show up as anti-Semitism. There are no simple answers here.

    • #31
  2. MarciN Member
    MarciN
    @MarciN

    Susan Quinn (View Comment):

    Ironically, I just realized that by “educating” students on the Holocaust/Shoah, we seed the potential of causing more resentment by students, teachers and parents for spending any classroom time on the topic. That resentment would likely show up as anti-Semitism. There are no simple answers here.

    I’m not worried about it stirring up anti-Semitism beyond the usual dysfunctional emotional reactions people always have to everything that has emotion in it. The western world has become a dysfunctional family writ large. It’s our biggest problem. We can’t talk about anything without someone reacting childishly.

    It was a historical event, and it needs to be taught as such.

    • #32
  3. Ontheleftcoast Inactive
    Ontheleftcoast
    @Ontheleftcoast

    Susan Quinn (View Comment):

    Ontheleftcoast (View Comment):

    Callling it “The Holocaust” is itself political propaganda. The primary meaning of the word is “an animal which, as an offering to a deity and usually having been slaughtered, is entirely burned up on an altar.” This seems blasphemous to me. In addition, the way in which it has been framed in public discourse since has contributed to today’s cult of victimhood in general, and promoted a distorted picture of Judaism in particular.

    The Hebrew word, Shoah, destruction, is better. It’s used with a prefix which constitutes the definite article: HaShoah: The Destruction.

    The Jewish “ultraorthodox” community had a better idea idea: Calling it the Churban Europa; the Destruction of Europe. I think that Jewish Europe was probably meant. The root of Churban is ח•ר•ב (Ch•R•B), one literal meaning is “sword.” I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the response of the Orthodox world was to build Torah institutions and to have families, usually large ones, has thrived and is becoming a larger percentage of the Jewish world in the US and Israel while the response of those segments of the Jewish community whose communal spiritual response (I am in no way criticizing, I cannot criticize what any individual survivor’s response may have been) heavily involved, or even centered around, “The Holocaust” are getting older and are themselves dying out.

    Thank you so much for enlightening all of us, @ ontheleftcoast. I had no idea of the origin of the word, and I think Shoah is a much better and appropriate word. I am also very concerned of the effect the “victim mentality” has on the overall Jewish community. I’m not sure how to balance our remembering the potential for this kind of evil, and avoiding the perspective of victim. Any thoughts on that?

    It is still too soon, but I expect that sooner or later there will be Shoah Kinot for Tisha B’Av much as there are kinot for earlier, and less extensive catastrophes. Those who died in the Shoah are already implicitly included in some of our communal prayers, and those who are paying attention when we read Eichah next week we will be reading something which may give those of us fortunate enough to never have been ourselves put in the situation some faint hint of what it is to have lived through an invasion and massacre. But the communal liturgical response is then, literally, to get up off the floor. We then say Kaddish, and while saying Kaddish is an integral aspect (necessarily in a communal context, you need a minyan) of our individual mourning, it does not once mention death.

    • #33
  4. Susan Quinn Contributor
    Susan Quinn
    @SusanQuinn

    Ontheleftcoast (View Comment):
    We then say Kaddish, and while saying Kaddish is an integral aspect (necessarily in a communal context, you need a minyan) of our individual mourning, it does not once mention death.

    Thank you for filling us in. Kaddish is such a beautiful prayer, praising G-d, and I only realized a few years ago that it doesn’t speak of death. In a sense, I think we are all called to live, to life, to grow, to serve.

    • #34
  5. Ontheleftcoast Inactive
    Ontheleftcoast
    @Ontheleftcoast

    Susan Quinn (View Comment):

    Ontheleftcoast (View Comment):
    We then say Kaddish, and while saying Kaddish is an integral aspect (necessarily in a communal context, you need a minyan) of our individual mourning, it does not once mention death.

    Thank you for filling us in. Kaddish is such a beautiful prayer, praising G-d, and I only realized a few years ago that it doesn’t speak of death. In a sense, I think we are all called to live, to life, to grow, to serve.

    To continue this, there’s a real tendency for “Holocaust education” to remain stuck on the past—and to frame it in a destructive way—on the one hand, and then to use the past to stir up prescribed emotion to support the Left’s social justice agenda on the other. 

    • #35
  6. Susan Quinn Contributor
    Susan Quinn
    @SusanQuinn

    Ontheleftcoast (View Comment):
    To continue this, there’s a real tendency for “Holocaust education” to remain stuck on the past—and to frame it in a destructive way—on the one hand, and then to use the past to stir up prescribed emotion to support the Left’s social justice agenda on the other. 

    But the far Left is happy to let us all know that they hate the Jews. Are they speaking out of both sides of their mouths?

    • #36
  7. Ontheleftcoast Inactive
    Ontheleftcoast
    @Ontheleftcoast

    Postscript: It’s all very well to say “it should be taught in the schools” as a Platonic ideal, but if a “Holocaust” curriculum is going to be a broad national initiative, would it be a good thing or a bad thing to have that curriculum taught in the schools as presently constituted?

    • #37
  8. MarciN Member
    MarciN
    @MarciN

    Ontheleftcoast (View Comment):
    True, but in many ways the Soviet participation in the Nuremberg trials was grotesque. The Eastern Front was, among other things, a civil war between two murderous national socialist regimes. The USSR successfully conflated “fascism” with any resistance to its subversive attacks on the West, and by participating in the official defining of the word “genocide” managed to have examination of its own genocides kept off limits. That included the planned genocide of the USSR’s remaining Jews, which was interrupted by Stalin’s death.

    That is horrible but very interesting.

    The decisions made in 1945 through 1946 were almost all opposite of what they should have been. My daughter wrote a term paper in high school on the Yalta conferences, and we were shocked at how destructive and unnecessary the decisions were that were made at that time. If you took a piece of yarn and drew it straight through modern history from those decisions as they affected individual countries, it would very obvious that the political disasters that occurred postwar were almost all set in motion by those decisions.

    The one that irks me the most was how the three allies walked away from the fourth. Chiang Kai-shek was our fourth ally, and the other three had promised him they would help him defeat Mao. Clearly the bonds between Stalin and Mao were strong even then. Millions of people died at the hands of Stalin and Mao that might have been saved if the war-weary West had not supported their regimes. And if they had kept their promise to Chiang Kai-shek.

    • #38
  9. The Reticulator Member
    The Reticulator
    @TheReticulator

    Stad (View Comment):

    Instugator (View Comment):

    Chuck (View Comment):
    One other thing – where does it say schooling is limited 180 days/year?

    State laws mandate either days of instruction or hours of instruction per year. They do this to ensure that education time is not shortchanged between the various systems (Homeschool, Private School, Charter School, Public School).

    I believe the time period was decided upon for agricultural reasons. Parents needed their children to be available to work the farms during most of the growing season . . . . . .

     When I was in elementary school in Nebraska, farm boys in upper elementary grades by law could get excused absences during planting and harvest seasons to help with family farm work. I don’t remember the exact age restrictions and seasonal restrictions. In my rural,  two-room school it was rare for farm parents to have their boys miss school for that purpose, but it did happen. 

    • #39
  10. Ontheleftcoast Inactive
    Ontheleftcoast
    @Ontheleftcoast

    MarciN (View Comment):

    Ontheleftcoast (View Comment):
    True, but in many ways the Soviet participation in the Nuremberg trials was grotesque. The Eastern Front was, among other things, a civil war between two murderous national socialist regimes. The USSR successfully conflated “fascism” with any resistance to its subversive attacks on the West, and by participating in the official defining of the word “genocide” managed to have examination of its own genocides kept off limits. That included the planned genocide of the USSR’s remaining Jews, which was interrupted by Stalin’s death.

    That is horrible but very interesting.

    The decisions made in 1945 through 1946 were almost all opposite of what they should have been. My daughter wrote a term paper in high school on the Yalta conferences, and we were shocked at how destructive and unnecessary the decisions were that were made at that time. If you took a piece of yarn and drew it straight through modern history from those decisions as they affected individual countries, it would very obvious that the political disasters that occurred postwar were almost all set in motion by those decisions.

    The one that irks me the most was how the three allies walked away from the fourth. Chiang Kai-shek was our fourth ally, and the other three had promised him they would help him defeat Mao. Clearly the bonds between Stalin and Mao were strong even then. Millions of people died at the hands of Stalin and Mao that might have been saved if the war-weary West had not supported their regimes. And if they had kept their promise to Chiang Kai-shek.

    Maybe the West didn’t stumble at Yalta, maybe it was pushed:

    It’s astonishing to learn, with the exception of interpreters and note takers, neither Secretary of State Cordell Hull nor any other State officials ever attended any of the wartime conferences with Churchill and Stalin.90 The British sent Anthony Eden, foreign secretary; the Soviets sent Vyacheslav Molotov, foreign minister; and the Americans sent Harry Hopkins, Roosevelt’s own personal Foreign Office. Only at Yalta in February 1945 did the brand-new U.S. secretary of state, Edward Stettinius, attend—Hopkins’s “loyal protégé”—ably assisted by top aide Alger Hiss.

    West, Diana. American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character (p. 134). St. Martin’s Press. Kindle Edition.

    Historian Nikolai Tolstoy writes that “negotiations at Yalta on the issue appear to have been handled chiefly by Alger Hiss, the inexperienced Secretary of State, Edward Stettinius, being ill-equipped to conduct them.” Correction: the inexperienced secretary of state, Edward Stettinius, being “the loyal protégé” of agent of Soviet influence Harry Hopkins and therefore you bet “ill-equipped” to conduct them. Meanwhile, as State Department official J. Anthony Panuch would later testify under oath before Congress, Hiss exerted “Svengali-like influence over the mental processes of Junior Stettinius.”

    Ibid, p 232

    Hiss was, of course, a Soviet spy.

    • #40
  11. TBA Coolidge
    TBA
    @RobtGilsdorf

    MarciN (View Comment):

    Susan Quinn (View Comment):

    Ironically, I just realized that by “educating” students on the Holocaust/Shoah, we seed the potential of causing more resentment by students, teachers and parents for spending any classroom time on the topic. That resentment would likely show up as anti-Semitism. There are no simple answers here.

    I’m not worried about it stirring up anti-Semitism beyond the usual dysfunctional emotional reactions people always have to everything that has emotion in it. The western world has become a dysfunctional family writ large. It’s our biggest problem. We can’t talk about anything without someone reacting childishly.

    It was a historical event, and it needs to be taught as such.

    Yes. But. 

    We learn history – allegedly – so that we are not doomed to repeat it. 

    So when we teach it, we tend to give the moral along with the story. All well and good until you get to the part where someone sums up the moral, or worse, a ‘call to action’, which means putting those six million Jews to work for anti-racism/social justice/questioning authority/combating micro-aggressions…. 

    • #41
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