Polish-Jewish Relations: 1,300 Keyword-Phrase-Indexed Book Reviews (by Jan Peczkis)

Becoming a Holocaust Educator: Purposeful Pedagogy Through Inquiry, by Jennifer Lemberg and Alexander Pope IV (eds). 2021. Teachers College Press. New York and London

Holocaust Emotions: Manipulative Methods in Holocaust Education

Much Holocaust education is centered on the memorizing of facts. This book, by contrast, offers a different, presumably better, approach. It advocates that children and teens internalize the Holocaust through their own experiences. Of course, the Jews’ Holocaust, and no one else’s genocide, is always the starting point of these lessons.

PLAYING ON IMPRESSIONABLE CHILDREN’S EMOTIONS: AN EXAMPLE

There are many lessons in this book that gravitate to Jews as objects of sympathy and pity, but I focus on only one. The lesson uses Irv Roth. Wendy Zagray Warren writes, “‘He was just a kid, living a normal life. All of a sudden, they treated him like he wasn’t there, like he wasn’t even a person.’ ‘When they put him in Auschwitz, do you think the Nazis really thought of him as a rat, like on those posters we looked at?’ ‘He was only 14, and he wasn’t even with his parents. How could anyone shove Irving into a cattle car'” (p. 103. Emphasis in original).

No tears are flowing, least of all in the American classroom, about the Poles in the gulags or the Poles in Auschwitz. No one ever asks, “How can anyone shove a Polish child into a cattle car?” Only Jews matter.

THE GERMANS NEED FORGIVENESS–BUT ONLY FOR MURDERING JEWS

Carol Revell, and some other authors in this book, bring up Simon Wiesenthal’s encounter with a German soldier on his deathbed. He asks if the Jew could forgive him for the German mass murder of Jews. (pp. 96-97). Needless to say, there are no accounts, certainly not any in the American classroom, of a dying German asking a Pole if he could forgive him for the Nazi German murder of Poles. Once again, Poles don’t count.

JEWS ARE THE CENTER OF THE MORAL UNIVERSE IN THE AMERICAN CLASSROOM

But wait. It gets even better. Carol Revelle describes a lesson, which has Polonophobic overtones. She writes, “After we have completed this part of the work, I introduce the young novel Briar Rose (Yolen 1992), which features a character in turmoil over questions of forgiveness. In the book, a priest in Chelmno, Poland, recalls coming to the city believing that God could forgive its citizens for their crimes against the Jewish people who died there during the Holocaust. As he comes to understand the details of the deaths through confessions, he begins to doubt that they can be forgiven; however, he still tells them, ‘only God can judge.’ As time progresses, he resists the descriptions of their crimes, offering the members of his congregation assurances that allow them to rest easy instead of hearing and dealing with the crimes committed in the town. In response to our reading, I pose the question: ‘Is there a type of obliviousness, or intentional self-deceit, that might accompany forgiveness?'” (p. 99).

All these “moral ambiguities” are framed exclusively in terms of the Jews and their Holocaust. No other genocide is presented in this light, much less made the subject of students’ moral reflection. Moreover, the typical Judeocentric contextual vacuum is in force. The abject German terror that forced some Poles to denounce or kill fugitive Jews is never told to the students. Making Jews the everlasting victims, and Poles the designated bad guys, is all that matters.

Jews are never made to confront, much less feel guilty about, the Poles murdered by Jewish Communists. And, of course, this is never presented in the classroom. Today’s Jews are never faced with any kind of real or imagined ambiguities regarding such things as “rest easy instead of hearing and dealing with the crimes” of Jews that had murdered Poles. If this is not a palpable double standard, then what is?

There is also an irony. Normally, the Holocaust establishment is especially averse to any mention of God in the public school. Funny how God is brought up when it can be exploited for advantage.

THE HOLOCAUST “HOGS THE SPOTLIGHT”: NON-JEWISH GENOCIDES ARE DISPLACED FROM THE AMERICAN CLASSROOM

Lemberg and Pope make this obvious but forgotten comment, “Teaching the Holocaust entails pedagogical demands, not the least of which is the question of time. Teaching the Holocaust necessarily means not teaching something else.” (p. 6. Emphasis in original).

Exactly right. Note that many U. S. states require Holocaust education by law, and there are plans afoot to make all 50 states teach it. Guess which genocides will be omitted. Certainly not the Jews’ Holocaust! Now tell me again that teaching the Holocaust does not inhibit learning about other genocides. And tell me again that it is not a zero-sum game.

Non-Jewish genocides, at best, are second-class genocides. Yet America in general, and American public schools in particular, are supposed to be bastions of “pluralism, inclusion, and diversity”. Oh, really?