On upstanders and bystanders – Dara Horn in The Atlantic:

‘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.’

(…)

‘The illinois holocaust Museum & Education Center is a victim of its own success. When I arrived on a weekday morning to join a field trip from a local Catholic middle school, the museum was having a light day, with only 160 students visiting (typically, closer to 400 students visit the museum daily, alongside others). It was still so packed that the students strained to see the displays. The crowding also meant that most school groups did not explore the museum in chronological order; ours was assigned to start in the gallery describing the liberation of the concentration camps, making the history hard to follow.’ (…)

‘Teaching children that one shouldn’t hate Jews, because Jews are “normal,” only underlines the problem: If someone doesn’t meet your version of “normal,” then it’s fine to hate them. This framing perhaps explains why many victims of today’s American anti-Semitic street violence are visibly religious Jews—as were many Holocaust victims.
Like most Holocaust educators I encountered across the country, Szany is not Jewish. And also like most Holocaust educators I encountered, she is exactly the sort of person everyone should want educating their children: intelligent, intentional, empathetic.’

(…)

‘Other officially failed techniques include showing students gruesome images, and prompting self-flattery by asking “What would you have done?” Yet another bad idea is counting objects. This was the conceit of a widely viewed 2004 documentary called Paper Clips, in which non-Jewish Tennessee schoolchildren, struggling to grasp the magnitude of 6 million murdered Jews, represented those Jews by collecting millions of paper clips. The film won numerous awards and an Emmy nomination before anyone noticed that it is demeaning to represent Jewish people as office supplies.’

(…)

‘The effort to transform the Holocaust into a lesson, coupled with the imperative to “connect it to today,” had at first seemed straightforward and obvious. After all, why learn about these horrible events if they aren’t relevant now? But the more I thought about it, the less obvious it seemed. What were students being taught to “take a stand” for? How could anyone, especially young people with little sense of proportion, connect the murder of 6 million Jews to today without landing in a swamp of Holocaust trivialization, like the COVID-protocol protesters who’d pinned Jewish stars to their shirt and carried posters of Anne Frank? Despite the protesters’ clear anti-Semitism (because, yes, it is anti-Semitic to use the mass murder of Jews as a prop), weren’t they and others like them doing exactly what Holocaust educators claimed they wanted people to do?’

(…)

‘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,” 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.’

(…)

‘But is there any evidence that Holocaust education reduces anti-Semitism, other than fending off Holocaust denial? A 2019 Pew Research Center survey found a correlation between “warm” feelings about Jews and knowledge about the Holocaust—but the respondents who said they knew a Jewish person also tended to be more knowledgeable about the Holocaust, providing a more obvious source for their feelings. In 2020, Echoes & Reflections published a commissioned study of 1,500 college students, comparing students who had been exposed to Holocaust education in high school with those who hadn’t. The published summary shows that those who had studied the Holocaust were more likely to tolerate diverse viewpoints, and more likely to privately support victims of bullying scenarios, which is undoubtedly good news. It did not, however, show a significant difference in respondents’ willingness to defend victims publicly, and students who’d received Holocaust education were less likely to be civically engaged—in other words, to be an “upstander.”’

(…)

‘The Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum, which opened in 2019, takes up an entire city block in the downtown historic district. I was there to attend the annual Candy Brown Holocaust and Human Rights Educator Conference, where more than 60 teachers from Texas, Arkansas, and Oklahoma gathered for professional-development workshops last July. The “upstander” branding I’d encountered in Skokie and elsewhere was even more intense in Dallas. The museum’s lobby featured a giant red wall painted with the word upstander. Each teacher at the conference received a tote bag labeled upstander, a wristband emblazoned with upstander, and a book titled The Upstander.
One of the teachers I met was Benjamin Vollmer, a veteran conference participant who 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. When I asked him why he focuses on the Holocaust, his initial answer was simple: “It meets the TEKS.” The TEKS are the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills, an elaborate list of state educational requirements that drive standardized testing. But as I spoke more with Vollmer, it became apparent that Holocaust education was something much bigger for his students: a rare access point to a wider world. Venus is about 30 miles from Dallas, but Vollmer’s annual Holocaust-museum field trip is the first time that many of his students ever leave their town.
“It’s become part of the school culture,” Vollmer said. “In eighth grade, they walk in, and the first thing they ask is, ‘When are we going to learn about the Holocaust?’ ”’ (…)

‘In one model lesson at the conference, participants examined a speech by the Nazi official Heinrich Himmler about the need to murder Jews, alongside a speech by the Hebrew poet and ghetto fighter Abba Kovner encouraging a ghetto uprising. I only later realized that this lesson plan quite elegantly satisfied the House bill’s requirement of providing “contending perspectives.” The next day, I asked the instructor if that was an unspoken goal of her lesson plan. With visible hesitation, she said that teaching in Texas can be like “walking the tightrope.” This way, she added, “you’re basing your perspectives on primary texts and not debating with Holocaust deniers.” Less than an hour later, a senior museum employee pulled me aside to tell me that I wasn’t allowed to interview the staff.’

(…)

‘I asked Klett why no one seemed to be teaching anything about Jewish culture. If the whole point of Holocaust education is to “humanize” those who were “dehumanized,” why do most teachers introduce students to Jews only when Jews are headed for a mass grave? “There’s a real fear of teaching about Judaism,” she confided. “Especially if the teacher is Jewish.” I was baffled. Teachers who taught about industrialized mass murder were scared of teaching about … Judaism? Why? “Because the teachers are afraid that the parents are going to say that they’re pushing their religion on the kids.” But Jews don’t do that, I said. Judaism isn’t a proselytizing religion like Christianity or Islam; Jews don’t believe that anyone needs to become Jewish in order to be a good person, or to enjoy an afterlife, or to be “saved.” This seemed to be yet another basic fact of Jewish identity that no one had bothered to teach or learn.’

(…)

‘It is dehumanizing to be treated as a symbol. It is even more dehumanizing to be treated as a warning.’

(…)

‘Back at home, I thought again about the Holocaust holograms and the Auschwitz VR, and realized what I wanted. I want a VR experience of the Strashun Library in Vilna, the now-destroyed research center full of Yiddish writers and historians documenting centuries of Jewish life. I want a VR of a night at the Yiddish theater in Warsaw—and a VR of a Yiddish theater in New York. I want holograms of the modern writers and scholars who revived the Hebrew language from the dead—and I definitely want an AI component, so I can ask them how they did it. I want a VR of the writing of a Torah scroll in 2023, and then of people chanting aloud from it through the year, until the year is out and it’s read all over again—because the book never changes, but its readers do.’

Read the article here.

Teaching the Holocaust has become a practice that is merely teaching a diluted and non-offensive sort of humanist.
The dead Jew as a warning so pupils nowadays will avoid all kinds of non-acceptable behavior is not very dignified for the dead Jew indeed. Not to mention the paperclips, although I’m willing to applaud the irony and simplicity of that undertaking.

I don’t believe that the solutions Horn is suggesting will solve all the problems, the main thing is: teaching the Holocaust is teaching history and teaching history is not equal to a series of moral lessons. I don’t think we need history for that.
It’s important that somebody points or Holocaust Teaching, and maybe also remembrance culture, is often not only ineffective, but worse: counterproductive.

Filled with people with good intentions and very often the good intentions are not even that good, on closer inspection.

And thinking of Germany, and without equating World War II and Vietnam, maybe teaching the history of the Vietnam War might be a good idea as well in the US.