Paths to Teaching the Holocaust edited by Tibbi Duboys is an important new book. It offers contributions by childhood, middle and secondary teacher educators from various regions and universities in the continental United States. The array of material is a strength of this unique book.

Few topics in modern history draw the attention that the Holocaust does. The Shoah has become synonymous with unspeakable atrocity and unbearable suffering. Yet it has also been used to teach tolerance, empathy, resistance, and hope. Understanding and Teaching the Holocaust provides a starting point for teachers in many disciplines to illuminate this crucial event in world history for students. Using a vast array of source materials—from literature and film to survivor testimonies and interviews—the contributors demonstrate how to guide students through these sensitive and painful subjects within their specific historical and social contexts. Each chapter provides pedagogical case studies for teaching content such as antisemitism, resistance and rescue, and the postwar lives of displaced persons. It will transform how students learn about the Holocaust and the circumstances surrounding it.

Can the story be told? Jorge Semprun asked after his liberation from Buchenwald. The question is addressed from many angles in this volume of essays on teaching about the Holocaust. In their introduction, Marianne Hirsch and Irene Kacandes argue that Semprun's question is as vital now, and as difficult and complex, as it was for the survivors in 1945. The thirty-eight contributors to Teaching the Representation of the Holocaust come from various disciplines (history, literary criticism, psychology, film studies) and address a wide range of issues pertinent to the teaching of a subject that many teachers and students feel is an essential part of a liberal arts education. This volume offers approaches to such works as Jurek Becker's Jacob the Liar, Roberto Benigni's Life Is Beautiful, Anne Frank's diary, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners, Claude Lanzmann's Shoah, Primo Levi's Survival in Auschwitz, Cynthia Ozick's The Shawl, Dan Pagis's "Written in Pencil in the Sealed Railway Car," Art Spiegelman's Maus, Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List, Elie Wiesel's Night, and Abraham Yehoshua's Mr. Mani. To the challenge "How do we transmit so hurtful an image of our own species without killing hope and breeding indifference?" posed by Geoffrey Hartman in this volume, the editors respond, "Only in the very human context of classroom interaction can we hope to avoid either false redemption or unending despair."

This book serves as a critical resource for educators across various roles and contexts who are interested in Holocaust education that is both historically sound and practically relevant. As a collection, it pulls together a diverse group of scholars to share their research and experiences. The volume endeavors to address topics including the nature and purpose of Holocaust education, how our understanding of the Holocaust has changed, and resources we can use with learners. These themes are consistent across the chapters, making for a comprehensive exploration of learning through the Holocaust today and in the future.

This edited collection of more than one hundred primary sources from the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s--including newspaper and magazine articles, popular culture materials, and government records--reveals how Americans debated their responsibility to respond to Nazism. It includes valuable resources for students and historians seeking to shed light on this dark era in world history.

Teaching and learning about the Holocaust is central to school curriculums in many parts of the world. As a field for discourse and a body of practice, it is rich, multidimensional and innovative. But the history of the Holocaust is complex and challenging, and can render teaching it a complex and daunting area of work. Drawing on landmark research into teaching practices and students’ knowledge in English secondary schools, Holocaust Education: Contemporary challenges and controversies provides important knowledge about and insights into classroom teaching and learning. It sheds light on key challenges in Holocaust education, including the impact of misconceptions and misinformation, the dilemmas of using atrocity images in the classroom, and teaching in ethnically diverse environments. Overviews of the most significant debates in Holocaust education provide wider context for the classroom evidence, and contribute to a book that will act as a guide through some of the most vexed areas of Holocaust pedagogy for teachers, teacher educators, researchers and policymakers.

978-1438477213 978-1503601956 978-0815636328

The Holocaust marks a decisive moment in modern suffering in which it becomes almost impossible to find meaning or redemption in the experience. In this study, C. Fred Alford offers a new and thoughtful examination of the experience of suffering. Moving from the Book of Job, an account of meaningful suffering in a God-drenched world, to the work of Primo Levi, who attempted to find meaning in the Holocaust through absolute clarity of insight, he concludes that neither strategy works well in today's world. More effective are the day-to-day coping practices of some survivors. Drawing on testimonies of survivors from the Fortunoff Video Archives, Alford also applies the work of Julia Kristeva and the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicot to his examination of a topic that has been and continues to be central to human experience.

This book is a collection of seventeen scholarly articles which analyze Holocaust testimonies, photographs, documents, literature and films, as well as teaching methods in Holocaust education. Most of these essays were originally presented as papers at the Millersville University Conferences on the Holocaust and Genocide from 2010 to 2012. In their articles, the contributors discuss the Holocaust in concentration camps and ghettos, as well as the Nazis’ methods of exterminating Jews. The authors analyze the reliability of photographic evidence and eyewitness testimonies about the Holocaust. The essays also describe the psychological impact of the Holocaust on survivors, witnesses and perpetrators, and upon Jewish identity in general after the Second World War. The scholars explore the problems of the memorialization of the Holocaust in the Soviet Union and the description of the Holocaust in Russian literature. Several essays are devoted to the representation of the Holocaust in film, and trace the evolution of its depiction from the early Holocaust movies of the late 1940s – early 1950s to modern Holocaust fantasy films. They also show the influence of Holocaust cinema on feature films about the Armenian Genocide. Lastly, several authors propose innovative methods of teaching the Holocaust to college students. The younger generation of students may see the Holocaust as an event of the distant past, so new teaching methods are needed to explain its significance. This collection of essays, based on new multi-disciplinary research and innovative methods of teaching, opens many unknown aspects and provides new perspectives on the Holocaust.