Chapter 5: Teaching Strong Cultures

As educators, we continue to collaborate and improve our goals and methods with new materials and newly redesigned curricula. We affirm the importance of our objectives by reflecting upon why and how we teach our subjects. When we are teaching about the Holocaust, we are privileged to share new and improving resources, including materials easily available online. We discover and use online materials including vast archives of survivor testimonials that were previously limited to archival uses (Langer, 1991), new and often professionally produced videos that offer excellent summaries (ADL, USC Shoah Foundation, & Vashem, 2017, USC Shoah Foundation, 2018).

If we need to design our own materials and courses, we help humanize the Holocaust through accessible and individual accounts. We need not become distracted from our goal of providing Holocaust education by angry critics, cynics, or public debates; we will not be dissuaded from our goals by hateful materials or a narrow, singular focus only perpetrator perspectives. We can and should listen carefully to the voices of those oppressed by both the Holocaust (Frankl, 1992; Tec, 2003) and by all forms of social inequalities (Collins, 2012, 2016).