Charles Fodor is a Minnesota Holocaust survivor, one of the survivors whose arrival to the Twin Cities came over a decade after the end of the war. While many of the Holocaust survivors that immigrated to Minnesota did so in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, it was not uncommon for survivors to attempt to return to their prewar homes or, in the case of Charles Fodor, remain in their homes after they were liberated.

Born Fodor Karoly Sandor in 1936, Charles was interned with his family in the Budapest ghetto during the German occupation of Hungary which began in 1944. Like other survivors whose stories are told through the Upper Midwest Jewish Archives (UMJA) collections, Charles’ time under direct Nazi occupation was relatively short, ending in January 1945 when Soviet forces liberated Budapest. Despite this, Charles’ mother was abducted while the family was in the ghetto: she was taken away by the Nazis to perform labor, but never returned. Charles and his father were able to survive.

After liberation, Hungary was annexed by the Soviet Union, becoming an early member of the Eastern Bloc. Charles said many times that the Russians “stayed too long.” Despite this, Charles continued living in Hungary after the war. Eventually, Charles was drafted into the Hungarian Army, being ordered to appear for duty on October 30th, 1956. One week before this date arrived, however, Hungarian students and anti-Soviet activists organized to topple the Russian occupation. This would become known as the Hungarian Revolt of 1956. 

As Russian tanks moved into Budapest to quell the uprising, Charles took the opportunity to escape the ensuing revolt. Along with two friends, they began to make their way westward. After nearly three weeks of traveling on foot to avoid Russian forces, the three reached Austria. From there they were able to make their way to the United States, where Charles arrived on December 24th, 1956. He lived in the United States for the rest of his life, primarily living in Minnesota.

The shirt that UMJA has in their collections belonged to Charles, and is the one that he wore while escaping Hungary after the Revolt, wearing it all the way to the United States. This shirt was one of the only possessions Charles had with him while he was making his escape, and he kept it with him all the way up until his passing in 2018, when his wife Victoria donated it to the UMJA archives for further stewardship and care.

This shirt is not only fascinating because of the story it tells, but because it is housed in UMJA’s archives at all. The vast majority of UMJA’s archival materials are written records, pamphlets, correspondence, and other forms of paper materials, because Elmer L. Andersen Library’s onsite storage facilities are climate controlled to best support paper-based objects. This is why they make up a majority of the collections; three-dimensional artifacts like textiles require more complex storage requirements and are less likely found in UMJA’s collections.

Charles Fodor’s shirt, then, offers a unique departure for UMJA from their usual collection mediums. The conditions needed to maintain textiles, fabrics, and other objects can often take different forms than conditions needed to maintain papers and books. Despite these possible challenges, UMJA accepted Charles Fodor’s shirt into the archives. The story behind the artifact justified any extra care that would need to be taken in order to preserve this piece of history, which accompanies the oral history testimony from Charles also at UMJA. This, along with Charles’ incredible story of survival, makes this collection one of the most unique housed within UMJA.

Ryken Farr is a junior undergraduate at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, majoring in History and Jewish Studies. He is currently the undergraduate student worker with the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies and spent time in August 2024 as a student assistant with the Upper Midwest Jewish Archives.

University of Minnesota

Twin Cities Campus

Department of Curriculum and Instruction

College of Education and Human Development

March 20, 2023

Chair Cheryl Youakim

Republican Lead Ron Kresha

Members of the Education Finance Committee;

“Why have we never learned about this before?” This question was asked by a high school junior in my Genocide and Human Rights course just last week as we began learning about the Cambodian Genocide. The student, a second-generation Hmong-American whose family members experienced mass violence and came to the United States as refugees, is often frustrated that, until my course, her education has excluded most of the genocides we are covering in the course. Quite frankly, as her teacher, I am also frustrated and disheartened that most of my students have little knowledge of these events and the broader patterns of genocide. Thus, I am writing to support HF 2685 and Holocaust and genocide education in the State of Minnesota. As both a middle and high school social studies teacher and a scholar in the field of Social Studies Education, I have seen firsthand through my teaching and research the power of Holocaust and genocide education. 

I am currently nearing the completion of my 17th year as a classroom teacher. I have taught social studies at every grade from 5th through 12th in public, charter, and private schools in urban, suburban, and rural communities in Minnesota and Wisconsin, as well as two years in Vienna, Austria. As a teacher, I have seen firsthand the unique power of Holocaust and genocide education to engender attitudes of tolerance, justice, and citizenship within a pluralistic democracy. While students often come into my class curious about the topics, they leave inspired to seek a better world both locally and globally. I have also seen how teaching about genocide and mass violence, especially cases that are often absent from middle and high school social studies classes, can affirm students’ (and their families’) identities and lived experiences, as is the case for so many of my students from communities that have experienced mass violence. This is so important for Minnesota, as new and existing refugee and migrant communities seek to see themselves reflected in education and the state more broadly. Importantly, learning about Indigenous genocide provides opportunities for Indigenous and non-Indigenous students to better understand the history of the state and begin to imagine and work towards a more just future. 

However, like most social studies teachers, I came to the profession with little awareness of other genocides and limited knowledge of the Holocaust. Early in my career, when a principal asked that I develop and teach a high school elective course on the Holocaust, I began to seek out professional development opportunities, largely through the University of Minnesota’s Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies (CHGS). Through CHGS’s summer institutes, I was exposed to other cases of genocide, such as those in Armenia, Ukraine, Cambodia, Rwanda, and Bosnia. Importantly, I also learned from scholars and community members about the genocide of the Dakota and Ho-Chunk and the violence perpetrated against the Ojibwe. Soon my Holocaust course expanded to include these and other cases of genocide. HF 2685 stands apart from Holocaust and genocide education in other states in its support of funding for professional development for teachers, who will seek out and use these opportunities to create meaningful learning experiences for their students. 

In 2022, I completed my Ph.D. in Curriculum and Instruction and Social Studies Education, with a minor in Human Rights, at the University of Minnesota. Broadly, my research examines genocide education in high school social studies classrooms and curricula. My dissertation joins a growing body of research that shows the benefits of Holocaust and genocide education. My research also shows the power of legislation in strengthening and advancing Holocaust and genocide education in states which have adopted mandates. In Wisconsin, a newly implemented Holocaust and genocide mandate has spurred tremendous growth in professional development opportunities for teachers, and I have received dozens of requests to share my syllabus and resources with middle and high school teachers who are developing and teaching their own courses or weaving genocide into their existing social studies courses. Specific legislation places importance on the topic. 

I drafted all of the language related to the Holocaust and genocide in the 2021 Minnesota K-12 Social Studies Standards. While I laud the work of the standards committee in securing and expanding genocide education in Minnesota for years to come, I also recognize the limitations of the state’s teaching and learning standards. HF 2685 provides additional, essential safeguards and opportunities to secure and expand genocide education. Naming specific genocides matters. It ensures genocide education about and, importantly, beyond the Holocaust, including Indigenous genocide. Likewise codifying this language in legislation expresses an enduring recognition of the importance and commitment to genocide education within the state. 

HF 2685 is an important piece of legislation for Minnesota’s teachers and, especially, students. For students, this legislation will advance attitudes of tolerance, justice, and citizenship within a pluralistic democracy, affirm their and their families’ identities and lived experiences, and provide a step towards truth-telling in terms of Indigenous genocide within the state. For teachers, this legislation supports professional development opportunities and resources to ensure appropriate and responsible education. The community support for this legislation speaks to the importance of genocide education for Minnesotans of many different backgrounds. Perhaps, the most powerful call for such legislation is from my students when they ask: “Why have we never learned about this before?” This question speaks to the pressing need for such legislation. 

Sincerely,

George D. Dalbo, Ph.D. 

High School Social Studies Teacher

The Minnesota Department of Education (MDE) recently released the second draft of proposed social studies standards. The draft, part of a mandatory process to review teaching and learning standards every ten years, will not only secure but significantly expand Holocaust and genocide education across the state for years to come. 

The months-delayed second draft follows the release of a controversial first draft in December 2020, which did not mention Holocaust and genocide education. The decision meant not carrying through the three existing references from the current social studies standards, which were adopted in 2011.

This first draft drew widespread criticism from many fronts. A broad coalition called for the inclusion of ethnic studies; the Sikh community lobbied for the inclusion of Sikhism, and several conservative groups spoke out against the shift away from patriotic and whitewashed narratives of U.S. history. The omission of the Holocaust, in particular, became a rallying cry for the conservative Center for the American Experiment, which, however, made no mention of the omission of other genocides and railed against the expanded coverage of Indigenous history in the draft.

As a high school teacher and Ph.D. candidate in Social Studies Education researching genocide education and working with the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies and the Jewish Community Relations Council of Minnesota and the Dakotas (JCRC), I lobbied MDE to reinstate and expand Holocaust and genocide studies, while also supporting efforts to include ethnic studies, absent narratives, and Indigenous histories and contemporary realities in the standards. Genocide education is an important component of these and other efforts to expand social justice via education. 

Along with CHGS and JCRC, I am heartened to see that the second draft of the standards has included all of my suggestions regarding Holocaust and genocide education, which ensures that Minnesota is in line with many other states expanding their genocide education requirements in recent years. I am also encouraged to see the inclusion of an ethnic studies strand, a focus on absent narratives, and robust coverage of Indigenous peoples in the state’s past and more recent history. 

Below is a discussion of how Holocaust and genocide education is framed in the second draft of the standards.

Defining Genocide Education

A careful reader might note that the second draft includes no reference to specific cases of genocide, except the Holocaust and Indigenous genocide. This broader language allows districts, schools, and, importantly, teachers to tailor a study of genocide to meet the needs and desires of their students. For example, an eighth-grade benchmark states: “Examine the Holocaust, genocides, and other cases of mass violence in the 20th and 21st centuries […] and analyze how individuals, groups, and societies around the world have been affected by genocide and mass violence, including communities resettled in Minnesota” (8.4.19.2). Thus, teachers can include in a study of history those cases of genocide that match the lived and community experiences and interests of increasingly diverse students. 

Additionally, the draft standards do not define genocide; instead, teachers and students can explore definitions within their classrooms. This opens possibilities for a broader study of what genocide scholar Alexander Hinton termed “hidden genocides.” Hidden genocides are those cases of mass violence that are either, when they are taught, not labeled or discussed as genocide or simply not taught at all. For example, the events and aftermath of the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862, though taught in sixth-grade classrooms, may not be examined through the lens of genocide. While some cases of genocide, such as the Holodomor, are too often not taught about at all in Minnesota classrooms. The broader language of the standards opens up possibilities for an expansive study of genocide. 

Scope and Sequence of Holocaust and Genocide Education

The proposed standards will include Holocaust and genocide education in both middle and high school. More importantly, Holocaust and genocide education will be scaffolded and developmentally appropriate. For example, a high school benchmark states: “Evaluate historical narratives about World War II and the Holocaust in the United States and on a global scale” (9.4.18.13US7). This builds on a middle school benchmark, which states: “Outline the causes and conduct of World War II […] and the Holocaust” (7.4.18.5). Here, the scaffolding from a study of the “causes and conduct” of the Holocaust at a younger age results in students being ready and able to “evaluate historical narratives” about the Holocaust on a “global scale” in high school. An additional high school benchmark asks students to “describe the responses of individuals, communities, nations, and the world community to human rights violations, including the Holocaust and genocides” (9.4.19.6WH6). As a result of this careful scaffolding, students will not only study the history of the Holocaust, but they will also examine the Holocaust in the context of world history and analyze how individuals and societies respond to mass violence.

The proposed standards do not include Holocaust and genocide education in the elementary grades. Holocaust and genocide education scholars Simone Schweber and Samuel Totten have each written out against teaching this content to younger children, finding that these lessons necessarily trivialize the history of the Holocaust and genocides and can potentially traumatize students. 

Indigenous Genocide and Settler Colonialism

The second draft includes several references to Indigenous genocide in Minnesota and North America and settler colonialism. Beginning in fifth grade, students will “explain how Indigenous nations responded in different ways to settler colonialism” (5.4.21.2) and “analyze how rivalries among European nations and the search for new opportunities led to the exploitation and genocide of indigenous peoples and the theft of indigenous lands (5.4.21.1). Significantly, under the proposed revisions, students will study the “genocide that occurred within the land that is Minnesota today” (6.3.17.2). Such language is a powerful call for truth-telling regarding the history of Minnesota. 

While I laud the work of the committee in securing and expanding genocide education in Minnesota for years to come, I also recognize the limitations of the state’s teaching and learning standards. Despite the new language, districts and, especially, classroom teachers acting as curricular gatekeepers will ultimately decide what and how content is taught within their classrooms. Once these standards are finalized (expected in late 2021), the work of supporting educators across the state to implement them begins. CHGS is already working with university and community partners to expand its resources and educational outreach.

Note: MDE is seeking comments from the public on the second draft of the social studies standards through August 16, 2021. 

George Dalbo is a Ph.D. candidate in Curriculum and Instruction and Social Studies Education at the University of Minnesota and a Research Assistant at the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. George’s research broadly centers on how the Holocaust, genocide, mass violence, and human rights are taught in K-12 classrooms. George is also a full-time high school social studies teacher in rural south-central Wisconsin. Entering his 16th year of teaching, George has taught every grade from 5th-12th in public, charter, and private schools in Minnesota and Wisconsin and two years in Vienna, Austria.

In Professor Sheer Ganor’s course “History of the Holocaust,” students’ final projects were designed with three core goals: to highlight the spatial dimension of the Holocaust, to give students an opportunity to intimately learn individuals’ life stories, and to analyze primary sources and scholarly studies that shed further light on survivors’ stories. 

The students used StoryMaps, a digital platform intended for telling spatial stories. “[Story maps generally] use geography as a means of organizing and presenting information,” says Shana Crosson, Academic Technology Consultant in the College of Liberal Arts, who worked with Professor Ganor to implement this technology in her course. “In some classes, students create spatial data by closely evaluating primary sources such as newspapers, oral histories, archival records, guide books, or even phone books. This information may be combined with other databases and information to create maps, and ultimately, combined with narrative in a story map.”

Survivors, as students learned, were torn from their hometowns, dislocated multiple times — often through several ghettos and camps — and left to search for a new home after the war’s end. As a result, mapping the paths of different individuals illuminated the Holocaust as a global event and showed how the genocide’s far-reaching effects extended across borders and continents. 

Though millions of people fell victim to the Nazis’ genocidal machine, each person’s experience was unique. By closely studying a single survivor, students developed a sense of familiarity with that person and the details of their biography — from their childhood memories to strategies of processing trauma. Video testimony also increased this familiarity, as students learned to recognize the survivor’s voice, understand their accent, and pay attention to their body language. 

This spatial visualization not only highlighted the centrality of forced removal in the execution of this crime; using story maps, students also embedded the events recounted by survivors into a broader history of the Holocaust and the Second World War. Students took the maps and spatial data they created and then communicated their understanding of events by combining textual narratives, maps, and other visuals. 

The audience for these projects often extends beyond the course instructor, which gives them a different impact than a mere term paper. Students not only create a usable resource when compiling the data themselves; by defining structural parameters themselves (i.e., when students act as the mapmakers), they understand how mapping is left to subjective interpretations.

As Crosson also noted, feedback from students has been quite positive. Kyli Knutson, one of the students in Professor Ganor’s course, said, “I think what struck me the most about this project while working on it was just how close I felt to [Felicia Weingarten] after completing it. Even though I had never met [Weingarten], I learned so much about her life and her personality, that I felt like I had met her.” Knutson’s comments echo what many students said: they learned new skills, including learning a new technology, presenting information in a different format, and how to build maps. 

Knutson enjoyed the opportunity to do something creative with story maps that also addressed challenging topics such as the Holocaust. “It was hard for me at first to figure out how to structure the Storymap because the question was: how do you compile someone’s whole life in a way that does justice to their story while also educating others? The story maps helped combine [Weingarten’s] life story, the educational importance of her story, and relevant secondary sources.”

Knutson’s subject, Felicia Weingarten, was born in Łódź in 1926. Weingarten has been a consultant for the University of Minnesota in the past and has served as a resource for interviews and panel discussions on television and radio, as well as for newspapers and books. She has spoken extensively with high school and college students on topics dealing with the historical, psychological, and political factors of the Holocaust. In 2005, her book “Ave Maria in Auschwitz: A True Story of a Jewish Girl From Poland” was published by DeForest Press. The book is a collection of short stories that poetically reflect her experience in the ghettos and camps during the Holocaust. 

Some students even traced the paths of survivors who settled in the Twin Cities and whose materials are part of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies’ permanent collections. Felicia Weingarten’s book and other materials are available through the Center’s collections. Her testimony is available at the University of Minnesota through CHGS (via Elevator),  the Visual History Archive, developed by the USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education. Since its founding, CHGS has maintained and curated its own collections, which are accessible to UMN faculty, students, and staff as well as the general public. 

Taylor Johnon, an MFA Candidate in Art at the University of Minnesota, along with Jennifer Hammer, began in earnest to reorganize the Center’s Elevator site to make it more user-friendly. Since last spring, CHGS staff have begun creating new search parameters and organizational practices. CHGS hopes that, with an Elevator interface that is easier to use, more faculty and students will use the Center’s digital resources. 

Sheer Ganor is an assistant professor of history at the University of Minnesota. A historian of German-speaking Jewry and modern Germany, her work focuses on the nexus of forced migration, memory, and cultural identities. 

Shana Crosson is the academic technology consultant at the University of Minnesota’s College of Liberal Arts. She currently helps integrate Geographic Information Systems in a variety of disciplines in K12 and Higher Education, including History, Sociology, and Foreign Languages. 

Kyli Knutson is a junior History major at the University of Minnesota – Twin Cities. She has always been interested in history. Her undergraduate coursework has allowed her to pose important questions about historical events and figures, as was the case with her Storymaps project. In addition to her interest in History, she plans to double major in Art History and graduate in the spring of 2022.

Meyer Weinshel is a Ph.D. candidate in Germanic studies at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. He is a research assistant and the educational outreach coordinator for the UMN Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. He has taught community Yiddish classes with Minneapolis-based Jewish Community Action and will be a lecturer of Yiddish studies at the Ohio State University in 2021.

Setting the Stage 
Before our in-class discussion, I typically assign two TED Talks for students to watch: Aaron Huey’s 2010 “America’s Native Prisoners of War” and Bryan Stevenson’s 2012 “We Need to Talk About Injustice.” Both present hard truths about the histories and legacies of the genocide and dispossession of Indigenous peoples and the enslavement and mass incarceration of African Americans. Though increasingly common, the realities of Indigenous genocide and African American enslavement, which are called the United States’ “first sins,” are rarely discussed in social studies curricula and classrooms as part of the same overarching structure of settler colonialism.

We begin class by discussing the TED Talks. Though my students are sophomores in high school, most have had few opportunities throughout their formal schooling to discuss the issues raised in either talk. Initially, the issues discussed by Huey and Stevenson seem far away or part of some other America. Indeed, the August 2020 police shooting of Jacob Blake, the responding uprisings, and the co-occurring white nationalist violence in Kenosha, Wisconsin (60 miles away) highlighted the sobering reality of racism in Wisconsin. Yet, these went unmentioned and seemingly unnoticed by students at the start of this school year. These talks provide accessible entry points for class discussions. Note: Huey’s talk demands additional scrutiny. As a white photojournalist, his images from the Pine Ridge Reservation that accompany the talk – images that appeared in a 2012 National Geographic cover story – could perpetuate the (settler) colonial gaze.

Drawing Indians
Next, borrowing a prompt from Patrick LeBeau (Cheyenne River Sioux), I instruct students to “draw what you know about Indians” on a sheet of notebook paper. Though initially uncomfortable with the prompt, students soon begin filling their sheets with images. Similar to what LeBeau has found, students’ drawings invariably include teepees, tomahawks, and feathered headdresses – the stereotypical trappings of nineteenth-century Plains Indians. These are reflected in schoolwork from my own childhood, as well (see image below). Asking students to reflect on why these are the common images they hold of American Indians (images that are still prevalent in advertising, sports, and education) pushes non-Indigenous students to reckon with how they view American Indians.

Defining Settler Colonialism Theory
Next we examine Eve Tuck (Unangax̂) and K. Wayne Yang’s settler-native-slave triad, which provides a framework for understanding power relations within settler colonial society regarding land. Settler colonialism is a distinct type of colonialism in which non-Indigenous settlers remove and then replace Indigenous inhabitants on the land, occupying the land in perpetuity. Simultaneously, Africans and African Americans are enslaved to work the land. 

Within the triad, settlers occupy stolen Indigenous land, creating structures to ensure their continued dominance over society and land. The native continues to be removed from the land and erased within historical and contemporary narratives, while the chattel slave is restricted from owning land, disenfranchised, and valued exclusively for their labor. The prison-industrial complex represents a continuation of enslavement in U.S. society. Thus,  Patrick Wolfe wrote that settler colonialism is a “structure not an event,”  infused with a genocidal “logic of elimination.” While students might initially view the settler-native-slave triad as corresponding to identities, la paperson wrote that these are not identities, but rather technologies of the settler nation-state.

 “Therefore, the ‘settler’ is not an identity, it is an idealized juridical space of exceptional rights granted to normative settler citizens.” 

Thus, racialization and the racial categories of Whiteness and Blackness serve as organizing logics, or tools for maintaining settler colonialism. 

Returning to the TED Talks, students reflect on the following quotes through a settler colonial lens:

• “More than 90 percent of the population [on Pine Ridge Reservation] lives below the federal poverty line […] The life expectancy for men is between 46 and 48 years old — roughly the same as in Afghanistan and Somalia” (Huey).
• “In urban communities across this country — Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington — 50 to 60 percent of all young men of color are in jail or prison or on probation or parole” (Stevenson). 

Viewed through the lens of settler colonialism, the structural issues described by Huey and Stevenson are clarified and brought into relationship. 

Settler Colonial Imagery in the Settler Colonial Imaginary
Next, we turn our attention to John Gast’s 1872 painting: American Progress. In the painting, Columbia, adorned with the star of empire, floats across the American landscape. Stringing a telegraph wire, she ushers in settlement via Conestoga wagons, stagecoaches, and railroads. Bringing the light of civilization, she drives out darkness along with buffalo and Indigenous peoples. The imagery of the piece is not subtle, and students have little difficulty decoding the painting using a settler colonial lens. 

When considering the book in Columbia’s arms, most students reason she holds the Bible. However, zooming in, they see it is a school book. This revelation leads us to discuss how schools and curriculum function as mechanisms to sustain and perpetuate settler colonialism. Dolores Calderon has analyzed social studies curricula as examples of “settler grammar,” or those “discursive logics that maintain settler colonial ideologies.”

Unsettling Local Erasures
Clinton, Wisconsin, the rural community where I teach, like all settler communities, has a long history and collective memory of misrepresenting or erasing Indigenous peoples. A log cabin stands in town as a “visible reminder of the sacrifices made by early pioneers as they settled this area.” Yet, the many Indigenous communities that have called this land home are nowhere mentioned. The practice of memorializing first settlers through monuments while simultaneously writing Indigenous peoples out of existence is what Jean O’Brien (White Earth Ojibwe) referred to as “firsting and lasting.” A 1987 volume of local history stated: “There seems to be no record of any permanent Indian settlement located at Clinton before the coming of the Whiteman.” Discussing these local erasures brings the lessons of settler colonialism home for students. We follow these discussions with learning about land acknowledgments, which are more common in Canada or U.S. higher education, before drafting our own statement. 

Reflections on “Settler Fragility”
Discussions of settler colonialism are not easy for most non-Indigenous students, many of whom can trace their family histories to the founding of this close-knit farming community. It is not uncommon for male students to express frustration or anger when confronting local histories and legacies of violence, dispossession, and continued erasure. Students sometimes crumple their drawings and otherwise disrupt class discussions or put their heads down on their desks and disengage. It is not uncommon for female students, seeking to comfort their agitated peers, to become defensive and seek to excuse past and contemporary settler violence. Settler colonialism is heavily steeped in heteropatriarchal social norms. Such behaviors signal what Dina Gilio-Whitaker (Colville Confederated Tribes) called “settler fragility,” or the “the inability to talk about unearned privilege—in this case, the privilege of living on lands that were taken in the name of democracy through profound violence and injustice.” 

Beyond Settler Colonialism
J. Kēhaulani Kauanui (Kanaka Maoli) reminds us that taking up settler colonialism, though important, cannot replace the need for Indigenous (as well as other BIPOC) presence in the curricula, classroom, and community. While settler colonialism theory helps students recognize the logics that govern schooling and society, this lesson is only part of my and my students’ efforts to unsettle traditional social studies education. 

George Dalbo is a high school social studies teacher and Ph.D. candidate in Curriculum and Instruction and Social Studies Education at the University of Minnesota. His research interests include Holocaust, genocide, and human rights education in K-12 curricula and classrooms.

Philip Gourevitch opens his book on the Rwandan genocide, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families, with a quote from Plato:

Leontius, the son of Aglaion, was coming up from the Peiraeus, close to the outer side of the north wall, when he saw some dead bodies lying near the executioner,  and he felt a desire to look at them, and at the same time felt disgust at the thought, and tried to turn aside. For some time he fought with himself and put his hand over his eyes, but in the end the desire got the better of him, and opening his eyes wide with his fingers he ran forward to the bodies, saying, ‘There you are, curse you, have your fill of the lovely spectacle.

Many people desire to make sense of violence, a pursuit that often leads to engagement with violent imagery. However, as Susan Sontag captures in Regarding the Pain of Others, depictions of violence cannot ever replicate its lived experience. While graphic imagery or descriptions of violence may serve to aid in an understanding of violence, they also hold vast destructive potential. In contrast to assumed education benefits, they can also dehumanize or inhibit agency. As such, we are responsible for critically reflecting upon how we engage with this content in our roles as both researchers and educators.

To do so, we must acknowledge that representations of violence are not equivalent across populations. Historically, a hierarchy of suffering has prioritized the humanity of some groups above others. Within this hierarchy, violence against the Black community, Indigenous groups, people of color, and throughout the Global South is devalued in contrast to White populations in the Global North.

In “Savages, Victims, and Saviors: The Metaphor of Human Rights,” Makau Mutua reflects upon the limiting and, at times, the dehumanizing impact of human rights institutions and their depictions of violence. Commonly held understandings of human rights violations, especially against marginalized communities, can have the effect of reducing individuals to their experience of atrocity. This constructs violence as something that happens elsewhere, to other people, and it characterizes those who experience violence into limiting, unagentic categories. They may be hapless and helpless victims, incapable of caring for themselves, or barbaric, savage perpetrators. When people think of genocide and mass atrocity, for example, they often think of Africans before thinking about Native Americans. This violence is colloquially understood as being perpetrated by Africans against Africans, rather than by the early settlers of what we now call America against Native communities.

Crucially, our role as scholars can have the impact of reinforcing these destructive identities, especially when we share graphic imagery that supports these archetypes. Sharing depictions of violence can have the effect of shrinking a nameless individual’s identity to the experience of violence, as a “victim” or a “perpetrator,” an “other.” Closely intertwined with the capacity of violent imagery to reduce the subject’s humanity is an ethical conversation of agency. 

There is a profound intimacy in the experience of violence and death, and more often than not, those depicted have no voice in how their experience is captured. This, of course, is especially true for the dead – they cannot support or counter the narratives that depictions of their passing are utilized to further. Images of victims strip agency from those whose death and pain we voyeuristically consume from the comfort of our air-conditioned rooms.

We need to ask ourselves why we need images of death and suffering to make the point that humanity can be destructive, and further, what it means when we share such depictions in our classrooms. We need to think about the secondary traumatization process we put students through when they see bodies that look like theirs displayed for all and sundry to consume in the name of education. 

If the constant images of police violence against Black people in this country has not stopped the killing of Black people, why do we think that showing images of victims of genocide and mass atrocity will prevent these events from happening? These images are destructive in how they perform the function of allowing their consumers, subconsciously, to think of certain groups as already socially dead. They run the risk of presenting Black and Brown bodies as disposable. Just another body. Seeing as most images of victims of genocide and mass atrocity often look like the second author’s body, this is not merely an intellectual debate. It is position viscerally felt by him even as he studies the representation of genocide and mass atrocity in Africa.

Brooke Chambers is a Ph.D. Candidate in the University of Minnesota’s Department of Sociology. Her research interests include collective memory, cultural trauma, political sociology, genocide, mass violence, and the sociology of law. Her dissertation work examines generational trauma in contemporary Rwanda, with a focus on the commemorative process. She is the 2018-2019 Badzin Fellow in Holocaust and Genocide Studies and a 2019-2020 Fulbright Research Fellow.

j. Siguru Wahutu is an Assistant Professor at NYU’s Department of Media, Culture, and Communication, and a Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard. His primary scholarship examines media constructions of knowledge in Africa, with a particular focus on genocide and mass atrocities. His research interests include the effects of ethnicity and culture on the media representations of human rights violations, global and transnational news flows, postcolonial land claims, and the political economy of international media, with a regional emphasis on postcolonial Africa. His primary book project offers an extensive account of media coverage of Darfur between 2003 and 2008 within various African states (including Kenya, Rwanda, South Africa, Nigeria, and Egypt). When not studying media and genocide, he works on issues surrounding data privacy, and media manipulation in African countries. This secondary research stream is the subject of his second book project currently under contract with MIT Press. Wahutu’s research has appeared in African Journalism Studies, African Affairs, Global Media and Communication, Media and Communication, Media, Culture, and Society, and Sociological Forum.

What, then, do these conflicting yet interwoven sets of discourse convey to (and about) a broader public when most non-majority languages face steep declines in usage over the next century? In addition, how do the overly positive and overly negative pronouncements effect Yiddishists in particular, who often take it upon themselves as native and non-native speakers to “seriously” engage with a language and culture destroyed by genocide, state repression, and the continuing forms of stigmatization in and outside of the language’s respective communities? 

In the United States, the discussions surrounding Yiddish are two-pronged: 1. What role does Yiddish continue to play (or not) in the lives of American Jews (the majority of whom are Ashkenazi with immigrant backgrounds from Eastern Europe), and 2. How does this role translate to an anthropological reading of Yiddishism (broadly defined as cultural paradigms for, and in, Yiddish) today? 

Answers to all of these questions reveal themselves in recent publications for both academic and general audiences. In a recent piece in the LA Review of Books, Marc Caplan writes,

One hundred years ago, when most American Jews were immigrants from Eastern Europe, nearly every Jew in the United States spoke Yiddish, but no one gave it any respect. Today, by contrast, everyone is full of affection for Yiddish, even though almost no one speaks it.

For Caplan, Anthologies (like the terrific one he is reviewing) also expose underlying, persistent tensions—both in the anthology as a literary form, and (more importantly) societally in the United States. Today, most in-group members (i.e., Jews of Ashkenazi descent) have little or no knowledge of the Yiddish language or the figures and works that shaped Yiddish culture for the past millennium, and how these figures often worked from the margins of a larger society. Caplan provides these sobering reminders in 2020, a year like no other in recent memory when Americans (including American Jews) are forced to confront the structural racism that has shaped this country since its inception. 

For Caplan (and myself), the concern extends beyond, “What is the role of Yiddish [in America]?” But rather, what should count as a “serious” engagement with Yiddish, especially when taking into account these broader questions about minoritization and linguistic usage?  Why do we allow translation to comfort us as our only form of “knowing” when we know so little about the actual processes of translation and the power it holds on us to begin with? These are the operative questions most Americans refuse to answer—at the expense of needed structural change and the protection of linguistic and cultural differences among indigenous and immigrant groups worldwide. 

This notion of “seriousness” emerges in a recent ethnography by the anthropologist Joshua B. Friedman. Friedman’s study breaks down what he coins the “politics of Yiddish seriousness.” It is a seriousness that implies intimacy, which in turn is two-fold: intimacy with subject matter often elided (Yiddish language and culture), and intimacy within a global community of individuals working outside more traditional spaces of power.

Through this ethnographic study, Friedman uncovers Yiddishist attitudes toward traditional power structures found in academia, institutional Jewish spaces, and mainstream publishing, all of which are settings that (“serious Yiddishists” would argue) condone a superficial engagement with, and further marginalization of, Yiddish. It is why Friedman notes that Yiddish among “serious” Yiddishists is an alternative to American Jewish cultural intimacy, which usually confines Yiddish to the butt of jokes (i.e., in that humor is used to bely underlying collective anxiety about belonging and acceptance). Instead, Yiddish acts as a mode of communication and cultural specificity. 

A Yiddishist himself, Friedman also highlights the risks inherent in viewing any subject of study with a lack of rigor and critical distance. As just one example of this, Friedman cites the ways Yiddish culture often appears in romanticized depictions of workers’ struggle and internationalism, thereby eliding the complexities of Yiddish culture in the same ways “Yiddish humor” also does. Furthermore, any romanticization, I would argue, also consequently erases (for example) the complicated role of Yiddish and race in the United States. 

The intergenerational phenomenon that is linguistic assimilation, which is prevalent in all walks of American Jewish life, erases much of the work on the ground many are doing (and have been doing for decades) in order to assure some semblance of intergenerational language and cultural transmission continues. Upon initial review, it is understandable why Yiddishists are “serious.” Watering down Yiddish does the language and culture a disservice or worse.

Some forms of “seriousness,” however, can also lead to gatekeeping—namely, around the few tangible resources available for long-term engagement with the language. What often belies this seriousness are calls for authenticity, which in turn risk excluding those newly interested in Yiddish or dismissing hybrid forms of engagement by categorizing unknown actors as “less than,” all of which are political acts. 

As I often get asked for resources on Yiddish culture, I recommend perusing the hyperlinks included in this post. For example, Caplan’s review of two recent publications center intergenerational engagement with Yiddish literature and culture. And Friedman’s newly published article can help many better understand the challenges faced by Yiddishists, especially in the face of mainstream Jewish life in the United States.

It should surprise no one that the Yiddish world, past or present, is pluralistic; it is multigenerational, multiracial, both Jewish and non-Jewish, etc. But whether teaching Yiddish to your children at home, in Jewish community settings, colleges and universities, etc., each path begets challenges both structural and cultural that these respective communities also face. These questions of seriousness (thankfully) pose multiple answers, all while many minoritized and indigenous communities here in Minnesota work to revitalize language usage. 

Meyer Weinshel is a Ph.D. candidate in Germanic studies at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. He is a research assistant and the educational outreach coordinator for the UMN Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. He has taught community Yiddish classes with Minneapolis-based Jewish Community Action and will be a lecturer of Yiddish studies at the Ohio State University in 2021.

Indeed, as a social studies teacher and as a Ph.D. candidate in social studies education at the University of Minnesota studying genocide education, I am encouraged to see that the recently-released draft of the proposed 2021 state social studies standards contains several references to both settler colonialism and Indigenous genocide, specifically the “genocide that occurred in the past within the land that is Minnesota today.” Such language does not appear anywhere in the current social studies standards implemented in 2011. The revisions are proposed by a standards review committee composed of a diverse group of 44 educators and community members. The Minnesota Department of Education is required by law to review and revise state teaching standards every ten years. 

Recognizing what many Dakota scholars, such as Chris Mato Nunpa and Waziyatawin, have been saying for years, the city councils of Minneapolis and St. Paul passed resolutions on the sesquicentennial of the U.S.-Dakota War acknowledging the genocide of the Dakota. The Minnesota Historical Society has also begun to use the term genocide in relation to the state’s history. Through my research and professional development work with educators, I have found that, in recent years, a small but growing number of social studies teachers have taken up settler colonialism and genocide frameworks in their classrooms. It is long overdue that the social studies standards reflect these shifts and promote a more truthful telling of Minnesota’s history. 

While I welcome these changes to the standards, unfortunately, the three references to the Holocaust and genocide that appeared in the 2011 social studies standards have been dropped from the initial draft of the proposed 2021 standards. I urge the committee to reinstate references to the Holocaust and other twentieth and twenty-first century genocides in the 2021 standards. Minnesota students must have opportunities to learn about the histories and legacies of genocide in both Minnesota and around the world. 

Genocide education has the potential to be transformative for individual students and whole communities and societies. Such education highlights the harmful effects of prejudice, racism, and discrimination while engendering attitudes of tolerance and underscoring the importance of standing up to and speaking out against acts of intolerance. Genocide education develops awareness of national and international institutions, laws, and norms, especially human rights, and raises awareness of pluralism and the value of diversity within a democracy. Genocide education also underscores how communities and societies that have been affected by genocide and mass violence – including many communities in Minnesota, such as the Armenian, Cambodian, Jewish, and Ukrainian communities – have engaged in healing, seeking justice, education, and preserving culture and memory through recognition, commemoration, and memorialization efforts. 

In addition, the inclusion of language around Indigenous genocide and settler colonialism in the 2021 draft standards serves as a call for truth-telling in social studies classrooms regarding the histories and legacies of colonialism, genocide, and the continued violence against Indigenous people and communities. Such truth-telling can serve as a step towards justice, reparation, and healing within society. Indeed, to our north, Canada and the Province of Manitoba, which have more widely acknowledged their national and local histories of colonialism and genocide, have made changes to social studies education that might serve as a model for Minnesota. 

However, it is also important to recognize the limits of the proposed changes to the standards. While the changes to the language in the standards are essential, much work still needs to be done to create and update curricula, equip practicing teachers, and educate aspiring teachers to bring genocide education, especially the difficult histories and legacies of genocide in Minnesota, into the state’s social studies classrooms. 

The public can comment on the first draft of the proposed social studies standards between now and January 4 through an online survey and series of virtual town halls organized by the Minnesota Department of Education.

George Dalbo is a high school social studies teacher and Ph.D. candidate in Social Studies Education in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Minnesota. He previously served as Educational Outreach Coordinator for the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. He is currently a part of the CHGS team researching education as a form of reparative justice in Minnesota & Manitoba, a Human Rights Lab funded project.

This is my tenth year teaching a Holocaust and genocide course, and I love teaching this class. I know it sounds strange to say I love teaching about genocide, but I do. Though I teach other social studies courses each year, I spend most of my time and energy on this class; I even went back to graduate school to study how and why to teach about genocide. Over the past decade, I’ve read A LOT; traveled to many places like Armenia, Cambodia, and Rwanda; talked to many survivors (and perpetrators); and conducted research with teachers and students. Despite this, I still have many questions regarding teaching about genocide.

Why did you sign up for this course? Why do you want to learn about genocide? I know I already asked this question on the first day of class. You shared about your plans to major in global studies and international relations in college, relatives who survived (and those that didn’t) the Armenian genocide or Holocaust, and your desire to learn more about those genocides that were barely or never discussed in school.

Why do I want to teach this course? Why do I want students to learn about genocide? I believe that there are lessons to be learned from studying genocide: lessons around how and why individuals and societies participate in, resist, and reconcile after genocide and lessons about tolerance, morality, history, and justice. However cliché, I believe that genocide education can give power and purpose to the coda voiced by the liberated prisoners at Buchenwald: never again. Learning about genocide can be hugely transformative for individuals and societies. 

However, this class will be hard, and at times, it may even be too hard. We will be examining the worst aspects of history and human nature: genocide, rape and sexualized violence, and individual and collective indifference to such heinous crimes. I fear that the hopeful narratives of survival, resistance, and the collective commitments to human rights that we also study will be woefully inadequate to balance the enormity of what has been called unspeakable and unimaginable crimes. Learning about genocide can be traumatic. 

I first learned about the Holocaust when I was seventeen and living in Austria as an exchange student. I visited the Mauthausen Concentration Camp Memorial with my classmates. We walked through the former camp listening to our history teacher’s matter-of-fact description of the “stairs of death,” the 186 rough-hewn stairs, up which prisoners were forced to haul slabs of stone from the quarry below. However, it wasn’t the sight of these steps or the gas chamber and crematorium that made the biggest impression on me; instead; it was a simple iron ring embedded in the masonry of the Klagemauer, or “wailing wall,” where newly-arrived prisoners were chained and brutally beaten. The crudely-hewn ring had left a blood-colored rust stain on the stone.

Standing frozen in front of the ring, as my classmates moved on with the tour, I felt physically ill. For years to come, the mental image of that ring and accompanying nausea would overcome me. This image, still sharp in my mind, has become another in a series, alongside images (and the overwhelming smell) of mummified bodies at the Murambi Genocide Memorial in Rwanda and the “killing tree” where young babies were smashed to death in Choeung Ek, Cambodia. I can’t seem to shake these images. 

Despite having experienced trauma in learning about genocide, I still want to share these images with you. I want to find ways to somehow recreate for you within our classroom the experiences I’ve had in learning about genocide. However hard and haunting, these experiences have been hugely transformative for me as a teacher and academic – as a human being. I suspect that you would also say that you want these images and experiences to be a part of our course, no matter how difficult it might be to encounter them. Thus, we will examine images, watch testimonies, read memoirs, listen to survivors speak, and analyze perpetrators and bystanders’ statements.

In the past, I often measured my effectiveness as a teacher by students’ responses to seeing these images and testimonies. “You could have heard a pin drop,” or “the students were left speechless,” I might have proudly remarked to fellow teachers after a lesson. Simone Schweber referred to such responses as “Holocaust-awe,” or the stunned silence that follows listening to a survivor speak. Recently, however, I’ve started to wonder if this “awe” might be interpreted as a trauma response to learning about genocide.

James Garrett wrote that “sometimes there is knowledge that we simultaneously do and do not want to have.” Deborah Britzman called this “difficult knowledge.” Such knowledge is difficult not only because of the traumatic content but also because learning about such knowledge is itself traumatizing. Likewise, teaching about genocide can also be traumatizing. Though traumatic, learning about genocide is also often transformative.

I continue to wonder, however, if the transformative power of genocide education can ever outweigh the trauma that it inflicts on students. A popular Holocaust education curriculum reminds teachers to guide students “safely in and safely out” of Holocaust education. I wonder if such safety – lessening the trauma by sparing students some of the most difficult images, narratives, and truths about genocide – arrests the transformative power of genocide education. 

As the pandemic worsens, the switch to virtual learning has brought up new concerns. I worry that the community that we built in our physical classroom, which helped us better navigate the trauma inherent in learning about genocide, won’t withstand the strained internet connections and actual physical distance between us. 

I wish I had some platitudes with which to close this letter and justify our endeavor this semester: The transformation is worth the trauma, we have a moral obligation to bear witness, or never again. I’m afraid such statements only mask the trauma inherent in learning about genocide. Failing other conclusions, I’d suggest that we start by (a) recognizing and naming the trauma inherent in genocide education, (b) reflecting on our own needs and desires for learning about and from genocide, and (c) continue to strive for an open and supportive learning community (even during a global pandemic). 

Yours, 
Mr. Dalbo

George Dalbo is a secondary social studies teacher and a Ph.D. Candidate in Curriculum and Instruction and Social Studies Education at the University of Minnesota. His research interests include Holocaust, genocide, and human rights education in K-12 curricula and classrooms. 

Interestingly, this study depicted Minnesota’s relative success in the area of Holocaust education. It found that 64% of Minnesotans surveyed could name a concentration camp or ghetto, and 75% could identify Auschwitz. Yet, Stephen Smith, UNESCO Chair of Genocide Education, took great issue with this survey, arguing that genocide education is more than being able to identify specific historical facts. While he argues these facts are important, he highlights the findings of another recent survey.

In this survey, Echoes & Reflection surveyed 1,500 students at four-year American colleges. They found that students who received Holocaust education not only knew more about the Holocaust, but they were also more tolerant of people of different races and sexual orientations than those who did not receive such education. Furthermore, students who had received Holocaust education were 50% more likely to offer help when presented with a bullying scenario.

Smith demonstates that Holocaust education is not solely based on the reguritiation of historical facts, but attitudinal changes regarding tolerance, diversity, and bystander intervention. If this one of key outcomes of Holocaust education, Echoes & Reflections’ recent survey may in fact demonstrate its effectiveness of Holocaust. Although historical facts about the Holocaust are not be easily recalled by American college students, the lessons regarding the danger of hatred and importance of tolerance seem to resonate with students.

So while children may learn about historical dates, the causes and consequences of WWII, and the definition of genocide; being able to recount the historical narrative of the Holocaust may not be the primary goal of Holocaust education — despite its importance. These findings give us many things to consider moving forward. Perhaps the greatest question is: what is the purpose of Holocaust education? 

In my studies of post-violence history education, I find that there are many purposes of history education. But perhaps the most oft cited reason is to prevent future violence. Today, 75 years after WWII, Holocaust education focuses on eradicating anti-semitism, humanizing the victims of genocidal violence, and fostering the understanding that violence is preventable.

Over the years, education has proven to be a key agent of socialization, having the ability to promote peace and/or violence. More specifically, schools can be sites of physical violence. For example, schools were a common site of genocidal violence during the Rwandan Genocide and Canadian residential schools were a key instrument of what Canada has now labeled cultural genocide. Aside from being a site of physical violence, schools can also foster structural violence (or inequality). In the years leading up to the Holocaust, Jews were banned from schools, and education was systematically withheld from Jews and other marginalized populations. Furthermore, education can also be used to spread hateful and divisive rhetoric, such was the anti-semitic indoctrination that occurred in German schools. 

Therefore, given education’s key role in promoting genocidal ideology, we must seriously consider how schools can be used to promote peace and tolerance and continue to be mindful of the many ways schools have the potential to prime citizens for future violence.

In both my research and teacher trainings on Holocaust education, I’ve noticed a common desire to humanize victims of genocide. As we know, victims and survivors of genocide, are often dehumanized by their perpetrators in efforts to justify the violence committed against them. Thus, genocide education often prioritizes humanizing these individuals — an incredibly important task. 

Yet, as teachers and educational programs seek to humanize victims and survivors, they often dehumanize perpetrators. Perpetrators are seen as inhuman and evil, and their violent acts are the only qualities discussed. I ask you to consider, however, that if the purpose of genocide education is prevention, mustn’t we humanize perpetrators as well? 

Holocaust education programs often fail to convey how and why “ordinary” men and women participated. If students believe those who participate in genocide are simply motivated by pure evil, will they ever be able to see the unconscious biases (or stereotypes and attitudes that we hold but may be unaware of) that work alongside violent ideologies?

For example, during a 2017 ‘Unite the Right’ rally in Charlottesville, a protestor drove his vehicle through a crowd killing a counter-protestor, and more recently, President Trump has refused to denounce the violent actions and ideologies of the Proud Boys. The individuals who participate in these organizations and violent actions are Americans. They are our neighbors; they are our current or former students. They may sit beside us on public transit or stand behind us in grocery stores. They are “ordinary” people.

If students only see humanity in victims and survivors, can we expect them to acknowledge when their beliefs persecute others? We need to seriously ask ourselves these questions, if we hope to stop Americans from participating in future acts of violence.

Jillian LaBranche is a Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology and a Research Assistant at the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Minnesota. Her research interests broadly include violence, knowledge, collective memory, and comparative methods. Her research seeks to understand how societies that recently experienced large-scale political violence teach about this violence to the next generation.