Taking (and Teaching) the Shoah Personally

Abstract

rt Spiegelman's wry assessment of the business'' would have had little resonance for me had I not attempted with a colleague from our history department, Ron Weisberger, to design a course at our community college in Shoah literature and history. Since we are both Jewish and since I am a child of survivors, I knew full well that we faced a range of difficult challenges. The painful loss described in Shoah memoirs cannot help bringing to my mind the devastation experienced by my own family: the killing of both sets of grandparents, all of my uncles, aunts, and cousins. Nevertheless, I did not fully appreciate the risks (in Yiddish, we'd say tsuris) of this business (in Yiddish, read mishigas). More than once have I heard that anxious voice from my childhood: Sha, be still. Say nothing. (My parents would say this often when my siblings and I were young; there was a risk in calling attention to ourselves.) Leaving aside the challenge of reading memoirs, diaries, and fictional accounts containing horrific detail of the Holocaust, we were also teaching this course at a time when the Middle East was (and still is, as of this writing) in deep turmoil and America and Israel had never been more closely linked in Arab and non-Arab minds. Would we be perceived as Jewish propagandizers, hauling out the Holocaust as a way to justify controversial policies of the current Israeli administration?