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Select rA1031-)??-) 7474LD
Communications
WES
0 6
Religious Zionists ofAmerica
111 Mizrachi
Hapoel HaMizrachi
Lecture Series
Islamic Studies:
Jewish Perspectives on the
Arab World
guest speaker
Professor Jacob Lassner
Cip
LU
Distinguished Professor of
Near Eastern and Asian Studies
Director of the Cohn-Haddow
Center for Judaic Studies at
Wayne State University
LU
CC
Date:
Place:
LU
U-I
30
Time:
Sunday, December 6
LaMed Auditorium
United Hebrew Schools
21550 West 12 Mile Road
Southfield, MI 48034
8 p.m
LIFE page 29
distribution. Life was also
awarded a $250,000 federal
grant in October to pay for
distribution and teacher
training.
From its inception, the in-
tention was to avoid the all-
too-common newsreel im-
ages of bulldozers and piles
of bodies, crematoria, and
shrunken concentration
camp inmates, says Dr.
Bolkosky.
The overuse of these im-
ages has numbed us all,
relegating this shameful
period in human history to
an unreal realm in the na-
tional psyche, he said. Most
people today grew up with
these images and that of
Anne Frank, whose story
only touches a small part of
the entire picture.
High school social studies
classes have not done much
to rectify the problem. Most
high school history text-
books devote an average of a
couple of pages to the
Holocaust.
When Dr. Bolkosky and
his colleagues first began to
develop the Holocaust cur-
riculum in the early '80s,
they found the curriculum
available at the time pitiful-
ly lacking in depth, quality
and scope.
Partly in response to the
current rise in Holocaust
revisionists who claim it did
not happen, many school
districts have introduced
specially developed cur-
ricula. There are scores of
these curricula available,
both spawned locally by big
city schools, or produced by
individual states. At least
several states, including
New York and Illinois, re-
quire that teachers devote
some time to teaching the
Holocaust.
There is definitely a mood
nationwide to give the
Holocaust more attention.
"There's no question that
over the last 10 years the
study of the Holocaust has
become more popular," says
Dennis Klein, director of the
Anti-Defamation League's
Braun Center for Holocaust
Studies.
The introduction of the
Holocaust to the classroom
has not been without con-
troversy, however. An Arab
group criticized New York
state for politicizing educa-
tion, and some parents of
students complain that if
such special instruction is
required, then instruction in
the history of other ethnic
groups should be as well.
Many curricula and teach-
ers lump the Holocaust with
other genocides, being
careful not to offend the sen-
sibilities of other ethnic
groups. At Southfield High
School, for example, Ameri-
can history teacher Robert
Harding teaches the Holo-
caust during a two- to three-
week period that also covers
the slaughter of the Ameri-
can Indians, the Cambodian
genocide by the Pol Pot
regime, and the Armenian
genocide of 1915.
The project had its begin-
nings when Zelda Robinson,
a Southfield school board
member, introduced a reso-
lution in 1978 to develop a
special Holocaust curricu-
lum for Southfield Public
Schools. By 1984 the Jewish
Community Council Sub-
committee on the Holocaust,
which she chaired, had
The key theme of
Life is that no one
escapes
culpability.
Indifference is the
main culprit.
acted on her idea. None of
the project's developers had
any idea back then it would
grow to the effort and
stature it has, they say.
Working with Dr. Bol-
kosky on the project and car-
rying it through to its
culmination was Betty
Rotberg Ellias, a Southfield
High School teacher who sat
with Dr. Bolkosky on the
original subcommittee.
David Harris, a social
studies curriculum adviser
for Oakland Schools, was
soon inducted.
As the project developed,
Sidney Lutz, a data systems
executive, assumed major
financial responsibility by
providing his own staff free
of charge to administer
what was becoming a major
undertaking. Peter Nagour-
ney, an educator working for
Sidney Lutz, served as the
project director.
While the Life textbook
and video is the product of
all their efforts, the text and
the video testimonies stem
from Dr. Bolkosky's
Holocaust scholarship and
interviews with survivors
since 1981. I
One of the problems
educators face in developing c'
a special curriculum is the
amount of time that can be ,,
squeezed within a wide- )
sweeping World History or ,
U.S. History class. But
another, and perhaps more
important impediment, are
the teachers themselves,
who generally find the sub- r,
ject too awesome and
unfathomable to tackle.
The key theme of Life, a
subtle voice that gnaws at,-'
the reader with each turn of
a page in Life's 216-page tex-
tbook, is that no one escapes '
culpability. In fact, indif-
ference turns out to be the
main culprit. Life takes
pains to expose the fact that
the Holocaust could neven
have occurred without the
cooperation of the vast
number of cooperating Ger-
man bureaucrats.
The story of the Holo- cl
caust, says Dr. Bolkosky, is
about the deadly-calculated,-
emotionless bureaucratic
machine put in place to kill J
the Jews. It's about the
railroad watchmen, conduc-
tors, switchmen, etc. who
performed their duties,-
without flinching. "From )
my perspective, it is a func-- 1
damental indifference to the (
plight of others," Dr. I
Bolkosky says.
Not only the German peo-
ple are implicated, says Dr. -(=
Bolkosky, but the entire„
Western world, including '
the American government
who knew what was hap-
pening in the camps, but
failed to act on it.
Life pulls the camera away
from Hitler and the Naz'i'
leadership and focuses on
the bureaucrats, whose
tasks, however menial, were
integral to the whole opera-
tion to collect, transport and
kill. Thus the railroad ac
countant, once removed
from the boxcars filled with
Jews heading to the camps,
and the chemists who con-
cocted the lethal Zyklon B
gas are responsible. Even
the neighbors who stood by — 1
and watched Jewish fami-
lies being taken away can
not be dismissed.
But the curriculum
"doesn't point any fingers at --
people," Dr. Bolkosky says.
"After studying the mate-
rial, it should be obvious
that it was a European phe-