"taking the Holocaust test"

[zocheret]

My username, zocheret/ צוחקות means "to remember" in Hebrew. I find it entirely apt considering this section in Ryan dealing with the idea of narrative and history, and how humans structure their memories, their experiences, as narrative. So it is any small wonder that I seized on this passage in Ryan, "taking the Holocaust test"? Yet again, the

Comments

[zocheret]

I'm torn about Sarkozy's plan. On the one hand, anti-Semitism is rampant in France. There's a lot of social Othering that occurs in France, and I understand in the abstract Sarkozy's hope that in teaching the Shoah in an individual, emotional way, it might help people understand why social Othering is a dangerous thing. On the other hand, it is emotionally overwhelming for a child that age, and I think it will too neatly "package" what the Shoah was for French Jewry. I'm suspicious of neat historical/social/religious packages, as they scream of construction to me.

I'm deeply resentful of this attitude in the American educational system that we can just show high schoolers "Schindler's List" and be done with Shoah education. Perhaps read Night as well, though Night is a true account, if turned more obviously into narrative. But that's it, that's all that people feel they need to do, and it's one of the struggles of the American Jewish community, to be able to educate our children about the Shoah and what it means without reducing all of Jewish education to Torah and Shoah. It says that the only people who need to really worry about the realities of the Shoah are Jews, and that is problematic on so many levels.

I could really, really rant here. We had survivors in the family, though they've since passed on. I know many others. It's an issue that is deeply carved into my bones, into my sense of my Jewish self. And I resent how people take the Shoah and depersonalise it, dehumanise it in order to push a theory, an agenda, an idea. It's not an idea, it's a reality, a flesh and blood and ash and bone reality.