Teaching the Holocaust in Academia: Educational Mission(s) and Pedagogical Approaches

Abstract

This essay examines a few possible approaches to teaching the Holocaust, while focusing especially on teaching testimony. The testimony signifies an unmediated encounter with the horror of the Holocaust and presents a stark, horrifying reality that undermines the American ethos of affirming optimism. The feminist Holocaust scholarship suggests an unbiased approach to women’s testimonies. The reader-response theory helps to identify a pedagogical approach that reinforces the mission of strengthening the ethical world-picture without trivialising the Holocaust experience. I suggest that the analytical reading of the testimony is helpful in developing a dialogic and emphatic approach to the text. Such an emphatic dialogue allows for the discussion of humane existence in the post-Holocaust world. The essay concludes with a description of a university course intended to study the testimonies of the Holocaust as a dialogic/analytical encounter, which leads to the reassessment of the ethics of post-Holocaust reality.

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Notes on contributors

Rachel Feldhay Brenner

Rachel Feldhay Brenner teaches modern Hebrew literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She has written extensively on the representations of the Holocaust in Jewish literature. Her latest book is Writing as Resistance: Four Women Confronting the Holocaust: Edith Stein, Simone Weil, Anne Frank and Ettie Hillesum (1997)