Holocaust and genocide education

While leadership scholars increasingly acknowledge the influence of followers in the leadership process, less attention has been paid to their role in the destructive leadership process. Specifically, the current debate lacks a broad-based understanding of different susceptible follower types that synthesizes related research across academic domains. Expanding on Padilla, Hogan, and Kaiser's (2007) toxic triangle model of destructive leadership, we integrate research and theory across various academic literatures to derive a cohesive taxonomy of vulnerable followers that we call the susceptible circle. We describe the core characteristics of each follower type, drawing on Barbuto's (2000) theory of follower compliance to highlight the psychological processes that motivate each follower to comply with destructive leaders. We then conclude by discussing theoretical and practical implications, as well as avenues for future research.

This response to Anja Mihr’s article, “Why Holocaust Education Is Not Always Human Rights Education,” argues that despite their differences, Holocaust education and human rights education are more similar than Mihr suggests and face similar challenges. Holocaust education offers numerous opportunities to engage critically in comparative and prospective reflection that relates to human rights. This paper claims that its relevance transcends regional and cultural limitations and that an analytical and comparative approach—tempered with critical reflection on historical context, collective memory, and the implications of its status as a symbol of evil—is preferable to one based on empathy. Likewise, human rights education is incomplete without fostering critical thinking, including acknowledgement of the failures of human rights law and critical attention to the darker side of human rights discourse and logic.

This volume focuses on the impact of the Armenian Genocide on different academic disciplines at the crossroads of the centennial commemorations of the Genocide. Its interdisciplinary nature offers the opportunity to analyze the Genocide from different angles using the lens of several fields of study.

On the centennial of the acts commonly referred to as the Armenian Genocide, academics and professionals from a variety of disciplines discuss the impact of the Genocide in their respective fields. In this volume, they assess why it still remains relevant to discuss the Genocide today, as well as its global ramifications and its equally long-lasting mark. Some contributions make the case for the use of aspects of the Armenian Genocide for comparative studies, in order to study the emergence of patterns between conflicts. Others focus on the impact of the Genocide on their specific fields of study. Tackling this theme from the perspective of history, law, sociology, anthropology, political science, literature, education and media studies, The Armenian Genocide Legacy relies on an interdisciplinary approach to expose the complexity of the genocidal process, while marking the centennial of the Armenian Genocide.

"In diesem Buch entwickelt Nora Sternfeld ein Instrumentarium für eine aktuelle Geschichtsvermittlungspraxis zum Holocaust und den Massenverbrechen des NS-Regimes. Zentral sind dabei die Perspektiven, die sich für die Geschichtsvermittlung ergeben, wenn die Tatsachen des Postnazismus und der Migrationsgesellschaft und deren Implikationen für Erinnerungskulturen in einer geteilten Gegenwart ernst genommen werden.



Das Plädoyer für eine dissensuelle, hegemoniereflexive, multiperspektivische Geschichtsvermittlung verspricht einen Perspektiven- und Paradigmenwechsel sowohl für schulische und außerschulische Vermittlungspraxis als auch für den nationalen wie internationalen Diskurs."

NOTE:  THERE IS A REVISED VERSION OF THIS PAPER THAT WILL BE COMING OUT IN WEEKS AND THAT I WILL POST HERE, DELETING THIS ENTRY. engaging Holocaust survivors primarily as “witnesses” who provide “testimony”—which has long been the prevailing paradigm of practice with survivors—radically oversimplifies both survivors’ lives and their accounts of their lives.  Similarly, the conventional “testimony” model limits the extent to which we are likely become engaged in, and implicated by, survivors’ retelling.  The author has been making those arguments for over forty years.  Here, the focus is primarily on teaching “beyond testimony”: especially through immersion in survivors’ recounting as a deliberate, situated, multiply contingent process in which students themselves become, in a survivors’ phrase, “participants in a conversation.”  In the author’s classroom, collaborative exploration, participation in conversation, replaces “receiving a testimony” as the guiding paradigm.  Students’ responses to such conversations are featured.  One student wrote about a survivor who visited the class: “She was not ‘just’ a survivor, if I can say it that way.  And that made her being a survivor much more significant.  The ‘not-survivor’ part of her—the experiences and traits that are just like us or people we know—is what made the ‘survivor part’ real.  Not a symbol of the Holocaust.  But one of us.”  Engaging individual survivors as “one of us” rather than “symbols of the Holocaust” can transform how we teach about genocide, and the few who live after, even when only memoirs, recordings, and transcripts remain.

As technology continues to improve and online learning options proliferate throughout the United States, it is necessary for instructors to establish a sound understanding of proper pedagogical techniques for teaching in a digital environment. This phenomenon has ushered in a new era of education, thus bringing forth a myriad of new questions and issues that must be addressed. Social studies educators are faced with additional quandaries, such as teaching democratic processes for effective citizenship and the teaching of controversial topics. This exploration draws upon the scholarship and experience of experts in the field of social studies education, distance learning, and Holocaust studies to provide suggestions as to how teachers should approach controversial topics in a digital learning environment. A sample Holocaust lesson plan is also provided to showcase a successful integration of controversial issues into an online or blended learning high school social studies classroom.

This short essay presents an analytical update of how scholars, curators, and stewards are responding to the xenophobic climate and nationalist censorship being generated by the current Polish government under the rule of the right-wing Law and Justice (PiS) party. I focus on two new groundbreaking publications on the involvement of rural Poles and the Catholic Church in carrying out a rural Holocaust in World War II; the POLIN Museum's exhibit boldly representing the March 1968 antisemitic campaign that resulted in the exodus of thirteen thousand Polish Jews; and the activism of two educated, dedicated stewards of Jewish heritage preservation in small-town Poland.

This book analyzes sensationalized Nazi and Holocaust representations in Anglo-American cultural and political discourses. Recognizing that this history is increasingly removed from contemporary life, it explains how irreverent representations can help rejuvenate the story for successive generations of new learners. Surveying seventy-five-years of transatlantic activities, the work erects counterposing categories of “constructive and destructive memorializing,” providing scholars with a new framework for elucidating both this history and its historicization.