Transcripts For CSPAN3 Holocaust Scholarship Evolution 20240713

Seated next to her is devin pendis w srks pendas. He focuses on war crime trials. And next to him is our fault director of the la paige center, paul steege. Paul is focused on history, of every day life. Foe k focusing on germany, and were going to begin by learning about our scholars and where they come from on this question and topic and then we will dive into the conversation. So for now i will go back to jen for, allow me to welcome you to the la paige center. Tell me about your research and area of study. Im the executive director for the rowan center for Holocaust Research and human rights. We have multiple foci. One of the questions that were asked very often is so what. Were learning about other genocides, and what can we do about it now. So we made a decision to switch our emphasis so we could thans so what question that so many students have. My own research focuses on transgenerational holiday, and i came by way of education. I was an education professor, before that elementary school, and i have strong interest in how it is taught and remembered in school communities. So part of what duo is focus on the what and the how of history. Maybe for those not familiar, what does sociology bring to the study of holocaust memory. The how there is looking at how people and communities accounted. What Agency People took. So it is really on the people and the choices of the communities that were formed throughout in the holocaust and any other issue. If i may put you on the pot, what is an example . One of the questions i guess in my class is why didnt people leave. If this is what was going to happen, why didnt peep leave when they had the chance. And i share stories of people, families, and those that started to leave their hometowns and made a choice to go back and the things with the devil you know is better than the devil you dont. This is as bad as it can get. In a is a understanding of agency that people had. And that is how decisions were made when people didnt know what was ahead of them. Another example of community, thinking about my own research, and children and grandchildren of survivors, are the communities formed in the second and Third Generation how people think about the shared communication, the shared history they have, that is another example. Devin, i will put you on the spot next, tell us about your research and how you approach this topic. Thank you for invitedininvii here. I guess the easiest way to explain my Research Agenda is to say that i started as a historian of the aftermath of the holocaust. This horrible thing happens, now what do we do . How do we respond to this horrible event. Much of that focus has been on league attempts at redress or how do we deal with it. And in places like israel where theyre not perpetrator nations, how they use criminal justice to respond to this. And i have expanded into questions around general strategys for responding to mitigating mass violence. I do a lot of history of International Law as well, right . Also though, for directly relevant for tonights conversation, i have done a lot of work on the his ytograhpy, h they have evolved, they were already writing about the holocaust while it was on going. How have our interpretations changed. And i wonder very briefly, has will been interdisciplinary intersections. Sure, one of the things i do regularly that is very interesting is every other year i reach a course for judges in the state of florida of all places. Its nice, they have beaches, so i teach a course on law and the holocaust for judges. It is a very interesting to hear the questions that judges bring to the table and the ways that those are different than what historians would ask, right . So why did they make those choices. Where people were following the rules, right . It is something dhie that is fascinating and disturbing. I distribute briefcase studies for mixed race and sexual rel e relations in the 1930s in germany. I present the facts of the case and i have the laws, and how do you respond to this, and then i show them thousand is responded to in a real court of law. For the most part they would applause the law which is kind of horrifying when you consider how unjust the law is. On the other hand, and we discuss this with the judges a lot. Would you want a world in which they just said that is not a good law, im not going to follow it. It creates are the serious unjust laws. How unjust do you think they are before you force them to resign from the bench. Fascinating, and finally let me introduce our colleague here, paul steege, same question to you, how do you enter this conversation . I would say im a historian of over day life and i focus specifically on berlin. Thinking about every day life it can be hard to imagine ordinary life or every day life as being something that is at all pertinent to talking about this horrendous act, and i think that looking at violence and the ways that people make sense of, tell stories about, and participate in acts of violence, i think is is important that it doesnt depend on monsters. It doesnt depend on people who are in extraordinary situations, but so many people found it so possible to integrate this wind kind of violence and killing into their ordinary lives. That is why where my perspective comes into the story, and you teach a class on nazi zegermany here, how do you do that in a classroom with students and bring up these types of questions with students and people studying the holocaust . So since my starting point nor cla for class is about thinking and exploring the humanity of the people whose history were exploring, and by taking seriously their humanity that are victims and perpetrators. People from all over europe, americans, and to think about the way have their experiences, choices, and their desires, theyre not exotic other than we look at and say how could we imagine any sort of connection to that. What is so unsettling is that the way their stories make a lots of sense. The best history is the not the history that draws a line under the past, but the history that unsettles the ground be neat our feet, and forces us to ask questions about ourselves and i think that is very much the ways in which i try to pose questions and unsetting our complacency even if were fairly comfortably in villanova. As we sort of dive into the conversation, and some of our other events i have done some polling. Im just curious welco, for tho us in the room, how many people have news on the holocaust. How many of you think i thought that we knew everything that we needed to know already about this. So i want to start with you and bring back the revisions of the sellership. So if you could, everyone here seems to know that the scholarship continues to be relived and expanded. Yes, i will try to dheep brief. I could go on for a very long time on this. One for much of the post war period there was two strands of his yog if h his histography. How did they die . How did they make sense of the death of their loved ones . And it is treated very much as an aspect of the longer history of the jewish sometimes it could be very zionist. Sometimes it was more interested in questions of kcosmopolitan jewish identity. And then there was the german history. This could be and often was written by jewish historians, but it is situated. This goes all of the way back to martin luther. Does it begin with 1918 and the defeat of world war one. What are the Decision Making processes that lead them to extermina exterminate jews, and there was, at times, hostility. Many historians were mistrustful thinking they were overly emotional or overly biassed, right . They were does trustful thinking they were jermgermans, and in s cases they were agenda driven. It later turned out they spent time in the ss at the end of the war, so there was a lot of mutual distrust. I would say in recent years, really only in the 2000s, you started to get integrated histories of the holocaust. They tried to bring these were not separate events, they were not merely reacting to german initiatives, right . There was an interaction that went on there, and trying to bring these histories and the d dialogue has been very important. The other thing that happened that has been also very important, maybe more controversial, has been the situationbroader history of genocide. And the way that world war ii is the example of world war. And dwyes there are distinct elements of it, but it is reck newsble as a war. So as jen sigenocide, it is sim. There is other instances that we can learn from comparing them, not to face the dirchlgfference to highlight differences that are distinct, but also to recognize the kmcommonalities. And some have said it is an ongoing genocije jen genocid stretching into the early 1950s with the ethnic cleansing of germans from earn and Central Europe that is a process of what one historian has called the unweaving of europe so it is particularly radical. It is quite distinct from other processes of saying ethnic cleansing in theba balkins, for instance. That is great, i think there should be a five minute Youtube Video of that. You have human rights in the name of your center, jennifer, youre at the later stages of the development where jen sigen and human rights are integrated into what you do. Sure, so just between us in this room and anyone watching at home, we had a huge debate about the name of our center, and whether or not it is repetitive to say the center for the study of genocide, holocaust, and human rights. We landed on a perspective of saying for now, but i suspect the conversations will go on for months, years, decades to come, the holocaust is one of many and unique in its own way. Learning about the holocaust including who, what, and wheres. Questions about why it happened, are questions of human rights and generality to what we can learn from the holocaust as opposed to what we can learn about the holocaust. When we think about Human Rights Violations b we see them in the holocaust, every other genocide, and so often in every day life in ways when we think about clean water and voting suppression. Paul, one of the things that we talked about when we put this panel together, so much of this debate, how much do they reach outs to the general public and should they. As someone that has been in the field for quite awhile, what do you think about some of these debates that happened within the circumstanceens and how it manifested in a broader populist if at all. We have so many people in the crowd tonight, but i would suggest that the questions drive a lot of these conversations. And rather than thinking about scholarship as a way of formulating answers, thinking about scholarship as a way of posing new kinds of questions. So even in terms of, i expect not all of you, or many of you heard about the goldhaggen controversy of the 1940s, but this is about two historians who use a similar set of archival data and come to very different conclusions about what it means and there is a big debate that was also covered on cspan at the holocaust museum, a overflow crowd, and part of the question was about how you look at these people, and what do you call them. Do you call them ordinary men, is there something about their germanness, or is there something more generally ordinary about them that a variety of different factors of peer pressure and ideology, and a sense they they need to live up to the standards of other men in their communitunit. But i think that it has shaped the field in terms of thinking about this question of paying more attention not just to extermination camps, but police units that were engaged in killing in the countryside of eastern poland. So to think about the ways in which the story of the holocaust is happening in different ways by different people, they initially seem to be just about who is calling someone names in their footnotes. I think think is a relevant strange of conversation. Our mission is public facing, academic journals and debays and museu museums. And i wonder if i can do another poll. How many of you learned about the holocaust through your education somewhere down the line. Education or high school. A good show of hands. How many of you continue to do your usage on this. But i think this is a good segues into the question about the public memory side of the holocaust. Another question for the audience real quick. How many of you feel like the most information about the holocaust that you know has come from films. From schindlers list. So films, and you, have done some work on this, you looked at a particular film, which i will not spoil the name of, maybe you want to tell people about that area of your research and how film is used as a medium to teach about the holocaust and what the pitfalls and shortcomingings might be. The film has not yet been named, it is called the boy in the striped pajamas. I saw lots of head shaking and a sigh of frustration. And for those that dont know the reason, some of the they are based on book of the same title. The book has a label on it saying it is a fable. The film does not. It is the most watched movie in American Public schools when it comes to teaching the holocaust. It has a pg 13 rating and it is only 90 minutes long. It makes the show casing of the movie in a classroom really practic practical, right . You dont need parental permission, you can show it in two class periods, and because it is shown so regularly but it is a question like why are you sneer people say it saved their life if is almost completely a historical. The main character is a young german boy, bruno refers to auschwi auschwitz, and as a viewer of the film, you follow the story of bruno that has no idea that jews are subhuman even though, being the son of a nazi he would have known this at 8 years old and he be friends a young jewish boy who has enormous amounts of time to sit quietly by himself by a fence. He passes chocolate to him. And theyre killed in a gas chamber full of jews, and bruno, who snuck under the fence, and the viewer is moved to tears by the fact that this young german boy has dayed because that is where your sympathy lies, and youre not as tuned into the jews and what their lives are like. So you know, i so often have a conversation with students about everything they have to know, and at the end of a semester we watch the movie in class with a project of writing down everything that could have happened. And they see it to me as a reasonable way to use a teaching tool. And they critically examine the movie and there are probably better choices in terms of what might be shown in school ranging from the documentary. You know, some people might reter critique. It might be impractical. One might argue that this film, you cant learn much about the holocaust, but you say that people show up as a result of seeing the film, so is there something redeeming in in the learning from like this, or the piano, or others. There is a real upside. I dont know that there is. If i had to pick a silver lining, and that is important to do, students become interested and they want to be correcting the narratives they have grown up believing about the holocaust in this story. Is there a redeeming narrative . Students work out of the classes and feeling cleansed, like they have done something really good. It is a so what request thquest raised before. In the writings, and what you learn from it, is an empty moral platitude, right . You learn im not a nazi, so im not going to murder jews, therefore im problemmatically good and i dont have to worry about anything, right . I think the kinds of universalizing fables around the holocaust, talking about life is beautiful a film that moves that that direction, right . But you dont necessarily to have that here. There is plenty of context. They can and should learn from the holocaust, but they have to be connected to the specificity of the event, right . They are free floating and it teaches Kinder Garden level morality. They can learn that in all kinds of other contexts. To just very briefly to build off of that, i think i would maybe say one or two things. It is so offer in the context of teaching, we teach students, younger students, stories of rescuers, and the questions that they want to ask is how many people here think you would be a rescuer, and there is only one right answer, right . Every kid would raise their hand, every kid races their hand. There is only one right answer there. Why certain people made choices to rescue. Why certain people made choices to turn their neighbors in. There was lots of context around this, and my second point which i will make, are the themes, lessons from the holocaust. Not be nice to your neighbor. One of the most important things is the realization that this is possible. And just to pick up on this example of who would be a neighbor. Of course we would be on right side of this story, that we identify with the victims and that by leashing about this were presouping our place on the moral high ground pb and even some laces in washington dc where you go through and you receive your Identity Card, which is to make a lot of sense in the effort of people breaking down, and this question at the end, will this person be identified with, do they live or die . In some ways it would be more provocative exercise that youre going through. You get your Identity Card and its unclear if youre a perm traitor or a victim and where you went to school, who you married, where you did your military service, and perhaps it challenges you more provocatively. What camp did you serve . . And that would probabliably a very different museum experience. The lines are also blurred, and the real challenge, and the real benefit of exploring the history is delving in. And someone that pent 3. 5 years at the museum as a coordinator, there is a real balance that one tried to strike. I think a lot of work is on the about question. Where did they live, what are their stories, and enthen there is a whole other section. What can we learn from this, how do we train them, and they are distinct personal specialties. I think is also tough for the sights themselves, and i want to bring paul back to talk about the sites themselves. Some of the other camp thats are lesser thoen. How much do we try to impart lessons when people walk out the door about what they should be doing. Sometimes they bring questions that the people working at the sites dont netly is great answers to. I think in the lead up to this conversation we talked about some of the exchanges happening in camps now with the young generations of students. There have been reports in the last few weeks about conversations taking place and the guides were asking provocative questions, and they were putting challenging the existence of gas chambers and crematoriums. They were locating these questions in the shifting political terrain of germany in one cay, that they were reflected in the fact that the teachers were a member of the right wing extremist party, so they were saying this is a political experience, but it is a question about an obligation, going to the camp to learn, and the question about whether or not people are willing to do that or not, or is it a sense of or ligation, or is it showing up and checking the box. And part of it is how does one, when i went to poland and i went to auschwitz, my First Experience getting off of the train with my backpack, looking touristic and running into people, saying taxi to auschwitz . Even in terms of this expectation that you going to any of these camps, that while it is just another one of your destinations that you need to go as part of your high school education, or part of your european tour, you check that off and you have done that, and i went to daha in the morning, and munich in the evening, and the camps, the lessons dont go without saying and i think that is precisely where historians and educatione ducators come in. Tell me, one of the things i think that you asked awhile ago about scholarly work, i think this is a really useful reminder, historians in particular, scholars more generally, when you do modern stuff, the question is usually not what happened. The question is usually why did it happen. The empirical information is usually pretty well documented. There may be some disputes here and there, but generally speaking it is very different if youre looking at ancient history. But when you get to the 20th century, the documentation is so thick on the ground that the what is not what theyre looking at, it is the why. In a panel on revisionist his tours and the holocaust, we have to remember that is a term that has been pooched to lend completely unwarranted legitimacy to their lies. But the fact is that there is no dispute about the facts, there is ignorance about the facts. Then question have these conversations about the why. Where there is a lot of room for very legitimate dispute and room for legitimate interpretive differences. I think there is still facts we dont know. Lets do a little show hands here, who knows the connection between shanghai china and holocau holocaust. How about the Dominican Republic and the holocaust . About half of the people. Refugee thats survived, people that escaped the holocaust. So there is still a lot of what and a lot of facts to get at. And i think one of the ways we get it is through the individual stories. The individual stories of people who were murdered, people who escaped, stories of people who were perpetrators, and that seems to be a place where there is an infinite about of what and facts. I think the boy in the striped pajamas is effective for some people because it distills a complex and awful thing. As an educator and teacher, working with teachers who teach on the holocaust, do you hear anything about that . Do you hear anything about the one ann frank that can move is as opposed to the six million that died in the camps . Absolutely. For all of us sitting here, imagining six million jews, 11 million victims, 9 million survivo survivors, you know just of the holocaust, not thinking about world war ii more broadly, the numbers are staggering. It feels almost impossible to take in the numbers. Six million, 11 million, how do we sort of sink through who news people were, what they meant, so absolutely. A story whether or not it is fiction, a book that someone reads, a documentary, a film, it gets at the Human Experience in ways that new mesh kal facts dont, and students, particularly younger students, really connect to wanting stories to hang on to as they try to make sense of the holocaust or try to move closer to making sense of the holocaust. But it is individual stories that do it, and i would argue there are other, primary sources that can be used to get at individual stories as opposed to certain films and books. About five more minutes on stage, and please think about questions and comments that you want to add. I want to continue to talk about how we educate, and a follow up found that the teachers had a very limited p amount of knowledge about the holocaust. Do we have a sense about what works then . If some of the things that were doing, do we have a sense about what to do moving forward . It is a Million Dollar question. If we take as fact that so much is not working the way we want it to by evidenced by my own research, largescale studies, all of which seem to point in the same direction that young people are really lacking in their content knowledge. So the question about what to do is the question of the day. The never again education act passed in the house of representatives. And i think there is a couple quick answers to that. So helping them understand what strategies work when were teaming people about the holocaust and histories, right . Slavery, the trail of tears, right . How do we help young people think about these issues . And how do teachers stay on top of emerging, i would argue that universities have roles to play, and i argue for meeting students where they are. So when i was learning to become a teacher, i had a super visor that said kids can concentrate in 15 minute chunks of time because that is where commercials are. Now i would say they have a focus for you tube video chunks of time or social media bits of time. It is even smaller than that, so we might have feelings about kids and attention spans, but we have an obligation to move them to a place that feels more comfortable. And the questions that we have been thinking about in the course of this series. I think that paul, maybe you could talk a little about some of the expanding interpretations and in our lead up to this you talked about 1933 versus 1941. Reshifting and reimagining some of these. I think this is a question of every historian that writes a book, you have to decide where to begin and where to end. You have to make some choices, and that is something that also reflects as devin mentioned earlier, the e voling scholar evolving scholarly focus. I think now in terms of understanding how nazi germany matters, and it is a moving target. We were talking earlier just today i was reading a new article that was discussing hitlers antisemitism and revisiting an interview that was conducted in 1994 with a woman who had been the daughter of a family in munich. Figuring out how these transform from a failed painter in austria to become a political leader in germany, and it is messy and complicated, and it is hard and there is lots of debates about what these Different Things mean, but i think this is a great example of the ways in which looking at a new source from the 1990s, it can give us in insight into say what was going on in munich in 1913 and 1914 and how should that matter for where we gip and end our stories. There is no question that the stories kind of sources that people will you know, that interview was from 94, right . At the time it was like, okay, theres this interview. Now someone is coming along, asking slightly different questions. In that perspective, youre right, that certain aspects of historical events, including the holocaust, will become known in a way that they werent previously, will become rediscovered. People will go back to things that people werent interested in, are suddenly interested in or interested in again. One topic thats gotten a lot of attention was Sexual Violence in the holocaust, something that was totally not talked about in the postwar period. In an era where the question of Sexual Violence is front and center in the public imagination, people are going back and looking at interviews and finding, you know, information about this that was kind of there all along, that people chose to not focus on it, right . Holocaust history is no different than any other history in that regard, right . That we ask questions of the past because they are important to us in the present moment that we are living in. Right . And someone who comes from a museum perspective, i would say, with the holocaust, one cant escape the power of the artifact, whether its a striped uniform or a toy or a shoe or a hair, and all those things are sources. And they are such a part of the story of how we make this transition and translation between scholarship and public understanding. I have the privilege of going down to the Dominican Republic to work at at museum, refugees from europe who wound up in the Dominican Republic before the war. To be the first person to look at those documents in 50 years, its a whole new arrange of sources and artifacts that scholarship can be derived from, and new understandings about this community can be formed. Theres a whole universe of documents we still have not fully explored. And the documents and artifacts are tremendous educational opportunities, i think, but they also have pitfalls and challenges. I want to make sure we get you all into the conversation. What were going to do now is were going to bring the house lights up a little bit so that we can see you, you can see us, the cameras can also identify you. Please do remember that you are on camera, on cspan, if you are asking a question. And i will repeat my statement from previous events, which some of you may have heard. For those who are first timers, we do audience feedback. When we send out our surveys, the number one comment we receive back from people about what we can improve on is to ask people to make their questions short or to make a short comment as opposed to a longer monologue. Thats the feedback we received from you. In order to help us make the experience better for you, well ask that you make your question or comment brief and you can direct it to an individual member of the panel or to all of us. And if you are willing, you can also identify yourself. So, we have two microphones on either end. So, lets bring you into the conversation now and feel free to raise your hands and well go from there. Well start on this side of the room, the gentleman right here. Hello. My name is jerry sanker i have a question for the whole panel. It has to do with the number 6 million. How and when did historians settle on that number . And maybe theres a who in that question as well. I can take that one. The 6 million number was first used in the nuremburg trials. It was derived from a combination of german sources, killings in the soviet union, for instance, they kept pretty good record. We have a fair sense of that. Some of them were based on prewar estimates of populations and then postwar accounts of refugees. One of the big problems is that for a lot of jews killed in extermination camps, the germans didnt bother to keep a record of numbers of how many people they were killing. We have a good number of jews who were enslaved and those who died due to conditions in enslaved labor camps. For the jews sent directly to the gas chambers, the germans did not keep meticulous count of that. Theres a lot of squishiness, i guess you could say, in these precise numbers. 6 million is a ballpark. Ive seen credible figures as low as 4. 8 million. Ive seen figures as high as 6. 5 million, right . So 6 million is kind of a give or take number, with a fairly large error estimate, but nothing lower than basically 5 million would be the lowest credible count that ive seen. Its an interesting question. I wonder from an educator perspective, working with teachers, how does that number function . Does that number, the power, the magnitude of it, have some sort of a role in how teachers approach the subject or deem a subject to be serious enough that it has to be taught in every classroom . Is there some power in that number . Its an interesting question. Certainly theres a power to the number, but i think because it is so unimaginable in so many ways, it makes the teaching of the holocaust enormously complicated. Theres an urgency because its so high. Theres an urgency because when you add other victim groups, aside from the jews to the number of victims in the holocaust, the number gets higher. And i think both makes it urgent and enormously complicated because it feels incomprehensible, particularly the younger you go, the harder it is to under 100, 40 feels really big to you when youre a kid. To think about 6 million is feels impossible. More questions. Well stay on this side of the room and sort of work across. This gentleman here on the end. First of all, im a catholic priest. I was stationed in poland for 18 years. I was pastor of the parish perhaps about five kilometers, six kilometers away from auschwitz. My family, my mothers family perished, as christians, in the camp. But i would have a question for the audience. How many have relatives or related to someone who perished . Thank you. Thank you for raising that. Appreciate that. We have a couple of grad students on this side of the room. Well get to them and then well move across, so stay patient. Kyle and then thomas. Hello. Im a firstyear grad student. I have kind of a general question. It could be for any one of the panelists, but it mainly has to do with teaching and, i guess, combating Holocaust Denial in your classroom. This came up last year in a class that i had where a professor was approached by a colleague who said they had students bring up facts that they learned online or reading like david irving, and their response was they werent really sure how to deflect these accusations from their own students about Holocaust Denial. So maybe a question of what are some ways that you can combat these kind of questions in class . So, ill start with this one, both because kyle was a student of ours in the past, and so i feel obligated to answer. Also because its teaching. And i also had the experience, i sort of know the situation kyle is talking about, but also a situation in new jersey recently, a teacher was fired for teaching Holocaust Denial. And he sued the school district. And i was a witness in that case on behalf of the school district, who was fighting against him and have given sort of enormous amounts of thought to what happens when not only students bring up Holocaust Denial, but what happens when teachers sort of trade in Conspiracy Theory and denial. And one thing that i have there are sort of two schools of thought. One is i will not debate a denier, you know, from the movie. And, you know, this idea that you just disengage. The holocaust happened. If you cant accept basic facts, our conversation is done. Particularly with students, who have perhaps been taken down weird google algorithm rabbit holes and been take toen sites like the National Historical review, sites that have really solidsounding names and they dont necessarily how to tell the good from the bad. So when you have students who are relying on faulty facts, theres a little more wiggle room to say okay, i see where youve gotten this. Let me give you a stack this big of documents that are going to refute that and lets talk about it afterwards and see how that makes sense. I dont know how you counter adults who are sort of trading in denialism and Conspiracy Theorys. With students, in particular, you can, in fact, fight facts with facts. Yeah. The only thing i would do is give a shout out to the web page called the newscorp project which actually does its the opposite of lipschat. Provides a lot of documentation and stuff that so if its a case where facts will make a difference, thats a really good resource for them. If its a case of kind of motivated reasoning, and facts wont matter, then it makes more sense to disengage. Maybe this is a plea for do value of doing a history in a particular way or calls out a shadow to the footnote. This is a way to think about providing, even if not actual footnotes, but essentially providing sources to support the work that we do. And so that this becomes a way of modeling but also providiing evidence. The reason why academic integrity is a big deal is not just because were trying to keep people from cheating, but its also about putting together the architecture of where ideas come from. So by demonstrating where our intellectual work on subjects like the holocaust come from, then we can also provide a much denser and more fully fleshedout sense of the foundations of those arguments. I think, too, this is a good time to reinforce the fact that credentials matter, right . And i think, unfortunately, were in a moment where theres a lot of ambiguity around credentials and credentialism and maybe some populist pushback. More broadly feel strongly that credentials mean something and expertise is important and should be valued. Certainly everyone can have opinions about things. But when it comes to having deep expertise on something, thats a different kettle of fish. Lets get thomas and well move back to this side of the room to get questions over here. We started off going to credentials, because my question is based on the fact that one of the most wellknown holocaust deniers is arthur butts, not an historian, but he was an Electrical Engineering professor with a phd at northwestern. How do we balance on insisting that the holocaust happened and there are certain points that are history with making history accessible, maybe not to people like arthur butts, but keeping holocaust history accessible while also insisting it happened and kind of keeping that argument in the forefront. Do you want to talk about instagram . Oh, yes. Before this, we had a twopronged conversation and i alluded to this a little bit when i talked about meeting young people where they are, right . Meeting students where they are. I used two examples. One of instagram, series of Instagram Stories called eva stories. Some here may have heard about it. And i believe it was a filmmaker in israel who did this. And Instagram Stories, maybe someone here can fact check me if i get the definition of Instagram Stories a little bit wrong. But they are essentially short, sort of video clips that can be posted on a fairly regular basis on an instagram page, account. App. Sorry. There was this Instagram Story called evas stories. It kroniccaled the true story of a young woman who was murdered in the holocaust and sort of portrayed her in the current day. You saw eva taking selfies and eva out with her friends. It was as if the holocaust was happening now in lots of ways, while also staying true to much of her story. And there was lots of debate about this, if it was appropriate, if it was horrifying, if it should be taken down and condemned forever. Lots of young people connected with this. It had lots of views or followers and or followers. Students would come and say i saw this on this Instagram Story. How real is this . It opened up the avenue for lots of conversation about whats accurate and whats not because they were able to see themselves and make a connection with this young woman in these videos. At the same time i think there is a tension with bringing serious scholarship and serious subject into perhaps these more playful and modern platforms, right . Theres been controversies about holocaust video games. People have tried to use video games about a way to teach holocaust. There was a video game that was shut down because it was deemed to be not the right tone, not the right message, too feeble and not factual. Its a relevant question about balancing the new platforms and opportunities with the seriousness that the subject demands. Its about learning about and learning from. Its a question that historians wrestle with in general, which is what is the place of fiction in a history classroom, right . Because by defense it has madeup elements, right . All the light can you not see, would you teach it in a class . You know. Some of them are better, some of them are worse. Some of them are great literature, some of them are not. All of them have fictional elements and what are the ethics of bringing any amount of fictional, you know, dimension into a story the reality of which, getting on with your question, right, is so profoundly important to acknowledge, right . So how do you say we are acknowledging the reality of this, but in order to make it accessible, were going to bring in fictional were going to bring in selfies or were going to bring in, you know, life is beautiful or whatever it might be. How does that function, about how creative and how, you know, imaginative can you get but still be true to the essence of the story, right . You know, the other thing that we had spoken a little bit about before this, thinking about technology, something that were working on at rowan, which is we are sort of challenged to think about teaching and learning about the holocaust by using virtual reality, which the first reaction everyone gives is sort of this [ gasps ] what we have decided to do after conversations inside the university and with other scholars is to recreate, recreate certain parts of the warsaw ghetto by using the documents from the archive, which was i think devin mentioned it before, jews who were imprisoned in the warsaw getto act as historians and took, wrote sort of diary entries, daily life type of reports about things that they were experiencing, how much food they had in the soup kitchen, how many people were there that day. So, were trying to do this, only using and then they were preserved so that generations to come could learn from the experience of these jews who were imprisoned in the warsaw getto. So were bringing to life documents that were intended to be read by future generations, or at least that was the hope. So there and i think our biggest question continues to be where are the ethical lines here . What is ethical and whats not . How do we do this without it feeling cool or like a video game but really using it as a teaching tool . I think its those ethical lines that not keep shifting, but become more complicated as Technology Advances and as we move further way from the event. Theres a balance of technology scholarship, ethics, teaching, none of which i have really good answers for but all of which were thinking about. Lets move to this side of the room, to make sure we get more people involved in the conversation. Youve been very patient. Well work to the middle where youve also been very patient. This was wonderful. Im wondering, do you know the movie the reader and your thoughts on that . I found it very powerful. I have. Okay. You go first. Im not a fan, for what its worth. The reader, if you dont know the film or the book, it was a cultural sensation late 90s, i want to say. The story is a young boy has young man has an affair with an older woman, who turns out to have been a female guard in a concentration camp, who ends up then having done some bad things, right . But its also about the core message is he helps her learn to read and introduces her to the classics of german literature, and this is kind of a story of redemption and salvation for her. And what i find troubling about that is the kind of the thesis of the story, if it has one, is that german culture can save you from german can culture. And, uh i say that as a joke but its kind of the problem emerges pretty clearly in and of itself, right . The question is not, you know, if only the germans had read more, the holocaust wouldnt have happened. The problem is the holocaust happened while the germans are reading gerta. And thats really the question, is why didnt reading gerta prevent the holocaust, right . And thats not how that question was framed in that book. So thats why i found that to be not entirely successful. And the one yes, i agree with everything that you said. And also think that it shows shades of gray that can be complicated for people to think, students in particular, to think about, right . So in what ways is the perpetrator in this film humanized, right . Shes not one dimensional. Shes not evil. She did evil things. She did horrible things, but she also is this person who loves and is loved in return. And so while agreeing that certainly parts of it are really problematic, i think theres something about the humanization of perpetrators. It makes it really hard to say, and i would never be that person. This is impossible. Thats sort of one little comment. And the other thing i would say, and this gets to the point of the messiness when you get down to the granular level of everyday life, the ways in which the lines between actions, they try to assess and evaluate their goodness or badness. So my work early on post world war ii berlin and one of the debates in the berlin municipal facility theres discussion, accusation of a socialist deputy and accusation of essentially that he had collaborated with the nazis, because he had purchased the shop of a jewish acquaintance so that person could emigrate. Is this an act of humanity, to facilitate the escape of somebody from nazi germany, or is this an act of collaboration contributing to the, quote, unquote, aryanization of the German Economy . And the answer is probably both. The level of detail that i could access from the record didnt get down to the relationship between these two people and how that played out and whether we know, you know, what was, in fact, informing this decision, that thats something that the record doesnt quite give us access to, but i think that that is precisely the case that just because somebody was not a nazi doesnt mean that ones actions were not contributing to the smooth operation of the nazi regime or just because one was a nazi doesnt necessarily mean that one couldnt do things that in individual moments also created opportunities for humanity or possibility. I think, too, this is evidence about how a good historian can ruin any movie that you watch. [ laughter ] i say that a bit tongue in cheek, but it gets back to the questions earlier from our students, right . There are ways that we want to engage with these topics, but its not always in the classroom. Its not always in a panel conversation. Sometimes it is through film and through book or through an instagram post. And so, you know, sure, it may not be the exact right tone or message, but is there something that we can learn from all this . And in some ways, do these things as a collective still serve a Public Interest purpose, by being out this and at least raising awareness, right . It would be worse if there were no films at all, i think. Thats my personal opinion. Lets get a few more questions. We had a lot of men raising their hands and want to make sure that we have gender balance. You, youve been very patient. Lets get you and then, if we can, well get my mother and a few others. [ laughter ] nepotism. Its called moderators prerogative. I have a question. I spent time with a german colleague a couple of months ago and we talked about she had questions for me about how we have progressed from slavery and going through jim crow and reconstruction and civil rights movement, how shes been seeing a lot of the statues not being removed. And she asked me about the education of how were educated about slavery. Then she switched quickly to how were educated about the holocaust and german history in the u. S. And i explained the difference that i experienced in that slavery is a matter of fact thing that happened and thats how it was explained to me in the south and that the holocaust was a sad thing that happened that i dont know a lot about, but its just a sad, sobering. The question i have for the panel is how, if you know, in german studies, how is the holocaust taught there and what can we glean from how they teach it there to also teach the holocaust here, but also other sad events, like slavery here in america . The distance in the past. Two histories remain so close to the surface. They are present in lots of ways and that continued to have to remain significant parts of contemporary life. I think that germany, west germany, in particular, was often held up, reunified germany was held up in a Success Story in terms of an effort to deal honestly and factually and conscioco consciencely. That this is something that contemporary germans need to wrestle with. When i think recent conversations have begun to really wrestle with is the ways in which the successful Civic Education was also detached from personal experience. So, there was a book a number of years ago that came out called grandpa wasnt a nazi. This idea that, yes, you know, nazis, it was horrible, the crimes, nobody is doubting that. My grandfather, he was just an ordinary soldier. So he had nothing to do with nazis were really bad. Its a good thing that we werent one of them kind of thing. And i think that that would be the challenge here, is the ways in which we can recognize whether as kind of personal family but also institutionally we have many more connections with these dangerous pasts. And so i think one good example is the question of universities. Georgetown or princeton or harvard or yale, who are confronting their connections to the legacy of slavery. Not just in the south, right, or beginning to. And i think that those are some of the ways in which we can think about. Its not just something in the past but our institutions in the present. Their wealth, their traditions. Their names. They bear lots of connections. And i think that that maybe is one of the Cautionary Tales of the success of germany, the ways in which it also becomes depersonalized. And quickly add, just the question of generations, right . Sort of the story of german success, dealing with its past, is really a story of the second postwar generation, right . The immediate postwar era, the dominant story in german public life is we are the victims, right . Were victims of the nazis, all four of them, who started this horrible war, right . And were victims of the all is who bombed our cities into rubble, you know. We were really unlucky. Were victims of communist. Its only really in the 60s with the next generation that you start to get people with a much more critical kind of engagement with that past saying, yeah, there were more than four nazis in the country, right . Maybe not my grandpa. Although there it was my dad. And there, they probably were pretty critical of that. It was the 60s, after all, right . Whats interesting now, though, is youre starting to see a generational shift. Holocaust denial is making its face known in germany in a way that it wasnt previously. Neo nazis are you dont want to overstate this, right, but they are more prominent publicly than they would have been 10 or 15 years ago even, right . And so, you know, progress on these kinds of confrontations with difficult pasts is not a oneway street, right . You can learn lessons and then forget them or fail to train, to teach them to the next generation, right . And that, i think, is again part of whats important about this kind of work, is making sure that lessons once learned are not forgotten. And i would just add, or argue that as many questions or concerns as we might have about Holocaust Education in the united states, i would argue its probably still a lot better than the education we do around slavery. I think it is this is an overstatement, but i think its easier for american children, or americans in general, to think about horrors that were committed by other people far away, where americans were on the side of right. And when we confront our own history of slavery, we dont have the safety of space. And so i think that theres an argument to be made that, you know, we do better when it comes to Holocaust Education than we do when it comes to slavery education. And we are running short on time. I promised we would end the event on time. Well get one last question from my mom. [ laughter ] and i know that there will be other questions that youll want to ask. We are actually going to have a Dessert Reception in the lobby. After the event, i will let you ask additional questions and have additional insights. I would say your question points to something weve talked a lot about at the lepage center, how different it looks depending what state youre in. I grew up in new york and learned a lot more about the holocaust than i did about slavery, but the inverse could be true for people in other states. So its very localized. The other thing is we know a lot more about the victims of holocaust than we do about slavery. And theres a lot more to uncover about the victims of american slavery and there are scholars working on that. With that, the final question, where did i our microphones go . Yes. Right here in the front. Hi. So, im the daughter of two holocaust survivors. I was born in a dp camp in germany after world war ii, and i would like to thank the entire panel for really a fabulous discussion. So i knew a fair amount, because i went to a Hebrew Day School and we have family in israel as well, but i never really appreciated how awful this was until we went, dan and i, my husband, dan and i went to birkenow, not auschwitz. But auschwitz is vast. If you imagine smoke, smell, dirt on the roads, shouting, nazis, dogs, completely oblivion for the people who came off the trains. So i think that even for someone like myself, an experience like that is really important. Now, obvious the other thing that happened while we were there is there was a survivor who was telling Israeli Soldiers about his experiences in the camp. So these were young men and women, from israel, who didnt really know anything about it. What i would suggest is in europe, hitler decided to completely exterminate the jewish communities, some of them that had been in europe for over 1,000 years. And one way to teach kids or to make it more immediate, i think and you guys know this better is to appoint people in the room and say to them, okay. You guys are going to disappear. The entire third or fourth or fifth of the class is going to disappear. How do you feel about this neighbor or that neighbor . How do you feel about not having this person in your class . I think thats the only way you can bring stuff home to these kids, because they live in a privileged world, and its really hard to make them understand this. So i want to be really careful with how i frame this. But to say there are lots and lots of debates within education generally about the use of simulations like that. And my biggest caution or concern, while i hear what youre saying and sort of wrestle around with this myself very often and am asked this question on a really regular basis, is are we giving kids then some sort of false equivalency . I was part of this in my class. I was disappeared or i was asked how i felt when my neighbor was disappeared, and now i understand what it was like to be a jew in 1939 germany. And so there is this thing that young people tend to do, which is to sort of put them say that they can understand everything. And so my pushback or my caution was Something Like that which, i agree in many ways would probably be effective and would really bring the message home, is that there is then this overd identification with something that, thankfully, our children right now in america cant understand. Its both a blessing and a curse that they cant. Thats my only stoort of bit of pushback to jasons mom. Sorry. Even in terms of thinking about the different ways in which there can be experiences of a place like auschwitz or birkenow can very much depend on the time of day youre there, what the weather is like, and that there is not a single way that that can be experienced. If i had to point to one holocaust memoir that i would encourage people to read is ruth kluger is still alive holocaust girl remembered. She warned against the even in the camps, rendering them museum like. She said she would never go back to auschwitz, because it could not be like it was when she was there. And so i think that i mean, part of this is a challenge for all history. All history is kind of an approximatation. Devin brought up fiction. All history requires an amount of imagination or inventiveness and the challenge for all of us is to navigate that balance between making connections, fleshing out stories that we have only in a fragmentary fashion, but i think at the heart of all of this needs to be recognizing the humanity of the people that we are talking about and the stories were trying to tell, and to acknowledge that and to recognize how complicated that is. Very quickly, so part of the point of history, education history, writing, is to imagine yourself in this past. To try to imagine what it would have been like to be in this past. When youre talking about, you know, mass murder events, right, it creates certain kinds of ethical challenges for that active imagination, whether youre trying to get students to understand the nazis. You want them to understand how nazis think, but you dont want them to think like nazis, right . So how do you, you know, make them understand that there was a kind of logic to what the nazis were doing, albeit a perverse and evil logic, right . And similarly, you want them to understand, you know, what the jewish experience was like, but you cant you cannot walk a mile in their shoes, right . You just cant. As somebody living in a peaceful, prosperous, wellshod, wellclothed, wellfed, no one is shooting at me kind of world, right . I can try to approximate an understanding of what that experience must have been like, but it is not my experience. I will not have that experience. So we have to kind of respect the kind of ethical distance, right, between the world that youre living in and this world of pain and terror and death. Yeah. And places have power. Conversations have power. And i think scholarship has power. And all those work together. Thats how this process unfolds and thats how we educate, and thats how we teach, and thats how we revise. Thats what we hope to do here at the lepage center, to create a powerful place and have powerful conversations. I think weve had one tonight. Thank you very much. Join me in thanking our panel. One final instruction, if i may. I know you are all eager to talk to the panelists that, prevents them from getting a treat in the lobby. Ill ask you to make your way to the lobby. Panelists will be out there in a minute. We can continue the conversation there. Thank you. During the week while members of congress are in their districts due to the coronavirus pandemic. Tonight, we focus on sandra day oconnor, the first woman justice to serve on the u. S. Supreme court. Starting at 8 00 p. M. Eastern, Ruth Bader Ginsberg and Sonia Sotomayor reflect on sandra day oconnor. Join us on American History tv now and over the weekend on cspan3. Every saturday night, American History tv takes you to College Classrooms around the country for lectures in history. Why do you all know who Lizzie Borden is, and raise your hand if you had ever heard of the gene harris murder trial before this class. The deepest cause where well find the true meaning of the revolution was in this transformation that took place in the minds of the american people. So were going to talk about both of these sides of this story here, right, the tools, the techniques of slave owner power. Well also talk about the tools and techniques of power that were practiced by enslaved people. Watch history professors lead discussions with their students on topics ranging from the American Revolution to september 11th. Lectures in history on cspan3, every saturday at 8 00 p. M. Eastern on American History tv, and lectures in history is available as a podcast. Find it where you listen to podcasts. Next on American History tv, the u. S. Holocaust Memorial Museum hosts the panel discussion, look iing at the continuing quest to bring former nazis to justice. They explore questions raised by recent trials such as if perpetrators are ever too old or frail to prosecute and whether its ever too late for accountability. Holocaust survivor, pulitzer prizewinning journalist and a documentary filmmaker. Good evening, everyone. My name is jessica abrahams, and im very pleased to