TEACHERS LEARN LESSONS ON HOLOCAUST, GENOCIDE
By Ryan Torok
The Jewish Journal of Greater L.A.
March 21 2012
Speaking on the Holocaust and 20th century genocides, Mark Gudgel,
executive director of the Educators’ Institute for Human Rights,
began his March 12 lecture at American Jewish University (AJU) with
a declaration.
“Rwanda is not genocide,” said Gudgel, who also teaches literature of
the Holocaust at Lincoln Southwest High School in Nebraska. Just like
Jews don’t want to be defined by the Holocaust, Rwandans do not want to
be defined by the “worst 100 days of their history,” he said. To do so,
he said, is to ignore all the positive qualities of the African country
– it’s mountainous geography; it’s democratically elected parliament,
which has a high percentage of female representatives; its cuisine
and unparalleled coffee – and it makes it sound as if nothing had
ever happened in Rwanda other than the 1994 genocide. Defining the
country by its genocide is one of the biggest mistakes he’s made as
a teacher, he said.
Gudgel was one of more than a dozen speakers at a three-day teachers’
forum on March 11-13, an annual event put on by the United States
Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) designed to give high-school
and middle-school teachers tools to teach the Holocaust and 20th
century genocides. It drew nearly 70 educators over the course of the
conference, in its 11th consecutive year. Gudgel, who has participated
in USHMM’s teacher fellowship program, also has run similar training
on behalf of USHMM for teachers in Rwanda and is involved in the
museum’s plans to conduct these trainings in Bosnia and Cambodia.
USHMM provided fiscal support for the training in Rwanda.
He said he also takes his high-school students to Washington, D.C.,
to visit the Holocaust museum, and to New York to Ground Zero, Park51 –
the Islamic community center nearby – and other locations. The purpose
of the trip is to help students deepen their understanding about the
Holocaust and terror, he said.
A bonus of taking the kids on the trip, Gudgel told the audience of
approximately 50 teachers, including some community college faculty,
is that the students come back to Nebraska – where it is universally
misunderstood that Park51 is a mosque located at Ground Zero – and
can tell others that it’s neither a mosque, nor is it located on the
site of the former World Trade Center towers.
During his 90-minute lecture, “Connecting the Dots: The Holocaust and
Contemporary Genocide in the Classroom,” Gudgel compared the Holocaust
to the 1904 massacre of the Herero people in German South-West Africa
(modern-day Namibia), the Armenian genocide in the Ottoman Empire,
the Khmer Rouge genocide in Cambodia, the Bosnian ethnic cleansing
and the genocide in Darfur. He made connections between the Holocaust
and these genocides while adhering to “Avoid Comparisons of Pain”
guidelines, one of 15 guidelines that have been developed by the
USHMM’s education department for high-school and middle-school
teachers. “Avoid Comparisons of Pain” discourages teachers from
comparing the experiences of victims and survivors of different
genocides, because it reduces their experiences. Instead, Gudgel
established thematic connections between the Holocaust and genocides
that have taken place before and after it.
For instance, denial is part of the Holocaust narrative. Based on
that, Gudgel made a connection between the Holocaust and the Armenian
genocide, which the Turkish government officially denies.
California is one of five states where secondary-school teachers must
teach the Holocaust in some capacity, and Gudgel’s lecture is designed
to prepare L.A.-area teachers for situations in which their students
are curious about events beyond the Holocaust and ask questions like:
What about what happened to the Armenians? Or, what about what happened
in Bosnia?
“Kids come in and say, ‘Hey, did you know this happened?’ And I can
lie to them, or we can take it on,” Gudgel said.
Gudgel acknowledged that students have added interest these days
in crimes against humanity because of “Kony 2012,” the video about
African warlord Joseph Kony that went viral earlier this month.
“It’s become a part of our dialogue, and our students’ dialogue,”
Gudgel said.
Other speakers at the conference included Holocaust survivor Peter
Feigel; Michael Berenbaum, director of the Sigi Ziering Center for the
Study of the Holocaust and Ethics at AJU; John Roth, founding director
of Claremont’s Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide,
and Human Rights; and Greta Stults, USHMM program coordinator at
the National Institute for Holocaust Education; as well as other
USHMM representatives and representatives of the Anti-Defamation
League, the USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and
Education, Facing History and Ourselves, the Los Angeles Museum of
the Holocaust, The Museum of Tolerance and the Jewish Partisans
Educational Foundation. It was free for teachers to attend, and
schools were reimbursed for the hiring of substitutes.
This was the conference’s first year at AJU.
http://www.jewishjournal.com/los_angeles/article/teachers_learn_lessons_on_holocaust_genocide_20120321/