HOLOCAUST & GENOCIDES 2011

This class requires that students have internet access at home to complete weekly assignments.

This interdisciplinary course, through lessons, readings, discussions, visiting www sites (including the archives at Virtual Jerusalem, Shamash, the US Holocaust Museum, the Simon Wiesenthal Center, and other web sources), and video, will explore the roles of the perpetrators, victims, bystanders and rescuers during these horrific periods in the 20th century.

Special emphasis will be placed on:

  • the Nazi rise to power
  • how the Nazis came to exterminate many peoples, including the bulk of the Jewish population of Europe
  • world-wide complicity in that extermination
  • resistance and rescue
  • Jewish cultural responses to the Nazis in the form of poetry, drama, diaries, journalism, religious expression and scientific inquiry
  • the aftermath of the war including the war crimes trials, the UN Genocide Convention, and the creation of the State of Israel
  • a host of other topics

Students will see the extreme results of inter-ethnic and inter-cultural conflict represented in the course. This case study of genocide also provides examples of the use of modern technology without moral or ethical bounds. Students will closely examine moral understandings in light of the realities of genocide in the 21st century. Understanding of Genocide leads to an appreciation of the necessity for maintaining acceptance of cultural diversity and a refusal to let hate-based policies of small groups become the policy of a nation. It is crucial that, through the examination of the extreme results of prejudice and ethnocentrism, we begin to understand our individual and corporate responsibilities for moral and ethical acceptance of diverse peoples and perspectives.  

Major Texts:

SchoolCenter PictureMausI & Maus IISchoolCenter Picture
NightSchoolCenter Picture

The CageSchoolCenter Picture
Milkweed SchoolCenter Picture
SchoolCenter PictureParallel Journeys
SchoolCenter PictureThe Sunflower
SchoolCenter PictureThe Book Thief

SchoolCenter PictureSchindler's List




SchoolCenter Picture