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Appendix E: Teaching the Holocaust: Dilemmas and considerations

There are many methodological traps into which teachers of the Holocaust can fall. They should try to find a balance, or steer a course, between the following extremes (Scylla and Charybdis).

(‘It is the nature of dilemmas that whenever one takes one side or another and stretches it to its utmost limits, one is in danger of bringing one’s case ad absurdum. This is perhaps the tragic dimension of the term “dilemma”: one cannot choose between two or more possibilities but has to consider them, knowing the limits and shortcomings of each of them. Guided by educational rather than by ideological deliberation, this consideration should be done, not by taking this side or another, but by reflecting on all possibilities and by considering their implications.’ [Chaim Schatzker])

SCYLLA

CHARYBDIS

Overall approach

1

Insistence on uniqueness

Surrender to banality

(a)

An approach which stresses the incomparable abnormality of the Holocaust (Nazism demonized).

The Holocaust as a mere symbol for the baseness of human nature.

(b)

‘Planet Auschwitz’.

Holocaust susceptible to clinical, academic analysis, translatable into modern educational forms, e.g. simulation (ugh!).

(c)

An approach that deals only with the particular lessons for Jews (Holocaust deuniversalized).

Holocaust located (lost?) in host of disciplines, eg. moral education, psychology, theology, general history (Holocaust deJudaized).

2

Perspective

Approach that is strictly chronological and ‘historical’.

Approach that deals only with the ethical, psychological and/or theological dimensions.

3

Tone

‘Emotional’ approach

An approach that is too dispassionate and ‘academic’.

-172-

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Publication Information: Book Title: Studying the Holocaust: Issues, Readings, and Documents. Contributors: Ronnie S. Landau - author. Publisher: Routledge. Place of Publication: London. Publication Year: 1998. Page Number: 172.
    
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