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The New York Times, Wednesday, April 12, 1995
Holocaust Teaching Gaining a Niche, but Method is Disputed
by William H. Honan
For most of the 50 years since Americans helped liberate Nazi death camps, academic study of the killing of six million European Jews has been slow to gain a foothold at American colleges and universities, some scholars say.
But in the last five years, the situation has begun to change as a handful of independently financed faculty positions, or special endowed chairs, have been created to focus solely on the Holocaust.
Even as other universities consider endowing their own Holocaust chairs, scholars express doubts about how best to include the Holocaust in the study of modern European history. Even the proper way to teach the Holocaust anywhere is the subject of sharp dispute.
Those who favor the chairs argue that the genocide practiced by the Nazi Government of Germany and its followers during World War II is of transcendent importance in modern history and demands the constant and focused attention that a specialized chair can provide. And the chairs are important, they say, because they partly compensate for the widespread neglect of the subject by those who teach modern European history and related disciplines.
But even some of those who hold the new chairs acknowledge that they may tend to marginalize and isolate the study of the Holocaust further rather than integrate it into college curriculums.
Similar discussions were provoked by the opening of the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington in 1993.
Because of the emotional nature of the issue, there is wide disparity in approaches to the subject. Elie Wiesel, the writer and Nobel Peace Prize winner, who described his experience at Auschwitz in the memoir "Night" (Bantam, 1982), said: "I don't think a university can teach history without including the Holocaust, but how can you grade papers on that?
"It is still a sacred area for me. When it is taught, it shouldn't be 101 Holocaust. It should be a life-changing experience."
Deborah Lipstadt, a professor of religion who occupies the chair on Holocaust studies at Emory University in Atlanta stressed her dispassionate approach to the subject.
"This field demands study and analysis," she said, "and can't just be left to the theological and emotional realm I insist to my students that we don't come to class to emote and denounce the Nazis. That goes without saying. We come to seek understanding."
Since 1990, endowed Holocaust chairs have been established at Emory, Stockton State College in Pomona, N.J., and Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton. The oldest such chair was founded in 1979 at the University of California at Los Angeles. Clark University in Worcester, Mass., has announced plans for a chair next year, and Harvard University is said to be searching for someone to fill such a position.
Some of the new chairs are, financed by Holocaust survivors like Sidney and Ralph Rose, former owners of the Fair Department Store chain, who donated $1.3 million to Clark for its chair, or by others who lost friends or relatives in the death camps and seek to lend permanence to their grief and outrage.
Most of the professors who hold chairs teach undergraduate and graduate courses alike. The undergraduates explore the origins of anti-Semitism in the 19th century and progress to the Nazi era. Graduate students, as in other disciplines, usually take part in small seminars and do original research. One graduate student at U.C.L.A, for example, is now working on a paper about the attitudes of German universities toward Jewish faculty members and students in the Nazi period.
The Holocaust chairs are not to be confused with those in Judaica, which cover a broad variety of cultural subjects, and now number more than 100 around the United States.
About 410 colleges and universities in the United States and Canada have courses in Jewish studies, said Aaron L. Katchem, executive director of the Association for Jewish Studies. Of these, Mr. Katchem said, one-third to one-half offer courses specifically dealing with the Holocaust.
Mr. Katchem and some other scholars argue that study of the Holocaust has not been well integrated into texts and standard courses on modern European history.
One of the most-popular college history textbooks, "A History of the Modern World" by R. R. Palmer (McGraw-Hill, 1992), for example, devotes 2 pages (including a map of Europe) to the Holocaust out its 1,209.
In German departments, Professor Lipstadt said, "the Holocaust goes down the black hole and nobody can find it."
Ruth R. Wisse, a specialist in Yiddish literature at Harvard, said: "Most political scientists don't find the subject interesting. They think it's intellectually parochial. What they want are problems that are universal. They don't want to get their hands dirty with this."
Gerhard L. Weinberg, a history professor at the University of North Carolina who specializes in 20th-century Germany, disagrees. "A very high proportion of those who teach modern history try very hard to deal with this subject adequately," said Professor Weinberg, who recently wrote a paper on the Holocaust. "And the chairs, far from marginalizing the Holocaust, do the exact opposite. They make clear its importance."
Robert E. Pollack, a professor of biological sciences and former dean of arts and sciences at Columbia College, opposes the idea of making Holocaust studies available primarily through departments of Jewish studies. The Holocaust must not be framed as "a Jewish issue," he said.
"The lessons of the Holocaust don't need to be taught to Jews," Professor Pollack said. "We live with the memory of it every day. Everyone should share with the Jewish community the task of assuring that everyone is taught the lesson of the Holocaust--that hell opens up at your feet even in a very civilized country."
Some note that the debates over Holocaust studies parallel those over African-American and women’s studies.
Those disciplines "were all started precisely because the material these people were interested in was not being treated by mainstream courses," said Richard Newman, a staff member of the W.E.B. DuBois Institute for Afro-American Research at Harvard. "Today, there are only 11 academic chairs named for distinguished African-Americans, and several of those are in departments such as biology and women's studies--not directly related to black studies."
"One difference between the interest in Holocaust studies and African American studies," Mr. Newman said, "is that whereas Jews don't want the Holocaust to be forgotten," some African-Americans "are not eager to remember slavery."
Professor Pollack of Columbia also said that when the Holocaust is taught in modern European history, such teaching has not reconciled the Holocaust as "an indigestible and unexplainable event" with "the idea that modern European history has been a story of ever greater freedom and progress."
"If the Holocaust happened in the midst of that upward past," he asked, "how can it be explained?"
James Sheehan, a professor of German history at Stanford University, denied that modern European history was taught as a path of progress. "We regard the period from 1914 to 1945 as a story of continual disaster of which the Holocaust is but one example," he said.
"I don't mean to say that we know as much as we need to know about the subject," Professor Sheehan said, "and I think the establishment of these chairs is a good thing, but I'm not persuaded that the Holocaust has been neglected."
As an example of outstanding recent scholarship in the field, he cited a book by Christopher R. Browning, a historian at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Wash. The work, "Ordinary Men" (HarperCollins, 1993), is an exploration of how a battalion of middle-aged reserve policemen in Hamburg, Germany, became executioners during World War II.
Professor Sheehan said that the introductory history course at Stanford "always includes a reading of Holocaust literature," from figures like Primo Levi or Hannah Arendt.
But that is not sufficient, said Saul Friedlander, a professor of history who holds the chair of Holocaust studies at of U.C.L.A. "Assigning readings from Primo Levi or Hannah Arendt serve to remind the students that something like the Holocaust happened," Professor Friedlander said, "but that is not systematic historical study."
"Furthermore," he said, "Professor Browning does not prove the case. He is one of the top scholars in the field of Holocaust studies, a specialist, and not a scholar of German history who also teaches the Holocaust."
Professor Friedlander put his position this way:
"Yes, absolutely the chairs have made the Holocaust a special domain, but there is no choice because otherwise it is not taught in any significant way.
"In Germany it's different. Most of my German colleagues have written about the Holocaust from one angle or another. Maybe in a way it's easier for them because it's so close to their anguished relationship with the past."
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