This study advances scholarship that will support educators toward sound pedagogical uses of the testimonial archives that have been established to preserve the life experiences of individuals who experienced Nazi persecution. The preservation work is well established. The work of education scholars and practitioners who are tasked with both…

"Fairy Tales and the Transmission of Prejudice" is a unit in a lecture course on fairy tales that draws on research on anti-Semitism in 18th- and 19th-century German literature and culture, mapping questions raised in 18th- and 19th-century tales onto contemporary issues: The unit traces a trajectory from the Enlightenment to the…

In this paper, we analyse the Second World War (WW2) and the Holocaust as genocide during WW2 as sensitive topics in history teaching as perceived by 719 teachers from Austria, Belarus, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, Serbia and the Netherlands. Using the thematic content analysis of open answers to an online questionnaire we…

Inspired by the work of the social and cultural historian Tim Cole, Stuart Farley decided to look again at the way he teaches the Holocaust. He wanted to focus on the geographical concept of place as a way of enabling his Year 9 students to build far more diverse narratives, which took full account of the chronological diversity of people's…

With the reunification of Germany, a Jenaplan School was founded in 1991 in the city of Jena, Thuringia. Since then one place of the city carried Petersen's name. The University School at Jena, refounded by Petersen as Life Community School in 1924 (the traditional purpose as a mere teacher training school goes back to the year 1844) and received…

Purpose: The purpose of this contribution is to analyse a set of Holocaust survivor testimony transcripts in order to find out their educational value regarding the connection between antisemitism of the past and the present. The narrative analyses are used to generate questions that might be relevant for addressing certain curricular aims within…

Getting students interested in events that are distant in time and space is an ongoing challenge in education. In this article, the authors demonstrate how learning at the sites where historical events happened abroad engages undergraduate students by reducing the effects of time and distance. Using student quotations gathered during three…

Based on an ethnographic field study in Cologne, this article discusses the connection between memory practices and emotion ideologies in Holocaust education, using Sara Ahmed's concept of affective economies. Moral goals, political demands, and educators' care for their students lead to tensions in the education process. Two case studies…

German Chancellor Angela Merkel's 'open-door' policy towards the recent wave of migrants and refugees to Europe shows promise for expanding the workforce and increasing diversity, yet opens up some significant cultural and religious differences. Although the government has created programs to aid in their transition, little attention has been paid…

State and national education initiatives provide American students with opportunities to engage in close readings of complex texts from diverse perspectives as they actively construct complicated understandings as they explore complex texts. Opportunities for interdisciplinary units emerge as the role of non-fiction in English/language arts and…

Levenson presents Nehama Leibowitz (1903-1997) as a principal figure in making the Bible a centerpiece of modern Jewish intellectual life. Complementing the already impressive literature on Leibowitz's pedagogical techniques, Levenson emphasizes the interdependence of Leibowitz's historical context, biography, and exegetical stance. Leibowitz's…

The successful introduction of formalised anti-Judaic policies in mid-1930s Germany was one of the steps toward the extermination of European Jewry through the implementation of the Final Solution. The current paper seeks to examine the role of social institutions, particularly educational systems within the greater German community, as agents of…

Most teachers hope to make a difference in the lives of their students, but whether they accomplish this with any regularity is often left unclear. With a topic like the Holocaust, the stakes are greatly raised. In this essay, the author discusses the place of the Holocaust in the liberal arts. He argues that the content of Holocaust education…

This article provides an overview of education after and about Auschwitz (Holocaust education) in Germany in both theory and practice, with particular attention to three critical areas. The first is the status of research in, as Adorno famously phrased it, "education after Auschwitz" within the context of contemporary Germany. German…

Against the background of the pedagogization and internationalization of Holocaust memory discourse, this contribution focuses on the specific conditions of history classes on National Socialism and the Holocaust in Germany. Using a case study, this article shows both how the meanings of these subjects are communicatively negotiated in history…