Telling -- and retelling
I am teaching Holocaust to my students in world religion at Glendale Community College. A daunting endeavor, especially to a diverse group of 20-somethings whose world view -- and life experience -- is very different than mine. No comments yet. You can be the first!
Where to begin -- and how to make it relevant to their world?
We begin by talking about persecution, what it meant to be a Jew in Germany in the 1930s as Hitler’s deadly plan began to unfold. We talk about the gradual abrogation of rights, limits on where Jews could work, where they could go to school, where they could live. We talk about how the Jewish world grew increasingly smaller, increasingly tenuous, increasingly dangerous.
“Does anybody have a story to share from their own families that might be an example of religious, racial or ethnic discrimination?” I ask.
A couple of hands go up.
I call on a student who usually does not speak. A shy, dark-haired young woman, who when she responds, has a decidedly Spanish accent.
“What about the immigrants?” she asks.
“What about the people who are afraid to go out of their homes?”
I stop. It is almost a revelation to me to hear the student make that connection.
We hear it often within the Jewish community, our history of persecution, our understanding of what it means to be a stranger in a strange land, or, even worse, in Germany in those years, of being a stranger in your own land, and how that should inform our position on immigration reform. But I don’t expect to hear it in a classroom in Glendale, Arizona, from a young woman who probably has had little, if any, exposure, to Jews and Jewish history much less Holocaust. But I do.
It resonates later in the week, in Deborah Sussman Susser’s column about the AJC initiative on immigration reform, and, later, in my story about Israel’s diverse ethnic mix and the program created by the TIPS partnership that hopes to instill newfound confidence and pride in the immigrant women of Kiryat Malachi and Hof Ashkelon, Phoenix’s partnership communities in Israel. Yes, what about the immigrants?
There is a relevance, and a power, in our stories and their stories, and, yes, a continuing imperative not only to tell and retell them, but to use them as the impetus to write the stories to come.
03 Nov, 2009 >