"taking the Holocaust test"

[zocheret]

My username, zocheret/ צוחקות means "to remember" in Hebrew. I find it entirely apt considering this section in Ryan dealing with the idea of narrative and history, and how humans structure their memories, their experiences, as narrative. So it is any small wonder that I seized on this passage in Ryan, "taking the Holocaust test"? Yet again, the

Comments

[ammamc]

Emma, you said, "Narrative history is a way of finding meaning, and when it comes to things that are so terrible as to be seemingly meaningless, creating narrative in order to relay those events is crucial. It's necessary. But it also creates false constructs of how things 'should be

[zocheret]

I'm torn about Sarkozy's plan. On the one hand, anti-Semitism is rampant in France. There's a lot of social Othering that occurs in France, and I understand in the abstract Sarkozy's hope that in teaching the Shoah in an individual, emotional way, it might help people understand why social Othering is a dangerous thing. On the other hand, it is emotionally overwhelming for a child that age, and I think it will too neatly "package" what the Shoah was for French Jewry. I'm suspicious of neat historical/social/religious packages, as they scream of construction to me.

I'm deeply resentful of this attitude in the American educational system that we can just show high schoolers "Schindler's List" and be done with Shoah education. Perhaps read Night as well, though Night is a true account, if turned more obviously into narrative. But that's it, that's all that people feel they need to do, and it's one of the struggles of the American Jewish community, to be able to educate our children about the Shoah and what it means without

[martin_doc]

I remember being irritated in Kraków when more tourists were interested in seeing the set pieces from Schindler's List than the remnants of the real Jewish Quarter that the Nazis ravaged when they rolled through Poland. On the one hand, there is a need to make history into narrative, especially when dealing with something as huge, as important as the Shoah. On the other hand, that act of narrativity calls it all into question.

Again, hyperrealité!

~MKF