“I had one student in my genocide class in the fall, who is Latinx, and she told me how the Holocaust was taught to her in high school. The teacher just basically said, ‘You would have died ,’ and that’s what she took away,” he said.
New Jersey was an early adopter of that approach, passing a law in 1994. The curriculum teaches the issues of bias, prejudice, bigotry, and bullying through the lens of the Holocaust and other genocides for K-12 students.
During the course, students read books , hear the stories of Holocaust survivors and go to events dedicated to the remembrance of genocides.
“What began the genocide?” she asked, pointing to a timeline on the wall that shows the slow build to the Holocaust.
“Something that I’m teaching now to my students is how Jim Crow, here in America, informed Nazi Nuremberg laws .
community centers in Arizona were part of a string of bomb threats to Jewish community centers and schools across the United States in 2017.
He said the problem is when deniers and public officials are given a platform to voice some of these ideologies.
“To read something in a book, to see it on a screen is one thing but to be able to shake the hand of someone who survived the Holocaust or served in Battle of the Bulge – That has an impact on students that I think is priceless,” Bowman said.
During the Holocaust, other groups like Gypsies, Germans with disabilities and homosexuals were targeted and killed by the Nazis, according to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Over the years, the state expanded its curriculum to include 9/11, the Darfur War, the Ukrainian famine, Armenian and Native American genocides, according to New Jersey’s Department of Education.
Students read “Night,” writer Elie Wiesel’s memoir of his experience as a teenager in a Nazi concentration camp.
The Holocaust began with stripping away rights such as excluding Jews from civil service positions, the burning of non-German books on university campuses and limiting the number of Jewish students in schools.
Nuremberg Laws, established in 1935, revoked citizenship for Jews and prohibited them from marrying or having sexual relations with Germans. The laws were inspired by Jim Crow laws that enforced racial segregation in the South, according to the University of Southern California.
The number of anti-Semitic incidents in the U.S. grew more than 50% from 2009 to 2018, according to the Anti-Defamation League. In Arizona, there were 32 reported incidents in 2018.