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Lawrence Hrubes

The Responsibility of Knowledge: Developing Holocaust Education for the Third... - 2 views

  • In a radio address in 1966 the prominent German philosopher, Theodor Adorno, declared his dissatisfaction with the state of Holocaust consciousness. He claimed that ignorance of the barbarity of the Holocaust is “itself a symptom of the continuing potential for its recurrence as far as peoples’ conscious and unconscious is concerned.” (Adorno, Education After Auschwitz). It is for this reason that he envisioned education as the institution which would be most responsible for instilling values in the masses so that they have the agency to oppose barbarism.  Adorno spoke not only of education in childhood, but “then the general enlightenment that provides an intellectual, cultural, and social climate in which a recurrence would no longer be possible.” Almost 40 years later, the Holocaust education is still important, not only to combat another genocide but also to provide a consciousness of human rights necessary in a world where such standards are becoming commonplace. Holocaust education is in a state of constant evolution. As generations grow up and new ones are born, as distance from the Holocaust increases, it is necessary to reform the methods in which its history is taught. As survivors die and the third generation slowly drifts out of the Holocaust’s shadow, education must be buttressed with an understanding of the applicable lessons and principles that may derive from the Holocaust. For this education to have any meaning, those mechanisms that allowed the Holocaust to take place must be fully understood. History must empower pupils with the understanding of various choices they must make and their ultimate impact on society. 
Lawrence Hrubes

'Son of Saul,' Kierkegaard and the Holocaust - The New York Times - 1 views

  • The spectacular success of science in the past 300 years has raised hopes that it also holds the key to guiding human beings towards a good life. Psychology and neuroscience has become a main source of life advice in the popular media. But philosophers have long held reservations about this scientific orientation to how to live life.
  • The 18th century Scottish philosopher David Hume, for instance, famously pointed out, no amount of fact can legislate value, moral or otherwise. You cannot derive ought from is.
  • Science is the best method we have for approaching the world objectively. But in fact it is not science per se that is the problem, from the point of view of subjectivity. It is objectivizing, in any of its forms. One can frame a decision, for example, in objective terms. One might decide between career choices by weighing differences in workloads, prestige, pay and benefits between, say, working for an advanced technology company versus working for a studio in Hollywood. We are often encouraged to make choices by framing them in this way. Alternatively, one might try to frame the decision more in terms of what it might be like to work in either occupation; in this case, one needs to have the patience to dwell in experience long enough for one’s feelings about either alternative to emerge. In other words, one might deliberate subjectively.
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  • Most commonly, we turn our back on subjectivity to escape from pain. Suffering, one’s own, or others’, might become bearable, one hopes, when one takes a step back and views it objectively, conceptually, abstractly. And when it comes to something as monumental as the Holocaust, one’s mind cannot help but be numbed by the sheer magnitude of it. How could one feel the pain of all those people, sympathize with millions? Instead one is left with the “facts,” the numbers.
markfrankel18

Doing Business With a Company That Took Jews to Their Deaths - Emma Green - The Atlantic - 2 views

  • Keolis, a company that's mostly owned by SNCF, was recently invited to bid on a public contract to build a new metro line, the Purple Line, in the Washington, D.C., area. But legislators and lawyers say that the company needs to pay reparations for its conduct during the Holocaust if it's going to compete for a contract funded by tax dollars, particularly because a number of survivors and their family members live in the parts of Maryland where the line is being built.
  • So where does that leave the ethical claims of this debate? The lawyers and legislators who are involved seem genuinely passionate about advocating for Holocaust victims, but only insofar as it won't jeopardize a major transportation project. And they're specifically assigning blame to SNCF, but only so long as the French government doesn't step in to pick up the tab.
  • Perhaps this is indicative of the broader ethical complexity of making reparations for decades-old crimes.
markfrankel18

'Son of Saul,' Kierkegaard and the Holocaust - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • There are generally two, radically different ways to relate to the world: objective and subjective. Objectivity is an orientation towards reality based on abstracting away, in various degrees, from subjective experience, and from individual points of view. A subjective orientation, on the other hand, is based on an attunement to the inner experience of feeling, sensing, thinking and valuing that unfolds in our day-to-day living. This distinction has been brought into contemporary philosophical discourse most notably by Thomas Nagel, in a number of his essays, most famously in “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?”The spectacular success of science in the past 300 years has raised hopes that it also holds the key to guiding human beings towards a good life. Psychology and neuroscience has become a main source of life advice in the popular media. But philosophers have long held reservations about this scientific orientation to how to live life. The 18th century Scottish philosopher David Hume, for instance, famously pointed out, no amount of fact can legislate value, moral or otherwise. You cannot derive ought from is. But there is another, in some way more radical concern, expressed in Western philosophy most forcefully by Kierkegaard, and in literature by Dostoyevsky — two religiously inspired thinkers — namely that our experience of life matters in ineffable ways that no objective understanding of the world can capture.
Lawrence Hrubes

Textbooks for Peace in Israel and the West Bank - The New Yorker - 0 views

  • One of the few Palestinians who has tried to teach the Holocaust, Muhammad S. Dajani Daoudi, included it in a course at Al Quds University, in Jerusalem, and took twenty-seven Palestinian students to visit Auschwitz last year. He was vilified and hounded into resigning.
  • All eight students firmly denied that Jewish temples had ever stood in Jerusalem, a repudiation that has gained widespread currency among Palestinians, both Christian and Muslim. Textbooks don’t have to go that far; merely ignoring Jewish history in Jerusalem creates a vacuum, into which flow fabrications.
  • By contrast, Israeli textbooks acknowledge Islam’s connection to Jerusalem, according to Daniel Bar-Tal, of Tel Aviv University, the leading Israeli researcher for the Council of Religious Institutions study. Their central silence concerns the Palestinians’ angry pain over the founding of the Jewish state, which they mourn as “Al Nakba” (“the catastrophe”), in which they see alien outsiders as having stolen their land, killing and expelling innocent Arabs.
Lawrence Hrubes

Would You Hide a Jew From the Nazis? - The New York Times - 2 views

  • WHEN representatives from the United States and other countries gathered in Evian, France, in 1938 to discuss the Jewish refugee crisis caused by the Nazis, they exuded sympathy for Jews — and excuses about why they couldn’t admit them. Unto the breach stepped a 33-year-old woman from Massachusetts named Martha Sharp.
  • “There are parallels,” notes Artemis Joukowsky, a grandson of the Sharps who conceived of the film and worked on it with Burns. “The vitriol in public speech, the xenophobia, the accusing of Muslims of all of our problems — these are similar to the anti-Semitism of the 1930s and ’40s.” Advertisement Continue reading the main story
  • The Sharps’ story is a reminder that in the last great refugee crisis, in the 1930s and ’40s, the United States denied visas to most Jews. We feared the economic burden and worried that their ranks might include spies. It was the Nazis who committed genocide, but the U.S. and other countries also bear moral responsibility for refusing to help desperate people.
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  • “Yes, there might have been Nazi spies, but a tiny minority,” he said, just as there might be spies among Syrian refugees today, but again a tiny minority. “Ninety-five percent or more of these people are decent, and they are fleeing from death. So let’s not forget them.”
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC News - SS St Louis: The ship of Jewish refugees nobody wanted - 0 views

  • On 13 May 1939, more than 900 Jews fled Germany aboard a luxury cruise liner, the SS St Louis. They hoped to reach Cuba and then travel to the US - but were turned away in Havana and forced to return to Europe, where more than 250 were killed by the Nazis.
markfrankel18

Should Auschwitz Be a Site for Selfies? : The New Yorker - 2 views

  • From the self-absorbed faux seriousness of some (meditating on the grounds of Auschwitz-Birkenau!) to the jarring jokiness of others (hitching a ride by the train tracks!), the pictures have fed a perception of today’s youth as a bunch of technology-obsessed, self-indulgent narcissists. They also bring to mind the photos compiled in the popular Selfies at Funerals Tumblr blog. But if the “funeral selfie” kids were somehow hilarious in their inappropriateness, there’s nothing quite like seeing Israeli teens blowing kisses from the death camps of Poland to send you into a confusing and curious rage.
markfrankel18

Dresden at war with itself: should it remember or be allowed to forget? | World news | ... - 12 views

  • “While cities like Rotterdam and Coventry are seen to have ‘moved on’, Dresden is stuck in its past,” says Widera. First it served as an effective propaganda tool for the Nazis, then for the communists, and in the last 20 years has been used by neo-Nazis who use the anniversary to demonstrate against what they refer to as the “bombing Holocaust”, equating the event it to Auschwitz and viewing Germans as the victims, the allies as the perpetrators.
Lawrence Hrubes

My Terezín Diary | The New Yorker - 0 views

  • What is most striking to me today about the diary I kept seventy-five years ago is what I left out.
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