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Prospects (2010) 40:1733DOI 10.1007/s11125-010-9145-7
OPEN FILE
Introduction to the Open File
Holocaust educationInternational perspectives: Challenges, opportunities and research
Zehavit Gross E. Doyle Stevick
Published online: 11 June 2010 UNESCO IBE 2010
Abstract Sixty-ve years after the liberation of Auschwitz, Holocaust education is at a critical juncture. Societies including Germany and Israel have moved through several discrete stages both in their relationships to the Holocaust, and in education about it. Those shifts will surely continue as the generation of survivors is progressively lost to the passage of time, taking with them our most powerful links to history, memory, and understanding. This special issue explores Holocaust education research, and locates it within our evolving understanding of the Holocaust itself, particularly in light of what is being learned within Central and Eastern Europe, where so many of the atrocities were committed. This introduction considers the potential of Holocaust education as well as its limitations, and the risks of its failure. It also considers the contexts in which Holocaust education takes place, and the meanings that are at work in those contexts. While many goals and visions animate Holocaust education, here we explore the notion of a culture of peace and remembrance. We close with a review of the contributions to this issue.
Keywords Holocaust education Human rights education Civic education
Introduction
The Holocaust, a seminal event in world history, poses great challenges for societies around the world as they educate their young people. The Holocaust was massive in scale,
Note from Zehavit Gross: I would like to dedicate my contributions towards this special issue to my father, Zvi Brenner, a Holocaust survivor from the Transnistria concentration camp. I also want to thank him for choosing to live, and for choosing to lead a meaningful, spiritual-religious life.
Z. Gross (&)
School of Education, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan, Israel e-mail: [email protected]
E. D. Stevick
College of Education, University of South Carolina, 318 Wardlaw Hall, Columbia, SC 29208, USA e-mail: [email protected]
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hugely complex, extreme and unprecedented in its horrors, and verged on incomprehensibility in the evil of its totality and of its countless constituent events. For adults, even under optimal learning conditions, learning about the Holocaust can be psychologically wrenching and emotionally fraught; for...