Holocaust education in Jewish day schools suppressed grief and solidarity-building duty

Evidence

Looking back as the parent of a child older than we were then, I am struck by what wasn’t a part of these strangely mechanical retellings. There was space for the surface-level emotions: horror at the atrocities, rage at the Nazis, a desire for revenge. But not for the more complex and troubling emotions of shame or guilt, or for reflection on what duties the survivors of genocide may have to oppose genocidal logics in all of their forms. I am struck that we never actually grieved, nor were we invited to seize our anger and turn it into an instrument for solidarity. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 969

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The turn inward — from macro political argument to the author’s own childhood schooling — is the doubling device applied reflexively: how the self was trained not to see the Mirror World. Methodologically the hinge of these chapters.
• SEED: An essay on how a community’s founding trauma curriculum forecloses the very empathy needed to recognize comparable suffering elsewhere — ‘duties of the survivor’ as a pedagogical category.