Review of ‘Teaching, Learning and the Holocaust’

Two professors at Bristol Community College have developed a unique approach to teaching the Holocaust that they detail in their new book “Teaching, Learning, and the Holocaust: An Integrative Approach.” The authors, Howard Tinberg and Ron Weisberger, have written this classroom study of the Holocaust after teaching the Shoah at the college for over 10 years. Their book cites the challenges and outlines approaches to teaching the Shoah through history and literature together. They apply methods and insights of teaching and learning with the intent of examining issues in their interdisciplinary teaching at the community college level.

The authors approach their subject on a personal level by telling their own stories about how they came to teach the course and their own personal experience with the Shoah. One of the professors, a child of Holocaust survivors, teaches the literature with the realization that his own parents were there. The other professor, an assimilated American Jew and an educated historian, provides the students with an accurate, historical approach of the period. The two professors explain that, over the years, their methods have changed from teaching in each’s own way, separately, to now integrating their methods and successfully discussing the Shoah together with their students.

The book includes an introduction and seven chapters that deal with Contexts, Discipline, What We Knew and When We Knew It, Bystanders and Agents, Witnesses, Trauma and finally, Reclaiming Faith. In these chapters, several of their former students give testimony about how they felt during the course and give their own responses to the Shoah. It is probably not a coincidence that the titles of the chapters reflect the subjects that teachers deal with in teaching the Shoah, and Tinberg and Weisberger have done a superb job in bringing their students’ responses and the themes of the course together smoothly. In addition, they engage the reader to understand this unique course taught at the community college. At the end of the book, the authors provide the reader with a course syllabus, a template for the reading journals the students must write each week, the critical research project the students are asked to design and examples of the midterm and final exams.

After carefully reading this book, I have come to appreciate the process that Drs. Tinberg and Weisberger took to initiate this honors course at the community college level and to understand how their course evolved over ten years of successfully teaching students about the Shoah. It is indeed a pleasure to recommend this book to professors who want to learn how to initiate and design a Holocaust course at the community college level.

CYNTHIA YOKEN (myoken@comcast.net) is a retired language teacher and the co-chair of the Holocaust Education and Memorial Committee of the Jewish Federation of Greater New Bedford.