In an otherwise unrelated post recounting the life of a third-rate North Carolina Senator, Erik Loomis wrote something that jumped out at me:
So the U.S. has plenty of reason to feel shame about its actions or lack thereof in caring about the impending Holocaust, not that the college students who sign up for Holocaust courses by the hundreds but won’t touch slavery or Native American courses want to hear about their own nation’s complicity.
Is that last part -- suggesting that current college students "sign up for Holocaust courses by the hundreds", in comparison to presumably thinner enrollments in classes on slavery or Native American history -- true? Is it backed by any data regarding comparative enrollment levels across those sorts of classes?
Intuitively, it seems wrong to me. But I don't have any data either, so my intuition is just that. If others have harder numbers they could share, I'd be appreciative.
Most history students I've encountered in North America know very little about any Jewish history. The Shoah comes up primarily as a comparative or moral benchmark, often with very ambivalent tones towards its historiographical importance. In edge cases, Holocaust history is regarded as incipiently reactionary and requiring domestication.
ReplyDeleteStudents now love to talk about the influence of imperialism and biological racism on Nazi ideology. There's truth to that, of course, but they sometimes seem to think that American segregation was a greater influence on Nazism than European antisemitism. At a certain point this line distracts from historical understanding and merely functions to shift the benchmark of absolute evil onto another topic that they believe deserves greater attention.
(Personally, I think we should embrace the inquiry, but push it further by emphasizing antisemitism's crucial role in the development of imperialism!)
In one historiography class, I was assigned a text on the word "genocide" as applied to Indigenous peoples in North America. The author argued that the term should be used more often. Among other things, she blamed Holocaust historiography for this failure. Something along the lines of: "we have been made to believe that before the Holocaust, genocide was unimagineable."
This struck me, first of all, because it's obviously false. It is perfectly common for academic historians to refer to the Armenian genocide. There are historians who resist this designation, but we don't blame their resistance on an obscure debate over Holocaust historiography; we call them nationalist historians and are done with it. It seemed strange, and a little unsettling, that this author could not do the same towards historians who avoid "genocide" in the North American context. Is it not enough to say that American and Canadian historians might reproduce the nationalist narratives of their own societies?