The Holocaust stands as a focal event in modern Western history. With a vast array of literature, film, and historical work dedicated to the subject, it is increasingly difficult for educators to sift through the materials available and incorporate them into their curricula.

New Perspectives on the Holocaust offers guidance to those in the teaching professions confronting issues raised by the Holocaust. Authors, all actively involved in teaching about the Holocaust, reflect on a range of fundamental questions. Some offer guidance in selecting materials; others examine factors that determine the success or failure of Holocaust curricula; and still others essays examine questions of how much we can know about the Holocaust, investigating specifically the phenomenon of Holocaust denial. Providing a wealth of guidance for engaging students in a wide range of disciplines, from literature to history to geography to Jewish and Christian theology, and including contributions by such well-known scholars as Steven Katz, William Seidelman, Richard Breitman, John Pawlikowski, and Carole Fink, this volume is essential reading for all those in the teaching professions who grapple with the Holocaust.

The Holocaust stands as a focal event in modern Western history. With a vast array of literature, film, and historical work dedicated to the subject, it is increasingly difficult for educators to sift through the materials available and incorporate them into their curricula.

New Perspectives on the Holocaust offers guidance to those in the teaching professions confronting issues raised by the Holocaust. Authors, all actively involved in teaching about the Holocaust, reflect on a range of fundamental questions. Some offer guidance in selecting materials; others examine factors that determine the success or failure of Holocaust curricula; and still others essays examine questions of how much we can know about the Holocaust, investigating specifically the phenomenon of Holocaust denial. Providing a wealth of guidance for engaging students in a wide range of disciplines, from literature to history to geography to Jewish and Christian theology, and including contributions by such well-known scholars as Steven Katz, William Seidelman, Richard Breitman, John Pawlikowski, and Carole Fink, this volume is essential reading for all those in the teaching professions who grapple with the Holocaust.

The rise of Jewish feminism, a branch of both second-wave feminism and the American counterculture, in the late 1960s had an extraordinary impact on the leadership, practice, and beliefs of American Jews. ""Women Remaking American Judaism"" is the first book to fully examine the changes in American Judaism as women fought to practice their religion fully and to ensure that its rituals, texts, and liturgies reflected their lives. In addition to identifying the changes that took place, this volume aims to understand the process of change in ritual, theology, and clergy across the denominations.The essays in ""Women Remaking American Judaism"" offer a paradoxical understanding of Jewish feminism as both radical, in the transformational sense, and accomodationist, in the sense that it was thoroughly compatible with liberal Judaism. Essays in the first section, Reenvisioning Judaism, investigate the feminist challenges to traditional understanding of Jewish law, texts, and theology. In Redefining Judaism, the second section, contributors recognize that the changes in American Judaism were ultimately put into place by each denomination, their law committees, seminaries, rabbinic courts, rabbis, and synagogues, and examine the distinct evolution of women's issues in the Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, and Reconstructionist movements.Finally, in the third section, Re-Framing Judaism, essays address feminist innovations that, in some cases, took place outside of the synagogue. An introduction by Riv-Ellen Prell situates the essays in both American and modern Jewish history and offers an analysis of why Jewish feminism was revolutionary.""Women Remaking American Judaism"" raises provocative questions about the changes to Judaism following the feminist movement, at every turn asking what change means in Judaism and other American religions and how the fight for equality between men and women parallels and differs from other changes in Judaism. ""Women Remaking American Judaism"" will be of interest to both scholars of Jewish history and women's studies.

The Holocaust was a cataclysmic upheaval in politics, culture, society, ethics, and theology. The very fact of its occurrence has been forcing scholars for more than sixty years to assess its impact on their disciplines. Educators whose work is represented in this volume ask their students to grapple with one of the grand horrors of the twentieth century and to accept the responsibility of building a more just, peaceful world (tikkun olam). They acknowledge that their task as teachers of the Holocaust is both imperative and impossible; they must teach something that cannot be taught, as one contributor puts it, and they recognize the formidable limits of language, thought, imagination, and comprehension that thwart and obscure the story they seek to tell. Yet they are united in their keen sense of pursuing an effort that is pivotal to our understanding of the past-and to whatever prospects we may have for a more decent and humane future. A Holocaust course refers to an instructional offering that may focus entirely on the Holocaust; may serve as a touchstone in a larger program devoted to genocide studies; or may constitute a unit within a wider curriculum, including art, literature, ethics, history, religious studies, jurisprudence, philosophy, theology, film studies, Jewish studies, German studies, composition, urban studies, or architecture. It may also constitute a main thread that runs through an interdisciplinary course. The first section of Testimony, Tensions, and Tikkun can be read as an injunction to teach and act in a manner consistent with a profound cautionary message: that there can be no tolerance for moral neutrality about the Holocaust, and that there is no subject inthe humanities or social sciences where its shadow has not reached. The second section is devoted to the process and nature of students' learning. These chapters describe efforts to guide students through terrain that hides cognitive and emotional land mines. The authors examine their responsibility to foster students' personal connection with the events of the Holocaust, but in such a way that they not instill hopelessness about the future. The third and final section moves the subject of the Holocaust out of the classroom and into broader institutional settings-universities and community colleges and their surrounding communities, along with museums and memorial sites. For the educators represented here, teaching itself is testimony. The story of the Holocaust is one that the world will fail to master at its own peril. The editors of this volume, and many of its contributors, are members of the Pastora Goldner Holocaust Symposium. Led since its founding in 1996 by Leonard Grob and Henry F. Knight, the symposium's scholars-a group that is interfaith, international, interdisciplinary, and intergenerational-meet biennially in Oxfordshire, England. Contributors include Beth Hawkins Benedix, Timothy A. Bennett, David R. Blumenthal, Stephen Feinstein, Donald Felipe, Leonard Grob, Marilyn J. Harran, Henry F. Knight, Paul A. Levine, Juergen Manemann, Rachel Rapperport Munn, Tam Parker, David Patterson, Didier Pollefeyt, Amy Shapiro, Stephen D. Smith, and Laurinda Stryker.