Holocaust Education

A recent posting on Kosher Eucharist as well as a rereading of (what I consider to be) the very important essay by Chaim Soleveichik, "Rupture and Reconstruction: The Transformation of Contemporary Orthodoxy," which was originally published in Tradition, Vol. 28, No. 4 (Summer 1994) have got me thinking about something that was a pet peeve of mine in high school, Holocaust education. Simply put, the Holocaust is not treated properly in Jewish institutions. In my various experiences with after-school Hebrew school, Jewish day schools and synagogue education programs of all denominations, the holocaust is mistreated in the same ways, which detract horribly from serious education. First of all, it is mythologized horribly. It is held up as an event which is so terrible any discussion of it cannot capture it's horror. Now this is probably true. But any decent historian will tell you that you can't capture the exact essence, the real truth, of any event. Horrible, wonderful, it doesn't matter. Ever event is filtered through the evidence we have about it. The inability to really grasp what happened during the Holocaust doesn't separate it from other events, it makes it similar to them. The mythologizing manifests itself in other ways as well, primarily an inability to look at people who lived though (or were killed in) the Holocaust in any kind of objective light. The second flaw is that, partially because of our inability to discuss it in a historical light (at least in educational settings at Jewish institutions), Holocaust programs are mind numbingly boring. We list names; we count numbers; we hear survivors' accounts (which in my experience tend to blend into each other). The accounts are the only things which even approach being interesting, and they often are, but because they are never contextualized in the program, they lose a lot of their effectiveness. Now, because of these two problems, Holocaust education programs/curricula almost always end up resorting to cheap manipulations of the audience's emotions. I'm not a monster, it's impossible for me not to be affected by the pile of children's shoes at Yad V'Shem -- but so what? I feel bad, and then....? Nothing comes of this tactic, and in the end it has nothing to do with real education.
I have no real answer to the problems, but I would like to explore a few of the reasons for them. I'm going to start out with something that Chaim Soleveichik says in the essay I mentioned before (and which anybody who wants to have a solid understanding of the state of contemporary Orthodoxy should read),

"The sudden, passionate insistence that the suffering of one's people was sui generis and incomparable with that of any other nation in the long and lamentable catalog of human cruelty betokens, among other things, an urgent need for distinctiveness which must be met, but cannot be satisfied from within, from any inner resources. Finding one's inimitability in the unique horrors that others have committed against oneself, may seem a strange form of distinction, but not if there remains a powerful urge to feel different at a time when one has become indistinguishable from the rest."

He is talking about the phenomenon in a different context, but it is relevant to my point in the following way: The North American Jewish community's founding myth is based, at least in part, on the uniqueness of the Holocaust. Now, the Holocaust may or may not be unique in the catalogue of horrors that humanity has perpetrated, but it is something that should be discussed. We already have an answer to that question and it makes it impossible to look at the question seriously. In Israel the situation is even worse, because the uniqueness of the Holocaust is one of the justifications for the existence of the state. There is a vested interest in the mythologizing of the Holocaust. The are other reasons as well, a refusal to admit that the Nazi evil was rooted in reality, as opposed to some other-worldly evil (thus the comparisons to Amalek, ancient mythological enemy of the Israelite nation, invoked to explain evil when no other explanation suffices), a fear that recognizing the reality of the Holocaust would force us to act in certain ways that we may not like, some others which I'm sure I'm missing.
Now, the materials exist to teach the Holocaust well. Plenty of talented historians in North America, Europe and Israel have done lots of good work, and as time goes on we will only learn more. Speilberg's interview project is a wonderful thing. But until the Jewish community is willing to reject the myth of the Holocaust and exchange it for a serious look at what happened, these resources are wasted on us.