Holocaust and History

Eric C. Smith, Ph.D.

ecsmith@iliff.edu

Course Description

Historiography is the practice of making meaning out of the past. Sometimes the past resists this process, because of the inadequacy of our sources, the limitations of our perspectives, or because the past cannot be rendered meaningful. This course considers the Holocaust, the systematic extermination of Jews and others in mid-20th century Europe, and it asks what meaning can be made. Beginning with Christian anti-Semitism and ending with the ramifications of Shoah (“there can be no poetry after Auschwitz”), this course asks how to make meaning from the meaningless and how to do historiography in the face of the past.

Course Goals

1. To understand the theological and historical roots of Christian anti-Semitism;
2. To understand the Holocaust itself in its historical context within World War II;
3. To contend with historiographical and artistic representations of the Holocaust, especially with attention to film;
4. To wrestle with the implications of the Holocaust for theology, art, geopolitics, ethics, and the interactions between Jews, Christians, and Muslims;
5. To reflect on the roles and limitations of historiography in making meaning out of the past.

Required Texts

Berenbaum. Witness to the Holocaust . San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1997.

Berenbaum. The World Must Know: The History of the Holocaust as Told in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum , second edition. Johns Hopkins University Press 2005.

Wiesenthal, Simon. The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness. New York: Schocken Books, 1998.

Spiegelman, Art. MetaMaus: A Look Inside a Modern Classic . New York: Pantheon, 2011.

Desbois, Father Patrick. The Holocaust by Bullets: A Priest’s Journey to Uncover the Truth behind the Murder of 1.5 Million Jews. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2009.

Levi, Primo. The Drowned and the Saved . New York: Simon and Schuster, 2017.

Recommended:

Snyder, Timothy. On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2017.

Additionally, students should plan to spend about $25 on fees to stream some of the weekly films. I have tried wherever I could to find free versions, but in many cases the films are only available in pay formats. I have linked to these, and students should think of these fees like the cost of a textbook.

For the remainder of the syllabus content,

How the Course Will Work

The course is structured with a regular weekly rhythm. This rhythm holds sway for most weeks, with the exception of weeks 5 and 6 (Gathering Days). It looks like this:

Monday: By Monday of each week, I will post a video outlining the week's work. Called "notes for reading," these are not lectures, but rather a guide for the theme of the week and the material we will be encountering. This video will be posted in the Readings discussion, which is due Tuesday at midnight mountain time. 

Tuesday: By midnight (mountain time), read the assigned text(s) and comment in the discussion forum for that day. You can make an original post or join the conversation in someone else's post. These should be between a few sentences and a paragraph or so--just enough to convey an observation or question, and enough to signal to your classmates what was important to you about the text(s). 

Thursday: By midnight (mountain time), read the primary text(s) and make at least two annotations using hypothes.is. Your annotations can either be original, or they can be responses to someone else's. These can be a sentence or two long, and they don't need to be blindingly brilliant--just observations or questions about the primary source. They can, of course, be blindingly brilliant if you prefer them to be. 

Friday: By midnight (mountain time), view the film for the week and make a comment (original or reply) about it in the same manner as you did on the Wednesday post. 

Sunday: By midnight (mountain time), make a post of between a few sentences and a paragraph or so in the Check-In forum. Because this course deals with difficult and disturbing material, this discussion will serve as a way for us to process the week's work together and care for one another. It can serve as a space for you to summarize your reactions to the week's work, or to draw synthesizing conclusions about it, or to share your feelings or emotions about the material, or to respond to someone else's--whatever you like. 

This looks like a lot of posting and work, and it is. But it is meant to be iterative, revisiting the same material multiple times in different forms, and building a conversation from the beginning of the week until the end. You can choose to do all the posts at the beginning of the week if you like, or you can do them as they come up. The latter is preferred, as it allows you to respond to others and hear them respond to you, but if your life is structured so that doing all the posts at the beginning of the week works best, that option is open to you. 

These assignments are all low-stakes, in the parlance of pedagogy. That means that they do not carry very much weight on their own. Each of them is worth one point and is worth 1% of your final grade, and you get full credit for doing the assignment. The points add up to 36, plus 4 freebie bonus points which get you to 40 total points, or a little over one third of your grade. The grading is binary: do it and get a point, or don't, and don't get a point. If your post is too thin and I'd like for you to say more next time, I will tell you so, but you will still get full credit for doing the assignment. Likewise, if you write a dissertation for a post, I will ask you to write less next time. But you won't get extra credit for all your writing. My value here is around a single solid observation, or maybe two, to add to the conversation the class is having.  

Evaluation

I consider evaluation a necessary evil. I do not like to do it; it feels (to me) like a rupture in my relationship with you as a student, and a violation of the way we have been traveling together through the course. I am, however, required to submit grades at the end of the quarter, and these grades can be important for a number of reasons (as a record of your performance when applying for further study, to be considered by various ordaining bodies, etc.). In attempt to balance these competing realities, evaluation will take place in the following ways:

1) The weekly posts, worth 1 point each, as outlined above

2) A short (500 word) response to The Sunflower

3) The paper proposal and final paper

The final paper is a traditional research paper, and it should represent original research into some aspect of the Holocaust or related issues, and as such, it will be evaluated based on use of sources, argumentation, and adherence to standards of quality at Iliff.. The proposal is a prospectus for the research paper, exploring a potential topic and its feasibility. As part of these assignments, you'll be asked to assess yourself, based on your understanding of the work you've done and the success with which you've engaged the assignment. My evaluation, then, will be to see whether your own assessment is a fair one, and whether your understanding of your work matches mine. If you think you did C work, but I think you did B work, that is important information for us to consider as we move forward. 

Final grades for these synthesizing projects are assigned by me, using your self-assessment as a starting point. 

Plagiarism (defined as passing off someone else's work as your own without proper attribution) will automatically result in failure of the assignment (0 out of 32 points) and reporting to the Dean's Office. Please refer to the Masters Student Handbook for more information on plagiarism, or see this video prepared by Dr. Elizabeth Coody of the Iliff Writing Lab.  

Course Requirements

Weekly Posts (40%): Students will participate in four weekly forums or text annotation exercises. 

Response to The Sunflower (10%): Write a response to Wiesenthal's The Sunflower, patterned on those found in the book, from the point of view of your own ideological or religious standpoint. 

Paper Proposal (10%): Due in week 5. Students will write a prospectus on a research question for their final paper.

Final Paper (40%): A final paper of 12-15 pages will investigate some aspect of the Holocaust or related issues. This is a research paper, representing original inquiry into the research question from the proposal. 

ADA Accommodations

Iliff engages in a collaborative effort with students with disabilities to reasonably accommodate student needs.  Students are encouraged to contact their assigned adviser to initiate the process of requesting accommodations.  The advising center can be contacted at advising@iliff.edu or by phone at 303.765.1146. 

Pass/Fail

Requests to take the course pass/fail must be made to the instructor by the end of the first week of class.