Why We Need to Learn About the Holocaust and How Viruses Are Spread into a Pandemic: Schools' Curriculums In Today's Age

 Nadene Goldfoot                                         

In the United States, the states of Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Illinois, Kentucky, Michigan, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Texas;  a total of 16 states have mandatory Holocaust education.   You don't see Tennessee teaching about the Holocaust.  They just banned a book, Maus, that does just that, teaches about the Holocaust that teen-agers would like.  

The following states require Holocaust education as part of their secondary school curricula.  Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia and Wisconsin, 23 states out of 50, not even a full half.  

 As a retired teacher, I'm all for teaching about the most horrid historic event in the world.  It was in my lifetime ! My grandparents came to the USA before it happened in the early 1900s.  I'm appalled to think that after 77 years when this came to an end, there are adults in our country who have never heard about it, or who it affected or how it happened to start. Since it happened once, we don't want to see it ever happen again to ANY group of people.  The only way to keep something like this at bay is education.  Know about it.  Keep it from happening again.  It's the most important  but horrid event in World History.       

• "Maus” author Art Spiegelman spoke to CNBC after a school board in Tennessee voted to ban his landmark graphic novel about the Nazis’ persecution of Jews. The Jan. 10 vote by the McMinn County School Board only began attracting attention Wednesday.  

•  Art Spiegelman, born Itzhak Avraham ben Zeev Spiegelman on February 15, 1948).  Spiegelman was born  in Stockholm, Sweden.
•  He immigrated with his parents who were born in Poland to the US in 1951.   Art is an American cartoonist, editor, and comics advocate best known for his graphic novel Maus. His work as co-editor on the comics magazines Arcade and Raw has been influential, and from 1992 he spent a decade as contributing artist for The New Yorker.                                        
  
  Spiegelman visited the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1979 as research for Maus; his parents had been imprisoned there.
•                                                
  
        Maus was the 1st graphic novel to win a Pulitzer Prize.  
• It comes amid a number of battles in school systems around the country as conservatives target curriculums over teachings about the history of slavery and racism in America.  “I’m kind of baffled by this,” Spiegelman said.

As of December 2021, laws mandating education in the Holocaust were on the books in Austria, France, Germany, Hungary, Israel, the Netherlands, Poland, Switzerland, Sweden, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada.      

It's taken 77 years to get such laws passed so that students grow up knowing about the Holocaust.  California was the first to start which they did in 1985.  

California

1985

California Education Code Section 51220

Instruction shall provide a foundation for understanding ... human rights issues, with particular attention to the study of the inhumanity of genocide, slavery, and the Holocaust, and contemporary issues.

 Texas has a week of studying about the Holocaust.  they just started in 2018.  

Texas

2018

SB 1828

Holocaust Remembrance Week shall include age-appropriate instruction, as determined by each school district. Instruction shall include: (1) information about the history of and lessons learned from the Holocaust; (2) participation, in person or using technology, in learning projects about the Holocaust; and (3) the use of materials developed or approved by the Texas Holocaust and Genocide Commission.

   Oregon just started teaching about the Holocaust last year.  There are many companies who have books for children that teach about the Holocaust.  Scholastic is one of them.  One of the most unimaginable tragedies of our time, the Holocaust can be a difficult subject to both teach and discuss.                    

The 24 carefully curated books on this list can be used in a variety of ways to help students understand both the history and the cultural significance of this grave time period in human history. This list includes gripping first-person accounts from historical figures like Anne Frank and Elie Wiesel; moving stories of heroic rescues from both adult and children survivors; and award-winning, bestselling Holocaust fiction like Lois Lowry's Number the Stars and Marcus Zusak's The Book Thief. This collection is a essential resource for any classroom library.                                                                    

Oregon

2019

SB 664

Requires school districts to provide instruction about Holocaust and genocide beginning with 2020–2021 school year.

This means that there are 31 states who are not going to teach about the Holocaust like the stand Tennessee has chosen.  Last week, Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene compared House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's decision to continue to require members of the House to wear masks on the chamber floor to steps Nazis took to control the Jewish population during the Holocaust. Her comments were swiftly condemned. 

                                               

 

 She had the audacity, the chutzpa, to use the most horrible group, Nazis, who ever existed on this planet, to compare with a member of our government who's trying to follow the scientist's advice on dealing with the worst pandemic on this planet which is wiping out thousands of people, getting close to a million. How can she possibly think that asking people to protect each other by wearing masks during the worst pandemic ever experienced is anything like the treatment that Nazis acted towards Jews?  

This is what has happened to a town without any Holocaust education, anti-Semitism.  This should never happen in the USA.  “Though a great deal has been done, it is alarmingly clear that 77 years after the liberation of Auschwitz, the shock is wearing off,” Herzog said at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem on Thursday evening. “We are seeing a surge in antisemitic assaults online; a normalization of antisemitic terminology in mainstream media; and an introduction of social media platforms refocused on Jew hatred to newer, younger audiences.”

Besides killing 6 million of us, they were excruciatingly cruel in their treatment of the people before they were killed!   

In the United States, more than 73.2 million Corona virus cases have been reported, according to Johns Hopkins University, and more than 877,000 people have died from the virus in the U.S. I note that Greene is from Georgia, a state not teaching about the Holocaust.  Do they teach science?  Sorry, Georgia, but just as children are representatives of their family, your Marjory is a representative of your state.  

 I have a cousin in Illinois who is still suffering from getting the Corona virus, and he is miserable, very angry from still going through such suffering.  How does Greene think we'll ever get over this pandemic if we don't stop the virus's capability to get into our system? We're in a new era, and we have to accept it and deal with it as best we can.   

Resource:

THE HOLOCAUST by Martin Gilbert

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/republicans-take-sides-for-a-trump-fueled-tug-of-war-over-russia/ar-AATeU2G?ocid=msedgdhp&pc=U531

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_requiring_teaching_of_the_Holocaust#:~:text=In%20the%20United%20States%2C%20the,states%20have%20mandatory%20Holocaust%20education.

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/01/26/tennessee-school-board-bans-holocaust-comic-maus-by-art-spiegelman.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_Spiegelman

https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/29/us/holocaust-marjorie-taylor-greene-states-trnd/index.html

https://www.ajc.com/news/coronavirus-how-many-people-have-died-from-the-virus-the/mYlJ0bpc9DVgb2scSJGlEM/

https://www.scholastic.com/teachers/teaching-tools/book-lists/24-books-for-teaching-the-holocaust.html

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/rep-majorie-taylor-greene-shouts-aoc-outside-house-accuses-democrat-n1267206

Never to Forget 2020: The Year the World Stayed Home

Nadene Goldfoot                                             

The Corona Virus has landed on our doorsteps.
It first infects the cells lining your throat, airways and lungs and turns them into "coronavirus factories" that spew out huge numbers of new viruses that go on to infect yet more cells.

It's happening to all of us on planet Earth.  We're forced to stay indoors in our homes because of the pandemic of the Corona Virus.  For us, it started in December.  

We've known about such a virus since 1965 which was like a cold, but how did SARS-CoV-2, the new coronavirus that causes COVID-19, come into being? MERS and SARS are other bad ones.  Here’s what we know about the virus that was first detected in Wuhan, China, in late 2019 and has set off a global pandemic.                                                    

New Yorkers are in their homes; only the essential go to work and keep
at a distance; from 6 feet to 10 feet

 

Even Israel, where so many scientific medical discoveries come from was taken by surprise and was hit hard as so many in this tiny 8,000 to 10,000 square mile state live in high-rise apartment buildings.  Especially hit hard was Mea Sharim, a very orthodox neighborhood in Jerusalem.  

"As of April 3rd,  7,030 Israelis have so far tested positive for the coronavirus; Thirty-eight people have died, 115 are in serious condition and 95 are on life support. One Israeli tourist died in Italy. So far, 357 have recovered.
                                                                          

Police have set up cordons around roads leading in and out of Bnei Brak

The number of coronavirus cases in the ultra-Orthodox town of Bnei Brak, de facto a neighborhood of Tel Aviv, has jumped to over 1,000 on Friday. The rate of the increase has slowed down, however: as compared to the previous days’ 25 percent hikes, the number of cases grew by a mere 14 percent on Friday.  "An ultra-Orthodox Jewish town with one of the highest rates of coronavirus cases in Israel has been placed under effective lockdown.

The overall number of patients grew to 1,030 from 900 the previous day. Meanwhile, the number of cases has also grown significantly in Kokhav HaShahar (to a total of 11), Tiberias (84), Safed, Kochav Yaakov (31) and Modiin elite (97). (Aaron Rabinowitz)."  Is has been reported to be slowing down overall.  
                                                     

"Mea Shearim (Hebrew: מאה שערים, lit. "hundred gates"; contextually "a hundred fold") is one of the oldest Jewish neighborhoods in Jerusalem. It is populated by Haredi Jews, and was built by members of the Old Yishuv. The oldest Sephardic Haredi dynasty, Levi Kahana of Spain, has a religious cultural center in the neighborhood."
                                                      

Ambulance in Mea Shearim to pick up someone
who has the Corona Virus
This is one of several ultra orthodox communities in Israel.
People who have depended on their religion to keep them healthy
and safe, now have to depend on the scientists as well,
and follow a world-wide adaption of isolation; meaning
to stay home and not to contaminate anyone.
The problem is that healthy people may be carriers and can
give the virus to others with more delicate immune systems.
The world's economics are being destroyed; hopefully-
only temporarily.  

Chasing down the carrier of the Corona Virus

This carrier left home against orders. 

"Modesty" posters in Hebrew and English are hung at every entrance to Mea Shearim. When visiting the neighborhood, women and girls are urged to wear what is deemed to be modest dress (knee-length skirts or longer, no plunging necklines or midriff tops, no sleeveless blouses or bare shoulders), men and boys are urged to avoid wearing shorts and sleeveless shirts, tourists are requested not to arrive in large, conspicuous groups and in some of the older signs even non-jews are requested to wear Kippahs. During Shabbat (from Friday night at sundown to Saturday night at sundown), visitors are asked to refrain from smoking, photography, driving or using mobile phones. When entering synagogues, men are asked to cover their heads.

Update for Israel who has 173 deaths from the Corona Virus with 13,654 who have the virus and 3,872 who have recovered.  

LocationConfirmedRecoveredDeaths

Israel	13,654	3,872	173
United States	775,846	70,606	41,302
Spain	200,210	80,587	20,852
Italy	181,228	47,055	24,114
Germany	146,286	83,438	4,676
United Kingdom	124,743	-	16,509
France	112,606	36,578	19,718
Turkey	86,306	11,976	2,017

Israel

13,654

3,872

173

United States

775,846

70,606

41,302

Spain

200,210

80,587

20,852

Italy

181,228

47,055

24,114

Germany

146,286

83,438

4,676

United Kingdom

124,743

-

16,509

France

112,606

36,578

19,718

Turkey

86,306

11,976

2,017

Strict laws of keeping someone who has the virus and must be isolated have to be obeyed everywhere.  It's very hard on this neighborhood.  It's hard on all of us everywhere but oh so necessary.  What I find hard is to talk to anyone and keep even 3 feet part.  We don't do this normally.  My walking cane is about 3 feet long.  Imagine a 6 foot distance that is now deemed too close, so we need 10 feet apart.  Thus:  isolation.  

Some people are demonstrating to toss out the rule now, when we haven't even all reached the peak nor have had all people tested.  The total population out of bed might just all be carriers to each other!!  Because we've been living with THE FLU which we get inoculated against each year, and have been living with that, they think we should take our chances; after all, it's just the flu.
                                                        

Ramallah, empty streets 

The state of Palestine, and I don't know who this is, whether it's Judea and Samaria (West Bank) or Gaza, report today that they have 449 with the virus, 3 deaths and 71 have recovered.  
                                                   

Corona Virus victims in hospital with ventilators 

This is not just any old flu.  This is the worst and destroys the internal body after one has had it as best it can.  It is the most highly infectious.  It is indeed one of the worst calamities that could befall this world population.  To top it off, all three religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam feel we are living at a time of the end of times when things are really about to happen-like a big-time-war.  Add nuclear capabilities to the mix and it's so probable.  Well, now we have this to add to our fears.  Science can defend us and science can destroy us.  We are living in a totally scientific world of cell phones, computers, and getting everything we want immediately.  We don't like to wait for anything;  thus the NOW generation demonstrating to get back to work or the politics of needing people to work for the economy.  

Resource:https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/coronavirus-israeli-health-minister-netanyahu-mossad-chief-quarantine-1.8720108

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mea_Shearim

https://www.webmd.com/lung/coronavirus-history#1-3

https://www.bbc.com/news/health-51214864
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/state-of-palestine/