MA for Holocaust & Genocide Studies

The

Emil A. and Jenny Fish Center for Holocaust

&

Genocide

Studies

at Yeshiva University

“Teaching the lessons of the Holocaust to the next generation is one of the most important educational tasks of our time.”

–Shay Pilnik, PhD Director, The Emil A. and Jenny Fish Center

The Emil A. and Jenny Fish Center for Holocaust & Genocide Studies strives to build a cadre of professionals and lay leaders who are committed to Holocaust Education and Remembrance, and ready to meet the challenges that the field is facing. As survivors pass away and awareness of the subject in public memory fades, it is the responsibility of the next generations to explore, research and teach the history of the Holocaust and its lessons, confront Holocaust deniers and distorters, and combat antisemitism both in the U.S. and globally.

Through our interdisciplinary M.A. in Holocaust and Genocide Studies and regular community programming, we aim to broaden the perspective on the subject of genocide through exploration of the Holocaust in conjunction with the study of other genocides that have occurred since the early 20th century till present day.

We are as strong as our community of distinguished faculty and students hungry for learning.

A Call to Duty

Shay Pilnik, Ph.D. Director, The Emil A. and Jenny Fish Center

As the grandson of Holocaust survivors, Dr. Shay Pilnik’s connection to the Shoah is supremely personal—a connection that has formed his identity and propelled him to find his life’s calling as an educator.

“Sometimes it’s not easy for me to be so focused on this extremely difficult subject,” he admits. “But I see the call to ‘Never Forget’ as my mission and duty.”

QUESTION: What are the biggest challenges facing Holocaust education?

ANSWER: The primary one is to insist upon the Holocaust as a Jewish experience, anchored in the history of the Jewish people. At the same time, we must continue to explore the Holocaust’s universal lessons and its relevance to our day and age.

QUESTION: What is distinctive in the Fish Center’s approach?

ANSWER: While our master’s degree focuses on telling the story of the Holocaust from a Jewish perspective, it does so from many viewpoints, ranging from education and literature to law, film, and psychology, an approach that reflects the different faiths, denominations, and backgrounds of our student body.

QUESTION: How do you balance the teaching of the Holocaust with the teaching of other genocides?

ANSWER: The Holocaust is an unprecedented event in the history of humankind. Never before has a group of human beings been doomed to the death by committing one crime—the crime of belonging to that group. Never before has there been an attempt to erase millions of human beings from the face of the earth through methods of industrial murder. Unfortunately, genocide is something that humanity cannot put in the past; it keeps repeating itself.

Dr. Pilnik with his late grandmother, Fruma Hazanovsky (Liond).

QUESTION: The number of Holocaust survivors are dwindling. How does this affect education?

ANSWER: To a great extent, Holocaust education has been propelled by Holocaust survivors. As these survivors pass on and the Shoah becomes an increasingly distant event, the field must be professionalized. Our graduates will be the new generation of teachers and leaders, ready to come up with new content and pedagogical methods that will help make the Holocaust relevant in a world without those who had a firsthand experience of the Shoah.

QUESTION: Who is your ideal student?

ANSWER: Someone looking for answers to the Holocaust’s unanswered questions and who wants to learn more about the Jewish lives the Nazis destroyed. Someone committed to remembering the past, educating the future and playing a leading role in this fascinating and rapidly growing field.

Dr. Pilnik’s great grandparents, Zeev and Rachel Liond, murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators on October 22, 1942.

Survivor. Philanthropist. Visionary.

Emil A. Fish Founder, The Emil A. and Jenny Fish Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies

Born to a prominent Chassidic family in 1935, Emil Fish had a peaceful childhood in Bardejov, a picturesque Slovakian town with a vibrant Jewish community. Little did he know how his world would soon change.

In 1942, 90% of Slovakian Jews were deported to concentration camps in Germany by the local pro-Nazi Slovakian government. Mr. Fish’s father was lucky to be among the 10% exempted from deportation. In 1944, when the order came to round up and deport the remaining Jews, the family fled, hiding in a barn of a Baptist family who fed and protected

them for months. When Mr. Fish was 9 years old, he and his family were discovered and arrested by the Gestapo. His father was sent to Buchenwald, which he survived, while Mr. Fish and his mother and sister were sent to Bergen Belsen. In 1945, they were liberated.

The family emigrated to Canada, and in 1955, moved to Los Angeles. Mr. Fish met and married his wife, Jenny, earned a degree in engineering from the University of Southern California, and eventually became a successful real estate and senior housing developer.

The Fish Center is one of Mr. Fish’s many commitments to Holocaust remembrance and education to ensure that those whom the Nazis murdered including the majority of Bardejov’s Jews will never be forgotten.

QUESTION: What was the impetus behind the creation of the Fish Center?

ANSWER: I was at my grandson Zachary’s high school graduation from The Marsha Stern Talmudical Academy for Boys, and as I looked around at the names of all the graduate schools YU has, I realized they don’t have a Holocaust school. I knew something had to be done.

QUESTION: What worries you about the way the Holocaust is taught today?

ANSWER: I applaud the teachers who engage in this important field, but because they often don’t know the history of Nazi Germany and have never studied the Holocaust, they misrepresent what happened. This is why it is so important that there is training so that teachers can teach the truth, especially since the number of Holocaust deniers and anti-Semites keeps rising, both in Europe, and unfortunately, in our country, too. Perhaps they are not as influential, credible and well-organized as they used to be, but the danger is still there.

QUESTION: Do you see a problem with teaching the Holocaust in combination with other genocides?

ANSWER: The Holocaust was about killing children and adults for no reason except they were Jews, and it was perpetrated by the most enlightened, educated people in Western Civilization. It was a singular, unprecedented event that should not and cannot be equated with anything else.

QUESTION: How can we prevent the Holocaust from happening again?

ANSWER: We always hear the phrases “never forget” and “never again.” But the only way to make sure there is no “never again” is through education. The more teaching and physical proof of the Holocaust, the more likely it is that we won’t forget.

QUESTION: What’s your dream for the Fish Center in 10 years?

ANSWER: I hope the Center will be graduating many trained professionals who can teach the true Holocaust, what really happened, so it will never happen again.

16 Hours Ahead and Always on Time

Justin Zammit

Middle and High School History Teacher, Darwin, Australia Student, Fish Center

As a Catholic growing up in Melbourne, Australia, Justin Zammit knew little about Jewish people and even less about the Holocaust.

At 13, that all changed when a teacher assigned The Diary of Anne Frank, followed by a school trip to Melbourne’s Holocaust Museum. At 16, he read Exodus, Leon Eris’ epic novel about the birth of Israel. “I fell in love with the culture and history of the Jews,” he says. “And it all just snowballed into a kind of obsession.”

At 19, Zammit visited Israel for the first time, going on to study the Holocaust in college, graduate school, and at Yad Vashem, finally becoming a high school history and Holocaust teacher.

These days, Zammit arrives at his office at 6:30 a.m., crossing multiple time zones for his Fish Center Zoom classes. “I take what I learn and apply it right to the classroom or the staff room my fellow teachers are always interested

in what I’m learning,” he says. “The Fish Center has really enhanced my ability to educate Aussie kids about the Shoah, and I’m constantly learning and growing.”

QUESTION: What pushes you to keep studying the Holocaust?

ANSWER: I’m fascinated by mankind’s response to good and evil, and how ordinary people reacted during historical events. I always wonder, what would I have done if I was a 43-year-old German history teacher in the 1930s caught up in Nazism and the Holocaust?

QUESTION: How is the Holocaust usually taught in Australia?

ANSWER: Teachers often use the movie The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, a story told through the eyes of a German boy who winds up in an extermination camp. It does provide some context; however, it’s written from a German perspective, which is completely the wrong way to learn about the Holocaust. It’s also unrealistic and historically inaccurate. It drives me crazy.

QUESTION: What do you consider a good solution?

ANSWER: Good Holocaust curricula are badly needed: while teachers have good intentions, they don’t realize what they’re doing is wrong. Using what I’ve learned from the Fish Center, I’ve created alternative curricula, texts and films, and conducted teacher development and training on Holocaust education throughout Australia.

QUESTION: How have you approached teaching your Aussie students about the Holocaust?

ANSWER: Many students have little to no exposure to Jewish people, especially in outback towns. I don’t start with pictures of dead bodies; I show them pictures of children before they were murdered. Then the kids realize, “These were people, just like me.”

QUESTION: What kinds of revelations have you had throughout the program?

ANSWER: I was thoroughly impressed with my course on Genocide. There was an interesting Aussie focus when we examined colonization and genocide, which I was able to bring back to my classroom as well as some interesting and enlightening conversations and discussions with my co-workers.

Reaching Gen Z

Julie Friedman Director, IT/Ed Tech at Naaleh High School for Girls, Fair Lawn, New Jersey Student, The Emil A. and Jenny Fish Center

Growing up in Norfolk, Virginia, in the 1980s, Julie Friedman was far removed from the Holocaust—and yet from a young age, she was fascinated by it. Her paternal grandparents, who emigrated before World War II, helped start Norfolk’s first (and still only) Orthodox synagogue, while her maternal grandfather earned a Purple Heart in the war. “My elementary school had a very good Holocaust education program that included a lot of historical fiction, and that had a big influence on me,” says Friedman. “I always wanted to know more and share it with others.”

As a high school and middle school teacher for over a decade, Friedman has updated the interactive lessons that affected her as a child for her current students, including a yearlong project on the Holocaust. That process stoked her desire to gain a more comprehensive education in Holocaust history that would lead to better techniques for reaching today’s youth. “The challenges teaching kids today, even Jewish kids, just keep growing,” she says. “That’s why we need the Fish Center to give us the tools to reach this and future generations.”

QUESTION: What have you found to be the biggest issues teaching students today about the Holocaust?

ANSWER: Because the kids are so far removed from it, they think, “How does this impact me now?” And in the Jewish schools where I work, the students are very sheltered. They can’t fathom a world where they would have to conceal their Jewishness, or hide under floorboards because they are being hunted.

QUESTION: How has technology affected your ability to reach students?

ANSWER: On the one hand, it gives us so many creative, interactive ways to make the Holocaust come to life, to make it real and personal. On the other hand, kids are exposed to so much violence and murder in television and movies that they’re desensitized to it. An actor gets killed in a horrible, bloody way, and everyone goes on with their lives. It makes it harder for students to comprehend the emotional devastation.

QUESTION: What do you think needs to change in the way the Holocaust is taught?

ANSWER: It’s not enough to say, “Don’t let this happen again.” As important as it is to teach the history, we need to address the individual and societal psychology behind it: how the Nazis turned the Jews into non-humans; the force of peer pressure. These are lessons we can apply to situations now to hopefully prevent other genocides.

She Wrote the Book

Karen Shawn, Ph.D. Director of Educational Outreach, The Emil A. and Jenny Fish Center Founding Editor, PRISM: An Interdisciplinary Journal for Holocaust Educators

The Diary of Anne Frank changed the trajectory of Dr. Karen Shawn’s life.

Through her now 30-plus years in Holocaust education, Dr. Shawn has seen many well-meaning but misguided methods of teaching the subject, as well as a trend toward de-Judaizing the Holocaust. Many educators, she says, teach only about “victims” and “man’s inhumanity to man,” never mentioning the word Jews. “It is a disheartening trend,” she says, “and it is growing.”

As a public-school English teacher for more than a decade, Dr. Shawn had taught the book to enough eighth graders to realize how much she didn’t know about the Holocaust. “My students had questions I couldn’t answer,” she says.

That realization led her to a fellowship to study in Israel at Yad Vashem and the Ghetto Fighters’ House. Galvanized by the survivors who had become her close friends, that month of study eventually turned into Dr. Shawn’s life’s work. “They told me I owed it to myself to continue to learn so that I could teach students what happened to our people,” she says.

Already working toward her Ph.D. in English, Dr. Shawn shifted her focus to teaching Holocaust to middle-schoolers. As part of her thesis, she created a curriculum on Anne Frank in cooperation with the Anti-Defamation League, which is now used nationwide and has even been translated to Spanish; she can now answer the questions that she could not have answered before.

Dr. Shawn is proud to be part of the Fish Center’s critical role in bringing back a uniquely Jewish perspective to Holocaust education and in determining how the Holocaust will be understood by future generations of teachers, students and citizens of the world.

“Most of us go into this field because it has become our passion,” says Dr. Shawn. “We learn for the sake of the survivors; we learn because this is our history; we learn and remember because we are a people of learning and remembering.”

Five Ways Holocaust Educators Make a Difference

I.

As survivors and witnesses pass away, Holocaust educators will be the ones who carry forward the history and stories of the Holocaust survivors so that they are never forgotten.

II.

By engaging the American public in a conversation about the Jewish people, Holocaust educators become the most effective frontline soldiers in the battle against anti-Semitism.

III.

Holocaust educators are expanding the reach and power of the Shoah by investigating it through the lenses of history, literature, psychology, cinema, law, social work, education and theology.

IV.

Holocaust education is character education at its best—it’s a powerful history lesson that helps young men and women understand the dangers of hatred, intolerance, racism, and anti-Semitism when gone unchecked.

V.

Holocaust educators working in museums, education resource centers, academia, politics, journalism, human rights advocacy and genocide prevention reshape the world beyond the classroom.

The Threat of Holocaust Amnesia

A 2020 nationwide survey* of adults under 40 showed a shocking lack of basic Holocaust knowledge

• 1 in 10 did not recall ever hearing the word “Holocaust” before.

• 63% did not know that 6 million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust.

• Nearly 50% could not name even one of the over 40,000 concentration camps and ghettos that were established in World War II.

• 7% were not sure the Holocaust happened.

• 3% percent denied that it happened.

• 11% percent believe the Jews caused the Holocaust.

In New York, the state with the largest Jewish population, the number climbs to 19% .

* Released in 2020, commissioned by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany. 11,000 adults participated.

M.A. in Holocaust and Genocide Studies

Are You Ready?

In as few as 18 months, you can earn an M.A. in Holocaust and Genocide Studies that will prepare you for a career ensuring that “Never Again” becomes a reality in your lifetime.

To do this, you will master the skills needed to identify the political background and root causes of the Holocaust and the different stages leading to genocide from faculty who are experts in history, social work, literature, theology, law and education. Classes are small enough to spark interactions that will lead to lifelong connections with both teachers and peers.

Apply now, and each applicant is automatically considered for a scholarship.

Wiesenthal Author, Holocaust Survivor

“For evil to flourish, it only requires good men to do nothing.”

–Simon