Soul Food Shabbat With Scholars on Race and Citizenship in Nazi Germany and the Jim Crow US

The Charlotte Jewish News, February 2023

By Rabbi Judy Schindler

How would you respond to Whoopi Goldberg’s erroneous claim that the Holocaust wasn’t about race? Through education, Whoopi Goldberg recognized how much she has to learn and apologized.

Everyone has the opportunity to learn more about this topic at a community Shabbat dinner with visiting scholars, Dr. Aya Marczyk, associate research scholar from Yale University, and Dr. O. Jennifer Dixon-McKnight, assistant professor of history and African American studies from Winthrop University. These academics will help Charlotteans find the words to counter such uninformed assertions.

Using video testimony from the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies from the Yale University Library with Leon Bass, a Black World War II liberator in a segregated army, the community will look at the legacy of this difficult history. Through a panel presentation and guided table conversations, participants will explore the connections between Jim Crow Laws and the Nazi Nuremberg Laws, the social construct of race, and its historical impact on Blacks and Jews and identify practical responses to combat antisemitism and racism today.

This Shabbat dinner and program is open to the public and will be held on Friday, February 10 from 5:30 to 7 p.m. at Queens University ($23/person).

It is sponsored by Queens University’s Hillel, Queens’ Black Student Union, the Belk Chapel, the Charlotte Black/Jewish Alliance, and the Stan Greenspon Holocaust and Social Justice Education Center.

If you are a teacher, how might you use this material in your classroom, allowing Holocaust history and American civil rights history to inform one another?

“An Historical Inquiry of Nazism & Jim Crow: Testimony in Dialogue with Primary Sources,” a workshop for regional educators, will be held on February 10, 8:30 a.m. to 3:30 pm, to provide teachers with skills to address these two disturbing eras in history. Dr. Aya Marczyk will introduce teachers to the Fortunoff Video Archive’s testimony-centered curriculum “Race and Citizenship in Nazi Germany and Jim Crow United States.” The curriculum is a set of 15 online lessons that engage students in the following questions: How do we listen to testimonies given by Holocaust survivors and witnesses? What skills and attitudes do we need to engage in both empathetic listening and historical inquiry? And what does it take to articulate rigorous comparisons of race laws in the United States and Nazi Germany in the 1930s?

Teachers will listen to an overview of the curriculum and discuss its underlying pedagogy, which draws on the Fortunoff Archive’s interview method and historians’ disciplinary practices. Participants will listen to a second-generation Holocaust survivor and apply what they just learned. Additionally, James

Whitman’s 2017 book, “Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law” will be explored. The educator’s workshop will be held at the Queens Athletic Complex and the cost is $25/per person. To join either or both programs, visit www.stangreensponcenter.org or contact Judy LaPietra, LaPietraj@queens. edu.