Repair the World: Holocaust & Human Rights Education issue 3

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THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL CRT AND CONTEMPORARY ANTISEMITISM

Holocaust Survivor Spotlight: Leon Schagrin

Unlearning to Learn: Nuremberg Laws /Nuremberg Ethics Code

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Repair the World: the Eugenics Edition

Table of Contents Letter from the Editor pg. 3 High Holidays 2021 pg. 6 Apfelkuchen Recipe pg . 7 The Frankfurt School: a brief history. pg. 10 CRT's origins, philosophy, and practice pg. 17 Survivor Spotlight: Leon Schagrin pg. 24 Stoking Hatred of Israel in Public Schools by Richard Cravatts pg. 28 Featured Story: Eugenics pg. 39 Un-Learning to Learn: The Nuremberg Laws & the 1947 Nuremberg Code of Ethics pg. 51 Creating community in the classroom pg. 62

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s e t a R p u Gro ly Bird r a E & w o N Rates le!

On Sa

Attendees receive a Zachor Shoah Tote bag full of resources including numerous Holocaust books & posters

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Letter from the Editor Welcome Back. What a Summer it has been!

I am at a loss for words, not because I have no words but rather because I have too many. As this publication is primarily written for educators, I am focusing this issue on the long complicated history of Eugenics and the The Frankfurt School. Together these two psuedo-sciences and twisted philosophies of the early 20th century have created more harm to societies and the individuals that live in them than any other idea in human history.

As Holocaust educators we tend to start at the end, at Auschwitz. And while it is important to remember the millions murdered, it is equally important, perhaps even more important, to understand how the world became a place that so readily assisted or ignored the reality of Auschwitz.

Long before the industry of murder was perfected with its complicated labyrinth of death and labor camps, the concept of the world being divided into "Us" vs "Them" had been well established. The Nazis did not invent that notion, nor did the Italian Facisti under Mussolini, but they certainly did perfect it. Unlike centuries beforehand, in the early 20th century the "Us" vs "Them" ideology was rooted in two devastating philosophies - Marxism and Eugenics.

As Holocaust educators, we have an obligation to the victims and the survivors to tell the story of humanity's greatest tragedy with accuracy. We must tell HOW this happened. We must have the courage of our convictions to speak up about what we know to be true, regardless of who censors us or what their motives are. We must make "Never Again" a promise we fight to make a reality every day.

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It is easy to fight hate and fascism when what we are fighting against is an unpopular concept, person, or movement. It is easy to fight when celebrities eagerly celebrate you for doing it. It is easy to shout even louder when there is no opposition to what you are saying. But the challenge is in fighting for what is true even when everyone says its false; fighting for what is right even when everyone says it is wrong.

The world is currently undergoing serious changes. In almost every corner of the world significant moral and ethical concerns should be being raised about a series of events - from dozens of Catholic churches set ablaze in Canada to vaccine passports connected to your ability to purchase food in France, to human rights violations under communism in China and Cuba to a divisive psuedo-scientific philosophy gaining new life under a slightly new name right in our own backyard.

As many of you return to classrooms where you may well be confronted with topics about "culturally responsive teaching" or "systemic racism" or "critical race theory" or any number of "white privilege"options, I wanted to equip you with a comprehensive history of these ideas. Just like anything else, you always have the right to support an idea or not. You, should however, be well versed on what it is before you make that choice.

Carolina Simon EDITOR

Repair the World: the Eugenics Edition

WISHING YOU A

Shana Tovah! pg. 5

Rosh Hashana is the Jewish New Year. Combined with Yom Kippur: the day of atonement, they make the High Holidays- the two most important religious days in the Jewish calendar.

Unlike secular New Year celebrations there are no fire works or drunken festivities. Instead the High Holidays are a time for introspection, spiritual preparation and cleansing, and gathering with friends and family to give thanks to God. In this way it is more like Thanksgiving than New year's Eve in America.

So, how does this holiday connect us to the Holocaust? Unlike Pesach or Purim or Hanukah that commemorate the Jewish people escaping annihilation by some tyrannical group, the High Holidays reminds us of our mortality. It is during these days that we thank God for another year completed, atone for our sins and that of our neighbors, and ask to be inscribed in the book of life once again.

Most modern Jews find Yom Kippur to be a particularly difficult or cumbersome holiday to observe, as it requires fasting all day and attending synagogue services. Services can be modified by sending a family representative (usually the man of the house) or reading the Torah portions at home, but the fasting cannot be outsourced or modified unless one is ill, pregnant or under the age of 12.

It is precisely during these days that we are closest to our ancestors.

For thousands of years Jews have marked the passing of time in the same way, including during the Holocaust. They spent years pleading with God to be inscribed in the book of life, waking each day thanking Him for another day, another week, another year. And even as a bowl of watery soup could mean living one more day, on Yom Kippur many chose to honor God and abstain. Surely we can do the same. pg. 6

Hmmmm.....Apfelkuchen!

It is customary to eat a round Challah, apples and honey for Rosh Hashannah. My mother always made her version of an Apelkuchen or German Apple Cake.

It may well be the easiest cake to make but its oh so good!

To prepare the German apple cake, a cake dough is mixed together and the apples are cut and placed on top of the cake before being baked.

This is the fundamental difference to say a French apple cake.

The German Apple Cake, as the name indicates comes from the central European region.

To be more precise the apple cake, aka Apfelkuchen is a Bavarian German dessert AND an Austrian cake. pg. 7

prep: 20 mins cook time: 40 mins total: 1 hr Servings: 12 Ingredients 1 ½ cups all-purpose flour ½ teaspoon salt 2 teaspoons baking powder ½ cup butter, room temperature 1 cup white sugar 2 eggs, room temperature 1 teaspoon vanilla extract ¾ cup milk, room temperature For Apple Topping 3 Apples medium to large sized 1 Tablespoon Brown Sugar ½ Teaspoon Cinnamon ground

Directions Place the soft butter into a mixing bowl with the sugar. Mix and whisk the butter-sugar into a creamy consistency.

Add the Eggs and milk and vanilla extract to the mix and blend smooth.

Now add in the Salt and baking powder. Besides that throw in some of the flour.

Start to blend the mixture and continue to add in the flour, step by step, until you have used up everything.

Mix the whole content to a smooth batter.

Peel your apples, cut into slices.

Put batter into a greased &floured pan.

Layer the apple slices gently into the batter so that they lay on top.

Sprinkle the apples with the sugar and cinnamon mixture Heat up your oven to 180 Celsius/ 350 Fahrenheit.

Cook for 40 min or until center of cake is fully cooked.

Enjoy!

Best served warm with a hot cup of coffee or tea

The Frankfurt School: a brief history

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The Frankfurt School: a brief history If you are a student of psychology, sociology, economics, literature, history, pedagogy, philosophy or humanities then you have studied the Frankfurt School's theories. If you have a degree, particularly a graduate degree in the Humanities as I have, then you are a student of those theories themselves.

In recent weeks The Frankfurt School and its theory - Critical Theory- has been getting a lot of negative press, as they say. But as with any other philosophical school of thought, it is often not the school of thought itself that is the problem.

As I share a brief history of the school of Critical Theory, keep in mind that anything can, and often is distorted to suit the selfish or depraved needs of power hungry individuals. As with anything in life, we must search for Truth.

Truth with a capital "T". The 20th century saw great strides in philosophical thought, often merging with psychological theory, to produce the notion that truth and Truth are not the same. When we seek a universal essence to an idea or event we are seeking Truth.

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When we seek our nuanced understanding of that universal Truth we are seeking truth. So that our personal truth is as valid in many cases as the factual Truth.

Facts become mere details in this Truth v truth scenario.

As we seek to better understand the origins of The Frankfurt School and its significant sociopolitical implications we must put aside our own personal truths and seek a universal Truth.

The Frankfurt School (German: Frankfurter Schule) was a 20th century "salon" consisting of intellectuals, academics, and political dissidents dissatisfied with the socioeconomic systems of the 1920s in Wiemar. They spoke in large universal terms, but ultimately this truth is of extreme importance because the origin of the philosophy prevents it from actually being a universal Truth.

Poverty and political unrest in Wiemar was unique to that society, that time in history, that government.

Repair the World: the Eugenics Edition But these 20th century "philosophes" thought themselves to be the norm and not the exception. They believed their truth was in fact Truth. In their waxing poetic they took from Freudian, Marxist and Hegelian premises of idealist philosophy and applied the methods of antipositivist sociology, of psychoanalysis, and of existentialism. What did utopia look like under each of these umbrellas? If religion was the opium of the masses, what was the purpose to morality, ethics, a soul? What was our reason for being here on earth and how did we achieve happiness? These were among their key concerns. But they did so from a pessimistic or better known as nihilistic perspective. That is to say that people are inherently selfish and bad, that our destiny is predetermined, and that individually we are weak and unable to achieve much.

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In particular, the Frankfurt School focused on the writings of Immanuel Kant, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and Karl Marx, of Sigmund Freud and Max Weber, and of Georg Simmel and Georg Lukács. It is impossible to fully comprehend what the school ultimately believed without having read the works of these authors.

The Frankfort School itself was a short-lived experiment in the interdisciplinary approach to human society that encompassed philosophy, Freudian psychoanalysis, sociology, and nihilistic philosophy. The school generally consisted of some 20 or so thinkers, with Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Leo Löwenthal and Friedrich Pollock as the primary contributors. As Marxists, they were enemies of the Nazis. When Hitler rose to power the Frankfurt school was closed. Many went into hiding or exile. Herbert Marcuse immigrated to the United States, became a university professor and found a new home for his inter-war period ramblings to take root.

Repair the World: the Eugenics Edition While the focus lately seems to be on what did they in fact believe, I think it equally important to understand why they believed what they believed.

Highly anti-Western society, anticapitalist and anti-establishment the original philosophers of the Frankfurt School might well have been diagnosed by Freud himself as malcontents having had too strong or absent a father figure and an over-indulging mother. For the very things they resented they inherently represented. They themselves were culturally part of Western culture, part of the new middle class, and among the rising cultural elite of the university system, yet they could not allow themselves to see past Germany's history of classism, antisemitism, and strong belief in established hierarchy/systems. In spite of the fact that they overcame these obstacles and were part of an emerging new social structure, they focused on what had been and not what was happening.

For a group of philosophers dedicated to understanding how people and society could become utopian they certainly wallowed in the depths of human failure.

Lastly, they saw the German systems as universal. One could argue that this itself made them quintessentially Germanic as throughout history, German culture has tended to do the same and ultimately was part of the very principles they claimed to be against (Pan-Germanism).

It was through this universality of their personal experience that they developed the now standard interdisciplinary lens they used. In today's university system, the term interdisciplinary has almost entirely been replaced with intersectionality.

Interdisciplinary allows for the study of both the independent subject and its connection to other subjects while intersectionality is highly miopic focusing entirely on the one point where a variety of roads (subjects) meet.

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Repair the World: the Eugenics Edition As a student of the Humanities with an interdisciplinary degree, I value the idea that there are aspects to human history, human society and structures that do in fact co-mingle. A writer does not write his masterpieces in a vacum, the world around him influenced him, inspired him as his work will do to a new generation influenced and inspired by yet a new social reality. The same is true of all artists. Jorge Luis Borges said "Nothing is original". This is precisely what he meant. And, yes we can and should look at how different aspects of the Humanities have been influenced and influenced such, but that is a far cry from what the Frankfurt School has become.

Primarily the work of Herbert Marcuse, as a renowned professor, author, and mentor the original works of the Frankfurt School have taken a very serious left turn (pun intended). And yet, if one applies the original intention of this philosophy to Marcuse's work post 1940, we see how yet again it is a personal experience pushed as universal.

Marcuse fled Nazi Germany as both a communist and a Jew. From 1943 to 1950, Marcuse worked in US government service for the Office of Strategic Services (predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency) where he criticized the ideology of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in the book Soviet Marxism: A Critical Analysis (1958). He did not oppose Marxism, just how it was implemented in Soviet Russia. His was the typical argument that Marxism is not flawed, it is simply never properly enforced or implemented. In the 1960s and the 1970s he became known as the preeminent theorist of the New Left (still in place today) and the student movements of West Germany, France, and the United States. He began his university teaching career in 1952 as a political theorist, first at Columbia University, then at Harvard University. Marcuse worked at Brandeis University from 1954 to 1965, then at the University of California San Diego from 1965 to 1970. During his time as professor he influenced and mentored many people who became prominent radical figures in US history. pg. 14

Repair the World: the Eugenics Edition "While the Frankfurt School was neo-Marxist, many of its adherents were less interested in economics and redistribution of wealth than in remaking and transforming society through attitudinal and cultural change. They incorporated Marxist class theory into sociology and psychology while also assimilating Freud’s theories on sexuality. Thus, Marx’s theory of the dialectic of perpetual conflict was joined together with Freud’s neurotic ideas, creating a sort of Freudian-Marxism. Their stated goal was a total transformation of society by breaking down traditional norms and institutions such as monogamous relations and the traditional family. This was to be accomplished by promoting and legitimizing unhinged sexual permissiveness with no cultural or religious restraint." -The Quiet Revolution.

Marcuse like his American Counterpart - Saul Alinsky, wrote but more importantly mentored people whose names we now consider part of the Left's leadership or among notorious Leftist intellectuals- Angela Davis (Black Panthers), Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Abbie Hoffman, among so many others who are "ordinary" college professors. What is most interesting about this otherwise motley crew, and I believe goes to the core of the concerns over The Frankfurt School, is how they all espouse a theory of inclusion and non-violence, but in practicality do not live up to that even in their personal lives. Like Marcuse and the other founding philosphers of 1929, these new social philosophers of the 1960s to 1990s are all members of the very social and cultural classes they criticize, engaging often times in physically violent forms of canceling the established norms in spite of preaching anti-violence.

In essence, the Frankfurt School has given society, like any other philosophy, something to think about, but something we should actually act on.

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The Postmodernist origins of CRT and its philosophy and practice in America

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What is Post-modernism and how is it related to the contemporary concept of Critical Race Theory (CRT)?

Post-modernism is a literary, philosophical, and artistic movement that can also be studied from a historical lens. It is both a movement and a critique or analytical approach. Highly influenced by the events of the early 20th century and its modernist perspectives, Postmodernism is an affront; a counter-argument to modernism itself.

Modernism was a late 19th century early 20th century philosophical and aesthetic movement essentially based on a utopian vision of human life and society and a belief in progress, or moving forward. Modernist ideals pervaded art, architecture, literature, religious faith, philosophy, social organization, activities of daily life, and even the sciences.

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We see modernism is the architectural and philosophical preferences of the early 20th century, including early writings of The Frankfurt school, the Eugenics movement, the rise of Social Democrats and Progressive politics as well as Communism and Nazism.

Modernist art and literature focused on the individual as well as the absurd as they sought to break free of traditional forms of expression. Under Nazism and Communism, it takes on a propagandist tone.

Although Modernism begins well before World War I and survives the tragedy of that war, it does not go beyond the 1940s.

With the end of World War II and the atrocities of the Holocaust made clear to the world, who could possibly advocate for the same idealistic utopian dream that had led down that road?

Instead the young creative and intellectual minds of the late 1940s through the end of the 20th century were hopelessly disillusioned with humanity as a whole and rejected the idea that there was any universal Truth and generally rejected even the greatest of universal Truths the existence of God. It is this depressive pessimistic view of life and humanity that sees Herbert Marcuse of the former Frankfurt School re-emerge as a college professor of the Neo-Marxist philosophy

Why not? pg. 19

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and social criticism referred to as Critical Theory. His students took his ideas and adapted them, as he had advocated, into a variety of social possibilities from race to gender to economics and more. This new form of Critical Theory emerges as a new theory, Critical Race Theory, in the 1960s primarily in Ivy League Law Schools. By the 1990s the idea of approaching intellectual thought from a critical/analytical lens had become part of the vernacular in all academic circles on university campuses and by the early 2000s was the primary component to all schools of education, sociology and psychology. So that every university student was not only aware and able, but well schooled in the practice of seeing society from a multilens critical approach. Nothing was sacred, not even children's bedtime stories. Everything was sinister and not what "they" told you it was. Scooby Doo cartoons were analyzed for their hidden stereotypes as were Tom & Jerry Cartoons. This was the pastime of the "grunge era" university student. These same students entered society with a healthy mix of their parents' ambition and grandparents' idealism and quickly replaced the CEOs and university faculty.

Well meaning as these GenXers and remaining Boomers may have been, their push for a never ending criticism of humanity has left an entire generation without hope, without commonality beyond dissatisfaction and anger, and without any coping skills for their increasing anger towards healthy social interactions that, of course, require people to see beyond the superficial or the perceived.

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Today there is a battle, perhaps even a war, an intellectual war, taking place within every institution in America. The war is about CRT. One group sees it as the answer to all our problems - if we just attack every fiber; every nuanced aspect of human development and society then we can start over, fresh, free of the mistakes and sins and lack of evolution of the past. The other side sees CRT and its quest to destroy everything humanity has ever created, needed, or believed in as a fool's errand that will, in the end, burn down the whole forest to chop down one dead tree.

Critical Race Theory seeks to do just that. Many claim it is Fascist or Nazi as it seeks to divide based on racial lines. This is not inaccurate.

Born out of the ashes of human destruction still smoldering with the heat of human idealism and yearning for utopia, CRT is its own form of man's inhumanity towards man.

There are many stories across America of teachers coming forward telling of how these CRT policies are being implemented in public, and even private, schools both k12 and university level. Some states like Florida have banned its use or direct teaching, recognizing that it is an antisemitic, anti-capitalist, racist ideology. But parents and teachers should be aware that just as previous ideologies found their way into the vernacular so too can CRT. CRT, for example can be found as Culturally Responsive Teaching and Social Emotional Learning, Social Justice, Re-imagined education, as well as anti-racist frameworks to name a few. pg. 21

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It is often touted as the response to revisionist history, and claims to be the voice for the historically voiceless.

To be perfectly fair, the superficial ideals of CRT are not in and of themselves a problem. It is true that historically there have been any number of social infractions against a variety of people. It is also true that we have a tendency to teach the story of humanity through very myopic eyes and in a significantly in-cohesive manner (a large part for why I wrote my Holocaust and Human Rights textbook- Beyond Auschwitz: Holocaust & Human Rights Education for the 21st century). However, the underlying intention behind CRT is the catalyst for the problem. As with every failed social experiment of the modernist age, so too the postmodernists fail to understand that a desire to seek perfection is their greatest downfall. Like the Modernists, postmodernists don't seek the glory of God or the approval of God or even the company of God in their choices. They don't consider their souls at all to be part of the equation. That would be banal and backward and not modern at all. Therefore, they don't acknowledge the existence or even the possible existence of God. God is a universal Truth, and there is only room for nuanced personal truth in the modern and postmodern world. In a world with no room for God how can we expect for their to be room for goodness and love? There is only division and derision.

We have seen how these ideologies end before. Do we really need to see it again? pg. 22

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Survivor Spotlight: Leon Schagrin

This is Leon Schagrin, Thanksgiving 2020 with my husband and I. I had the pleasure of meeting Leon through a mutual friend and fellow Holocaust educator, Ivy Schamis.

Leon is the sole survivor of his family.

His wife Betty (of Blessed Memory) was one of Schindler's Jews. Leon's story is remarkable. As a 14 year old boy, he saw his entire family (parents, all his siblings, grandparents, extended family and township) murdered in one day. He survived, like so many others, by the grace of God.

My favorite anecdote of Leon's from the Holocaust is from the day the Nazis killed everyone in his town. He was in a line, a Nazi came up to him unable to believe this young blonde blue eyed boy wasn't Aryan and asked Leon if he was a Jew. Leon responded "I don't know you will have to ask my mother". The Nazi quickly asked where is your mother?

To which 14 year old Leon responded "over there, you just killed her". pg. 24

Repair the World: the Eugenics Edition To me, this story embodies Leon's spirit of survival. I try and imagine my 14 year old nephew in the same position. Would he have had the courage to be so flippant in the face of the very people that just left him orphaned in a moments notice?

Leon was saved because of his looks and his talents. He was young and strong and bigger than expected for a 14 year old boy, and he knew how to work with horses, so he became the Horse Adjutant. His job was originally to collect the dead in his carriage and take them to the ditch to be buried. Among the dead were his family members. Any illusions of his family surviving were shattered at this moment.

Later, his job became that of personal chauffeur to the Nazi commandant. In a strange way this was a good job - he had slightly more food than others, had slightly better clothes, and slept with the horse, so at least it was warm.

But this did not last and Leon found himself in Auschwitz and later at Buna. It was here that he discovered that one distant cousin did survive along with him at least this far.

Leon told me that when the Russians liberated Auschwitz, they simply opened the gates and said go you are free and asked which way to Berlin. The Allies were in a hurry not just to end the war but in a race to see which one would claim absolute victory by taking Berlin.

Leon hitched a ride with some Russians closer to his town. He walked for another few days hoping to find someone from his family. He found his neighbor, a Christian, who had a son Leon's age. They washed him, scrubbing the inch long lice off his back with a horse brush, and giving him some new clothes and food. Leon was no longer a boy. He was 18 and completely alone in the world.

Leon lived in a DP camp until he was able to move to Israel.

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Repair the World: the Eugenics Edition He met and married Betty after meeting her in Israel many years later. Together they lived in New York until they retired and moved to Sunrise Florida. They had no children. His memoir: The Horse Adjutant: a boy's life in the Nazi Holocaust is available via amazon.

I absolutely love spending time with Leon. He is funny and insightful, and very charming.

And I love that he lets me see him as more than a Holocaust survivor. So often, Holocaust educators only see survivors as that, Holocaust survivors, negating they had a life post Holocaust just as much a part of their humanity as their trauma.

Leon loves animals, music (his favorite song is Nancy Sinatra's These Boots Are Made For Walking), Casino slot machines, Maneshewitz, Pierogi, brisket, and a good egg salad. He has candles lit continuously for his departed wife and for his family. He cries every August the entire month mourning the murder of his town and is brought back to life when children call him.

Sadly, he is almost entirely blind these days, but is otherwise in great health.

October 30th will be Leon's 95 birthday! I have promised him a big birthday bash when he turns 100. I will be sending, as usual, a birthday treat this year.

If you would like to help contribute to Leon's birthday treat let me know via email. If you would like to have your name added to his birthday card please send that via email as well. zachorshoah@gmail.com

Leon on his 94th birthday pg. 26

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Stoking Hatred of Israel in Public Schools

by Richard L . Cravatts & Originally published August 28 2021 in The Times of Isreal https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/stoking-hatred-of-israel-in-publicschools/

Thank you Richard for your permission to share your article among our humble pages.

May our collective work raise awareness about the many insidious forms of contemporary Antisemitism. pg. 28

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Stoking Hatred of Israel in Public Schools

by Richard L. Cravatts While public school teachers and their unions demonstrated a shocking obstinacy during the ongoing pandemic regarding opening up of schools to inperson learning for America’s students, they seemed to have found the energy at the same time to continue their activism and advocacy for teaching children to hate themselves because of the color of their skin, distrust law enforcement, blame white supremacy for systemic racism and the victimhood of marginalized people of color, identify their gender fluidity, and a bucket full of other progressive notions that animate what now currently passes for public education.

While a covert campaign to make critical race theory part and parcel of school curricula has been the most visible part of the activist educators’ efforts to corrupt teaching of America’s children, not far behind has been a troubling, pernicious campaign to demonize Israel and Zionism and to make the Palestinian cause the centerpiece of a campaign to slander the Jewish state and indoctrinate students with lies, contortions of history and fact, and outright propaganda that perpetuates Palestinianism as part of the cognitive war against Israel.

In May, as one troubling example, soon after Israel had initiated its campaign to suppress Hamas’s rocket fire from Gaza during an 11-day conflict, the 6200member United Educators of San Francisco (UESF) teacher’s union passed a grotesque “Resolution in Solidarity with the Palestinian People” which, in addition to calling on the Biden administration to end all aid to Israel, denounced Israel’s alleged “forced displacement and home demolitions” of Palestinian Arabs in Jerusalem and its imposition of “a regime of legalized racial discrimination.” The resolution concluded by committing its membership to sign on with the antiSemitic BDS campaign itself, stating “that UESF endorse the international campaign for boycotts, divestment, and sanctions against apartheid in Israel,” thereby becoming the first K-12 teachers’ union in the United States to endorse the BDS movement. pg. 29

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Not to be outdone by its union brethren further north, chapter chairs of the United Teachers Los Angeles, an affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers and the second largest teacher’s union in the country, also voted overwhelmingly in May in support of a statement, almost identical to the San Francisco version, that expressed its “solidarity with the Palestinian people and call for Israel to end bombardment of Gaza and stop displacement at Sheikh Jarrah . . , [called] on the administration of U.S. President Joe Biden to stop aid to Israel [and endorsed] the international campaign for boycotts, divestment, and sanctions against apartheid in Israel.”

At its annual meeting this summer, though the measures were defeated, the 13million member National Education Association (NEA) voted on two anti-Israel resolutions, New Business Item 29, which claimed that “The Arab population of Palestine has again risen up in a heroic struggle against military repression and ‘ethnic cleansing’ by the Israeli state and extreme nationalist forces in Israeli society” and New Business Item 51, which urged members to “recognize the existence and sovereignty of Palestine and Palestinian children and families and their human right to access a quality education and live freely as outlined in United Nations Declaration of Human Rights”—even committing the union to spend over $70,000, of all causes on earth, to promote programmatic activities in support of the Palestinian cause.

California teachers have also been embroiled in a contentious five-year process by which the state created its ethnic studies curriculum to serve as a way of indoctrinating students on aspects of critical race theory and how, allegedly, systems of oppression serve to maintain a white power structure over oppressed people of color. Jewish critics of the proposed curriculum, and there have been many of them (with some 100,000 public comments being submitted during the drafting of different versions of the curriculum) were particularly alarmed that the Jewish experience was ignored in the initial drafts and that rather than being presented as an oppressed minority themselves, Jews were said to enjoy white privilege and, therefore, part of the white hierarchy which has social, economic, and political control over people of color. pg. 30

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As it happens, the controversial first draft of California’s Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum was drafted by activists who created an educational organization called the Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum Institute (LESMC), a California-based educational consulting group for K-12 schools. Prominent on its website (revealed by the AMCHA Initiative, a campus anti-Semitism watchdog group) is a section named “Preparing to Teach Palestine: A Toolkit,” which, unsurprisingly, is replete with anti-Israel slanders, lies, and contortions of history and fact—part of a continuing campaign to prepare teachers to indoctrinate students on the predations of Israel, Zionism, and, by extension, Jews.

“In California,” the organization’s toolkit page proclaimed defensively, “attacks by Zionist and other right-wing organizations on the inclusion of Arab American studies—and specifically Palestine—in the CA Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum (ESMC) have shone a spotlight on Palestine and importance of including it in ethnic studies curriculum.” Moreover, because critics of pro-Palestinian rhetoric and behavior regularly point to the sometimes-blatant anti-Semitism just under the surface of anti-Israel activism, the organization tried to push back against such charges, absolving them of any responsibility for their bigotry. “The vicious attacks that equate any mention of Palestine with antisemitism,” they claimed, “have pushed teachers, unions, and districts to understand that honest discussion of Israel’s role in the oppression of Palestinians is not antisemitism.”

Not only are they innocent of hatred against Jews, but it is the Zionists themselves who are oppressive. How so? According to LESMC, “. . . Zionists are organizing to police curriculum on Palestine. They often try to isolate and attack individual teachers to scare other educators away.”

The resources offered to teachers in these pages are animated with the leftist, radical language of progressivism, with parts of the “liberated curriculum” including the typical slanders against Israel which describe it as a rapacious colonial oppressor of an innocent indigenous people, and the belief that Zionism is a racist ideology with a foundational lust for as much Arab land as it can illegally attain, completely divorced from anything to do with Judaism itself.

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And, using the language and ideology of intersectionality—the commonality of victimhood among oppressed people everywhere—the toolkit suggested that teachers “Integrate Palestine into your curriculum so it’s not a ‘multicultural addon’ but an illuminating comparison.” And to help students draw comparisons between suffering close to home and that alleged despair of the Palestinians at the hands of Israel, the resource suggested that teachers use as examples the “impact of continuing colonial control on water resources at the US/Mexico border and in Gaza, using statistics to look at forced removals in your city and East Jerusalem, impact of ideology comparing Manifest Destiny to the Promised Land, efforts to bury history and the struggles to resurface those histories,” all of which pointing to the perfidy and malignant nature of the Jewish state.

In August, Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-N.Y.) sent a letter to U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona, New York Education Commissioner Betty A. Rosa, and New York City Department of Education Chancellor Meisha Porter in which he described his alarm at a statement issued on July 11th by a pro-Palestinian teacher’s group, New York City Educators for Palestine. Zeldin correctly noted that the letter accused Israel of “terrorism, ethnic cleansing and other talking points all too commonly used to fuel violent attacks on and discrimination against Jews” and that if teachers recklessly use such anti-Israel rhetoric in schools it “will only escalate and embolden anti-Semitic attacks and vitriol throughout our country.”

Parroting the dozens and dozens of virtue-signaling statements that flowed out of universities and associations after the latest Gaza offensive, the NYCEP statement, of course, ignored completely the 3200 rockets fired by Hamas into Israel for the sole purpose of murdering Jews and bemoaned the precarious state of the Arab Palestinians. “As we teach our students to understand the world and seek respect and justice for all people,” the statement read, apparently not including Jews in that group of people, “we have no choice but to speak out against the injustice being committed against the Palestinian people.”

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Predicting that they might be asked why, of all nations on earth, they had decided to condemn the Middle East’s only democracy, the statement claimed that Israel is solely responsible for the conflict, that “We are obligated to respond to the injustice wreaked on historic Palestine. The rights and dignity of Palestinians are equivalent to that of all humanity.”

It is one thing for teachers to commit to a cause they believe in personally; it is another thing, however, when they seek to indoctrinate their students with a onesided, biased ideology aimed at slandering and libeling Israel, and particularly when that teaching includes falsehoods, distortions, and no historical context.

For example, the statement included the mendacious claim that “Palestinian land has been colonized for over seven decades,” that is, for the entire period of Israel’s existence. Any group that suggests that Israel-proper is a colony built on Palestinian land is recklessly and delusionally ignoring history and fact.

It is inexcusable that educators in America’s public schools have decided to become pro-Palestinian activists; that they have decided it is appropriate and productive to bring that activism to the classroom and include false history and contortions of fact in school curricula; that the Palestinians are perennial guiltless victims of Israel’s oppression; that Israelis—and by extension, Jews—have become part of white supremacy and colonial oppression; and that educators have decided it is critical to push this propaganda and bigotry down the throats of impressionable students and teach it as fact.

The naked anti-Semitism lurking behind the statement showed itself when these Israel-hating educators “also call on unionized educators to have their unions endorse BDS, a movement that aims to put non-violent pressure to end the Israeli regime of settler colonialism, apartheid and occupation over the Palestinian people.”

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Even more disgusting is the suggestion in the statement that aid to Israel should cease and that the aid is an example of Jews depriving New Yorkers of funds that might be spent domestically. “Over $3.8 billion yearly of taxpayer money funds the purchase of weapons by the Israeli military,” the statement read. “New York City alone gives almost $145 million dollars [sic] a year to the Israeli military . . . . This is money taken from the families of New York City by a nuclear power with one of the most technologically advanced militaries in the world. We simply cannot be silent while money for our families and children here go instead to terrorizing families and children abroad,” in other words, Jews are taking money from New Yorkers to randomly terrorize “families and children” without justification. And any necessity for Israel defending itself from the many foes who wish it harm is simply ignored, as if the military aid the U.S. gives Israel every year is not based on the fact that homicidal Arab aggression against Israel has been a fact of life since the Jewish state’s birth.

Apparently, too, these woke educators have no issue with the billions of U.S. aid given annually to such countries as Afghanistan, Pakistan, Egypt, and Jordan, countries which are far less friendly to the United States and not reliable strategic and diplomatic partners (not to mention the fact that almost all U.S. aid to Israel is spent on American military equipment).

The American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) periodically conducts surveys to assess college graduates’ knowledge of American history. The results are dismal. “Over one-third of the college graduates surveyed,” ACTA found, “could not place the American Civil War in its correct 20-year time frame.”

Moreover, almost “half of the college graduates could not identify correctly the term lengths of U.S. senators and representatives . . . Nearly half of respondents failed to identify the correct term lengths for the houses of Congress,” and, suggesting at least some pop culture awareness, “Ten percent thought that Judith Sheindlin —‘Judge Judy’—is on the Supreme Court.”

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Public schools are clearly failing in their effort to educate children in the basic facts of history, not to mention the necessary math and writing skills they will use later in their lives. So while test scores continue to fall and achievement in American schools compares poorly to that in other countries, teachers who are failing in their basic duties have nevertheless become social activists, progressives with a radical agenda to sexualize children, indoctrinate students about supposed systemic racism and white supremacy, scare students into mistrusting purportedly racist law enforcement, and, as part of the notion of intersectionality, elevate the Palestinian cause and lying to children to make them believe that Jews and Israelis are the sole oppressors in the Middle East, malign forces that deprive an indigenous people of the human and civil rights and whose self-determination, in the form of Zionism, should be discredited and crushed and the Jewish state destroyed.

Even if this campaign were not based on lies, slanders, distortion, and falsehoods, it is not the role of public-school educators—who are neither subject experts nor unbiased observers—to propagate this corrosive and malignant ideology.

About the Author Richard L. Cravatts, PhD, President Emeritus of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East (SPME) and a Freedom Center Journalism Fellow in Academic Free Speech, is the author of Dispatches From the Campus War Against Israel & Jews and Genocidal Liberalism: The University's Jihad Against Israel & Jews.

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Featured Story: Eugenics

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Repair the World: the Eugenics Edition Eugenics is understood by most people to be a pseudoscience, that is a fake science; one not rooted in anything remotely factual. But Eugenics is actually, like so many other things from the late 19th and early 20th century, so much more complex than our contemporary definitions allow them to be. So lets take a closer, more honest, look at what Eugenics was and still is today; why so many people shy away from the topic even though it was one of the most popular movements in the early 20th century and central to the Nazi medical paradigm. Racism is the idea that your socially constructed category of race is superior to others based on a desire for power and control. Eugenics is the belief that your genetic make-up is superior to others, even in your racial category.

So that poor children regardless of race are all considered inferior to the genetically superior upper/ruling class.

At a time when everyone seems to be screaming : " Follow the Science" better understanding an era that was consumed by "science" seems prudent.

Brief History of Eugenics: The Late 19th century saw a rise in innovation in a variety of fields related to or connected to scientific discoveries, a second wave of the age of discovery & scientific revolution you could say.In 1859, Charles Darwin writes his now nearly universally accepted theory in his book On the Origin of Species. By 1970, his theory was accepted a fact by most of the educated population, but still some held on to other theories. By 1930, Darwin's theory of evolution, survival of the fittest i.e. natural selection, and his explanations for connections between all the life sciences were universally accepted and made the foundational basis of life science itself. It is interesting to note, that what brought about this consensus was not so much evidence bu way of the scientific method of deduction but rather the modern evolutionary synthesis: a reconciling of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution and Gregor Mendel's ideas on heredity in a joint mathematical framework.

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Repair the World: the Eugenics Edition Julian Huxley coined the term in his 1942 book, Evolution: The Modern Synthesis. So that it would seem the conclusion was decided before the experiment was concluded. In any case, and I certainly am not arguing that Darwin's theory has no merit, subsequent theories arose from this late 19c method of studying the environment, its inhabitants, and human society. Darwin's half-cousin Sir Francis Galton is to the study of Eugenics what Darwin is to the study of evolution. basing himself, in large part, on Darwin's theory of evolution and natural selection, Galton applied the concept to hereditary traits, genetics, and society to the new field of Eugenics (from Greek εὐ- 'good' and γενής 'come into being, growing'), Eugenics is therefore a set of beliefs and practices that aim to improve the genetic quality of a human population,historically by excluding people and groups judged to be inferior or promoting those judged to be superior.

The concept of "selective breeding" is as old as the Greek that inspired the term, with Plato suggesting the practice in the year 400 BCE.

But the contemporary understanding of Eugenics, and certainly its practice, emerges in the late 19c in England and quickly spreads to most of Europe and all the English speaking world.

Consequently, regardless of political affiliations, most people understood Eugenics to be a good thing and most countries adopted policies based on its principles.

This meant that most countries had policies that encouraged "fit" people to reproduce and "unfit" people not to do so. In fact, in the United States, for example, "unfit" people had to petition for a special marriage license and often, even then, were forced to undergo sterilization treatments (at times even without consent). Who was considered "unfit" The list is long and is connected to the Victorian concepts of health, therefore anyone with vision or hearing problems, anyone with physical deformities bog or small, anyone with mental health problems, addictions, living in generational poverty, with a criminal record, considered to have a low IQ, or of minority groups that were believed to represent these traits such as Irish, Black, Catholics, etc. pg. 41

Repair the World: the Eugenics Edition In fact being lazy, vagrant, hottempered, unreligious, or too religious all fell under "unfit" as well.

The most shocking or disturbing part of this history is not that it happened or that anyone espoused these thoughts. Surely, we all have wondered why some people seem to not do as well as others and how can it help or hurt society as a whole.

No, the truly disturbing part is HOW it was so readily accepted by societies across the globe to simply sterilize, even institutionalize or imprison, large portions of the population simply because they were a blight on the scenery of life. The Victorians believed that cleanliness was next to godliness and anything short of perfection was an insult to God, his creation, and frankly sinful. The Victorians clearly had a God-complex with a tinge of self-righteousness.

Unfortunately, the world may have moved past the Victorian fashion and many of their highly restrictive cultural norms, especially for women, but they did not move past the incessant desire to categorize, label, and scientifically view every aspect of life.

In fact, it only became more intense as the 20th century moved from an Edwardian era to a Modernist one. In the USA this could be seen from the opening of Battle Creek Sanitarium in 1866, closing in the early 1940s and with its famous manager still influencing Americans via Kellogg's cereals.

Eugenics in the 1920s and 1930s: The idea that some people have better genetic make up than others so dominated the popular conversation that it is a central theme of the Great American Novel: The Great Gatsby. What, you missed that part? Read it again, Daisy and all the other "old money" families see Jack as unsuitable a character to marry or even to mourn (at the end of the book) because he is not of :the same stock" as they are. In fact there is even an entire conversation specifically using the term Eugenics.

In the USA, Eugenics was very much a central component to many social changes and popular beliefs, including the rise of the second wave of The Klu Klux Klan. pg. 42

Repair the World: the Eugenics Edition The original KKK, was created as a political response to Reconstruction Southern Democrats needs to stay politically "clean" in the post Civil War South, but still held strong to the preCivil War racial beliefs that had caused them to fight to maintain slavery as an economic institution to begin with. That was the original racism - a power driven system. But by the 1910s the old KKK had almost entirely withered away in popularity, Although Jim Crow Laws existed, they were to keep the Black communities of the South and Mid-West from succeeding. Black communities in America had everything from their Wall Street to several Millionaires Madame CJ Walker, the beauty product mogul- lived next door to Rockefeller. But by 1920 the Eugenics movement was so popular among both the ruling class and the medical community that it changed most of the American freedoms the lower classes enjoyed, even the successful Black communities.

Eugenics in America not only allowed for harsher Jim Crow Laws, but harsher punishments for violating those laws - it was no longer a question of violating a social

distinction but of potentially tainting the American bloodline itself. This attitude saw a new interest in the KKK, for a new reason. It also saw a relatively new career for womenprofessional social worker. Social Work originated in 19c England as a way to address many of the social ills feared and disdained by the Eugenics movement.

And although, social workers then and now see themselves as benevolent care givers to otherwise destitute people, their origins are less than charitable. Margret Sanger, now famous for her role in the establishment of Planned Parenthood and women's reproductive rights, she was a staunch Eugenicist, spoke at KKK rallies, and fervently believed that birth control and abortion should be readily available to the "unfit" women in society as a means to control the decline of America's make-up due to less than desirable immigrants, Blacks, and others. Her role and her beliefs are well documented, making her connection to Planned Parenthood today not only undeniable, but remarkable that pg. 43

Repair the World: the Eugenics Edition anyone would be honored to receive the Margret Sanger Award, as given out by Planned Parenthood each year. One might even argue that she was the most successful Eugenicist of them all. After all, the only aspect of Eugenics to have survived untouched, unchanged, unwavering has been the abortion component of Eugenics. But for every action their is a reaction, and the same science that brought about Eugenics and abortion is now bringing 3D ultrasound imagery, understanding of human development in the womb, and other such advances making it more and more difficult to maintain the Eugenics argument in favor of abortion without also openly admitting to the other Eugenics tenets of genetic superiority and selective breeding. This is particularly true when we look at the case of Down Syndrome babies.

In the USA, South Dakota passed a bill a couple of years ago, stating that abortions were illegal on Down Syndrome fetuses. many may have been shocked to hear that this was even something so "popular" as to warrant legislative attention.

But sadly it is. The Country of Denmark, who in the 1940s so courageously and successfully stood up to Nazism's Eugenics paradigm and saved all their Jews, today boasts having statistically eradicated Down Syndrome from their country. What does this even mean. They have less than 10 children born with Down Syndrome per year.

And how did they achieve that?

Simply by having a socialized medical system that makes sure that government doctors so heavily persuade expectant mothers as to abort these "future burdens of society". Whatever contemporary arguments there may be for or against abortion laws, there is no denying the origins of practice or its continued admiration for those ideological roots among the leaders of that movement.

Eugenics and the Greater Good: Eugenics is a form of genetic science that does not merely look at individual DNA, but rather is interested in how your individual genetics affects society as a whole. pg. 44

Repair the World: the Eugenics Edition In other words, they seek the greater good. Those two words - Greater Good- have caused more harm to people everywhere than any other words in any language at any point in history.

Under the guise of genuine concern for all members of society - the greater good concept- ultimately destroys everyone's standing and rights.

It is under the greater good concept that both Nazism and Communism flourished.

Eugenics and Nazism: Eugenics in Nazi Germany thrived under the new Nazi medical paradigm. It may not even be fair to attribute the shift to Nazism, as Eugenics pre-dates Nazism.

Nonetheless, Eugenics was able to go to greater lengths than in any other society under the Nazi flag. It is not at all surprising to know, given the history of Eugenics, that the first professionals to willingly and eagerly join the Nazi party, long before it was a requirement to do so, were the medical associations and individual doctors of Germany.

In their view, politics was finally listening to the science.

Under Nazism, society was not made up of individuals, rather it was made up of the Volk - the German people.

Therefore the greater good was always regarding the Volk. Each individual was considered a cell, much like the human body is made up of cells, so too Germay's Volk (body collective- was made up of individual cells.

And as with the cells of the body, sometimes there are cells that become sick or rogue and may even become cancerous, and in an effort to save the body, these cells must be eradicated. So too with the body collective of the Volk - individual cells (or people) who are cancerous to the Volk must be eradicated for the greater good. And this is how a society that gave birth to great musicians and philosophers, also shifted their moral understanding of good vs evil- right vs wrong. It was no longer wrong, sinful, or evil to discriminate, torture, or kill another human being if it was in the interest of the greater good. pg. 45

Repair the World: the Eugenics Edition The specific legal codification of Eugenics in Nazi Germany, much like the American version of the codification of both Jim Crow and Eugenics, was a collaboration between the medical community, legal community, and ruling class. In Germany it fell under the Nuremberg Laws. These laws were intricate and specific not only as to who was considered Aryan (and Aryan meant German), but also what should happen to those that were not.

Eugenics and the 21st century: So what does all this mean to people living in the 21st century? Sadly, Eugenics did not disappear, not even a little bit. The medical community may not have learned much of a lesson at all really. Having used Auschwitz as a prime destination for human experimentation free from all moral, ethical, and legal restraints, the medical community was loathe to let the few discoveries made go to waste. In fact, the same callous attitude was imported to the United States and used in Eugenics style experiments on African Americans in the Tuskegee Project.

Much of what we call medical advancements today are really direct results of the Eugenics movement and when we look at Eugenics head on we can clearly see its imprint on much of modern medicine - from DNA testing to vaccines, there is not much Eugenics has not infiltrated.

The desire to create a perfect society still permeates the many in the medical community and the social sciencesAnd the reasons for it really don't matter. Whether the motivation is power and control or a desire to alleviate suffering and pain, either way it is tantamount to playing God. So why do so few Holocaust educators teach about Eugenics: I cannot say without a doubt why this is. However, if you intend to be a Holocaust educator, much less a good one, you must teach about the full history of what took place and why. And that includes Eugenics.

Teaching about the Holocaust is not a means to teach kids "how to be good people" or a class to help "the unruly student become respectful".

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Repair the World: the Eugenics Edition It is a legitimate historically accurate scholarly course. For the past 25 years, the teaching of this subject to high school students, in particular, has been approached through a sociological "feel-good" lens of changing behaviors and attitudes. But in doing so we have failed to teach the universal Truth of the history, skipping the parts that do not suit the prescribed message. As made clear with the unfolding of Eugenics history - America in the 21st century does not have a racism problem. It has a Eugenics problem. And if we are not careful, we could have a Facism problem as a result of ignoring the Eugenics.

As witnesses to the worst of human cruelty we must do better than that.

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Un-learning to Learn: Nuremberg Laws & Nuremberg Ethics Code: one city two approaches to humanity

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The city of Nuremberg , located in the Bavarian region of Germany, has been the seat of the Nuremberg Nazi Rallies commemorating the Nazi fabricated triumph of the Beer Hall Putsch, the location for the Nuremberg Race Laws under Nazism, the location for the Nuremberg Trials by the Allies post-WWII, and the location for the Nuremberg Code of Ethics. With so many things taking place there, all historically significant, it becomes very important to use the full names of each in an effort to not distort history.

The city of Nuremberg was an important location for the Nazis and the Allies, thus lending its name to two significant yet very different sets of legal code - The Nuremberg Laws & The Nuremberg Code of Ethics

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Repair the World: the Eugenics Edition Nuremberg, Nuremberg Rallies and post WWII Nuremberg: the city was in the center of the German Reich and the location as part of Bavaria made it a place highly sympathetic to Nazism, as Munich (also in Bavaria) had been the "birth place" of Nazism. Bavaria also happens to be the "birth place" of many historically and culturally relevant figures to Germany, including the Brothers Grimm as well as the location of some of the more intense antisemitic incidents in German history. As a result, the Nazis could rely on the well-organized local branch of the party and the Nuremberg police were sympathetic to Nazi events. Therefore, as of 1927 Nuremberg was the official location for the annual Nazi rally.

Later, the location was justified by the Nazi Party by putting it into the tradition of the Imperial Diet of the Holy Roman Empire (under Charlemagne), considered the First Reich. After 1933, the rallies took place near the time of the Autumnal equinox, under the title of "The German people's National Party days" , which was intended to symbolize the solidarity between the German people and the Nazi Party. This point was further emphasized by the yearly growing number of participants, which finally reached over half a million from all sections of the party, the army, and the state.

In addition to the rally, the event included themes, propaganda films, official books, and a lot of pomp and circumstance to mark the occasion as a near religious experience.

After WWII ended, the Allies chose Nuremberg as the location for the trials that needed to take place again for its centralized location and because it was the only major city with its court house still standing. At the conclusion of the trials, it was decided that among the offenses committed by the political and military leadership, the medical community had engaged in atrocious acts violating the trust and rights of the patient. Therefore, in that same place, an international code of ethics was devised. We will look at both the Eugenics based laws and the Human Rights based code. pg. 53

Repair the World: the Eugenics Edition "Following the appointment of Adolf Hitler as German chancellor on January 30, 1933, the Nazi state (also referred to as the Third Reich) quickly became a regime in which citizens had no guaranteed basic rights. The Nazi rise to power brought an end to the Wiemar Republic, the German parliamentary democracy established after World War I. In 1933, the regime established the first concentration camps, imprisoning its political opponents, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and others classified as “dangerous.” Extensive propaganda was used to spread the Nazi Party’s racist goals and ideals. During the first six years of Hitler’s dictatorship, German Jews felt the effects of more than 400 decrees and regulations that restricted all aspects of their public and private lives". -The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum We will look at just two of those laws.

Nuremberg Race Laws: On September 15, 1935 just two years after Hitler was appointed Chancellor and one year after he declared himself supreme leader, The Nazi Reichstag declared two new laws: The Reich Citizenship Law The Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor As discussed in the article regarding Eugenics, the Nazis believed in Eugenics as did the majority of the medical community of Germany. Part of believing in Eugenics as a medical professional meant that you saw your role as doctor differently than it may have been before. Primarily this meant that you treated the patient not the disease. So that in a pre-Eugenics, pre-Nazi medical environment, a patient may have had a pernicious cough. You, the doctor would have treated the cough with a prescription and called it a day- the "take two aspirin and call me in the morning" attitude. In the Eugenics or Nazi medical environment that same patient with the same cough would have been treated by the doctor via a series of lifestyle questions and along with the prescription for the cough itself would be a lifestyle change requirement. The doctor would even refuse further treatment if the lifestyle requirements were not met. pg. 54

Repair the World: the Eugenics Edition Jewish doctors in general rejected this form of medicine, claiming it went well beyond their role as doctors. In the pre-Nazi era of Eugenics (1920s) this set the Jewish doctors of Germany apart from non-Jewish doctors and created animosity in the field. Doctors who prescribed to Eugenics saw this as not only an affront to their form of medical practice, but also as a sign that Judaism affected the health of Germany. When given the opportunity to silence their opponents and elevate Eugenics on a national forum, these power hungry doctors were happy to help establish laws that undermined Jews in every way.

It is important to understand that not everyone involved in Nazism was an antisemite, at least not in the way Hitler and his cabinet were.

That is to say that many high ranking and average Nazis took advantage of the extreme Antisemitism of the Nazi leadership to push their own agendas, be it Eugenics or personal affronts to specific Jewish neighbors or colleagues. pg. 55

The Reich Citizenship Law: True to his word from campaign speeches and his writings, Hitler had promised to make German citizenry only for those of German bloodline.

This law did just that. It looked at your ancestry and provided German citizenship status to those who were Germanic (from Germany or German speaking regions of Europe such as Austria and the Sudetenland). Everyone else was denied full citizenship, if any at all.

This concept in particular, is difficult for most American students to grasp because we are a country of immigrants.

This is why I have a section of my textbook dedicated to explaining the different cultures of Europe, their history and how that affects them culturally to this day. Nazis may have made it part of their legal code to deny "outsiders" full rights, but it is part of European culture to categorize in this manner.

Repair the World: the Eugenics Edition So that throughout Europe, immigrants, even in the 21st century, have a very hard time being fully accepted as German or French or English, etc. This has caused many upheavals as of late.

In 1935 the Nazis believed they had the answer to the problem. Of course they did not. The problem is in their thinking not their genetics.

Ultimately, this is what sets the United States of America apart from Europe most of all. The USA is not a nation built on any ancestral markers such as culture or heritage or religion or ethnicity. It is a nation built on an ideal (Life-LibertyPursuit of Happiness), so that anyone who shares in that ideal is fully American. This was true during the Revolutionary War as people from a variety of places joined the fight and it is still true today. While in Europe the ethnic struggles between the French, English, German, Balkans, etc were true in the Middle Ages and remain true today in spite of many advances to attempt to remove such barriers.

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The Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor: Once the law for German citizenship was established as only for people of Germanic heritage, then a "protection" of that heritage's purity had to be established. Again, under the umbrella of Eugenics this made perfect sense to both the Nazis and the doctors of Germany.

This law prohibited "race-mixing" through interracial marriages or intersexual relations. So that it was not just the commitment to form a union with someone outside your race that was illegal, but the casual sexual encounter as well.

This law was not that different from the US version of Eugenics, that also did not allow intermarriages among people classified as White or Black or from many of the Jim Crow Laws aimed at keeping white and black people socially segregated for the benefit of "preserving the integrity and purity of the white race", further demonstrating how wide-spread the beliefs in Eugenics actually were in the early 20th century.

Repair the World: the Eugenics Edition The Laws that surrounded the ideas of racial purity were highly nuanced and not always easy to remember or follow. The chart below was created to help medical professionals and others to understand everyone's status. *notice that only those with 1/8 Jewish ancestry or non-German ancestry are able to consider themselves German alongside those of full German ancestry.

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Repair the World: the Eugenics Edition If the pre-WWII world was consumed by Eugenics and the promise of a Utopian society, the Post-WWII world has opened the door to the Human Rights era. The first step into the Human Rights Era was the Doctor's Trial at Nuremberg which gave way at its conclusion to the Nuremberg Code of Medical Ethics or the Nuremberg Code of Ethics as it is often referred to.

It is important not to conflate or confuse the Nuremberg Laws with the Nuremberg Code. The former set to divide people and deny them basic rights while the latter set to elevate, unify, and provide people with their dignity, rights, and freedoms.

In recent days many people have been creating and sharing memes that clearly misunderstand the differences.

The Nuremberg Code of Medical Ethics: "The Nuremberg Code (1947) Permissible Medical Experiments The great weight of the evidence before us to effect that certain types of medical experiments on human beings, when kept within reasonably well-defined bounds, conform to the ethics of the medical profession generally. The protagonists of the practice of human experimentation justify their views on the basis that such experiments yield results for the good of society that are unprocurable by other methods or means of study. All agree, however, that certain basic principles must be observed in order to satisfy moral, ethical and legal concepts: 1. The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential. This means that the person involved should have legal capacity to give consent"; As with everything else about this point in history, we must remain vigilant to not forget so as not to repeat the atrocities of the past.

Read the literature, read the code: For more information see Nuremberg Doctor's Trial, BMJ 1996;313(7070):1445-75.

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Creating Community in the Classroom Whether its the first day of class or the last, a truly successful year depends entirely on the cohesion of the group. Your classroom transforming into a space where students are valued, seen, respected, and allowed to grow is essential.

How do you do that?

E pluribus unum The words above mean Out of Many One - they are the USA's motto and are found on our great seal among other places in government.

It reminds us that we all are different with shared values and goals.

-Make this your classroom motto this year. See how it goes!

-Create a true "safe space": a place where ALL opinions are respected.

-Introduce fun when possible. If not fun, at least levity and creativity. This is especially important in a Holocaust class. Try starting the year with a game like The Marshmallow Challenge every group gets a certain amount of marshmallows, tape, and raw spaghetti. Whoever builds a tower first wins.

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