The following announcement was provided by the Jewish Community Day School of Greater Boston:
The Jewish Community Day School of Greater Boston (JCDS) proudly invites the public to experience a unique and moving museum exhibit: Unpacking History – A Mobile Holocaust Memorial. Developed by the JCDS Class of 2025, this innovative traveling exhibit was created by teens, for teens to educate and inspire a new generation about the realities of the Holocaust.
Sponsored by the renowned educational organization Facing History and Ourselves, Unpacking History approaches Holocaust education in a thoughtful, age-appropriate way. The exhibit aims to combat rising antisemitism and Holocaust denial by empowering young people to learn, reflect, and take a stand against hate.
The exhibit features powerful storytelling, personal artifacts, and interactive elements, encouraging visitors to connect deeply with the past while considering their role in shaping a more just future.
“This isn’t just a school project,” said one student curator. “It’s our response to a world where too many people are forgetting — or even denying — what really happened. We wanted to create something that speaks directly to our generation.”
Unpacking History is currently open for private viewings for members of the press and the wider community. Appointments are required and can be made by contacting the project team at unpackinghistory@jcdsboston.org. As school is still in session, visitors without appointments may be turned away.
On Tuesday evening, May 13, we also celebrated the culmination of a year-long collaboration between 8th Grade students from JCDS and the German International School of Boston. Together, students have explored what it means to stand on opposite sides of a shared history—and the responsibility we all bear to remember the Holocaust.
A special culminating event, held for students and their families, showcased the students’ collaborative memorial projects. These thoughtful creations reflected deep learning, empathy, and a powerful commitment to remembrance and justice.
Having the Consul Generals from both Germany and Israel join students, parents, and friends from the two communities added a level of importance and urgency to this shared project. Also, survivor Elizabeth Depazo enthusiastically participated, reinforcing a message of gratitude and hope in our future leaders of tomorrow.
Join us in honoring the past — and in building a more informed, compassionate future.
Facing History and Ourselves is an excellent program and I am glad they are still around. The have great programming on the Holocaust and Armenian Genocide. I still remember many lessons. I don’t know if their curriculum has expanded but I always thought they could do a great program on African American enslavement since our form of slavery and the racist system that persists today inspired Hitler, along with the Armenian Genocide. He saw these two destructive, traumatic realities, and realized that he could possibly get away with the murder of 6 million Jewish people and 1 million others (LBGTQ, Roma, dissidents, POWs, political opponents, disabled, etc.) If there was a national education curriculum, I would include their programing. Unfortunately today too many young men are idolizing Hitler and Ayn Rand, and not Mohammed Ali or Julia Child. It is not cool. We have to do better for everyone.
Education is the best way to remedy hatred, the power of propaganda and antisemitism. I am so happy to see this take place given the extraordinary rise in number of incidents of overt and more passive new forms of antisemitism.
Where do you get that Hitler was inspired by “our form of slavery and the racist system”? That’s an outrageous remark and it is not true. Do your research, and you will find out that World War I, social Darwinism, Weimar economy, Nationalism, and hatred of Jews were among its motivators.
And there is no proof that he was inspired by the Armenian Genocide. If you have it, show it.
I could imagine some may like or even admire Ali or Child. But idolizing? Let’s come back to reality?
Quick top results but there are library shelves full of these facts:
Accordingly, I have placed my death-head formations in readiness – for the present only in the East – with orders to them to send to death mercilessly and without compassion, men, women, and children of Polish derivation and language. Only thus shall we gain the living space (lebensraum) which we need. Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?” – Lochner’s What About Germany? (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1942)
===
When the Nazis set out to legally disenfranchise and discriminate against Jewish citizens, they weren’t just coming up with ideas out of thin air. They closely studied the laws of another country. According to James Q. Whitman, author of Hitler’s American Model, that country was the United States.
“America in the early 20th century was the leading racist jurisdiction in the world,” says Whitman, who is a professor at Yale Law School. “Nazi lawyers, as a result, were interested in, looked very closely at, [and] were ultimately influenced by American race law.
Contrary to common belief, Nazi Germany’s legal assault on the Jews between 1933 and 1945 was not unique in its racial character nor its segregationist aims. There are remarkable similarities between Americas own Jim Crow laws and those in Nazi Germany. As with many Nazi attacks against the Jews, the Nazis took ideas and practices that were common in their own and other cultures and radicalized them to suit their needs. This exhibit will examine the Jim Crow laws with examples from Houston’s segregationist past and the Nuremberg laws.
Whitman’s 2017 book, Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law, received wide coverage in the news and academia.[6][7][8][9][10] Whitman demonstrates the extent to which US racial laws (Jim Crow laws, separate but equal legal doctrine) influenced the Nazi Regime in formulating the Nuremberg Laws of September 1935. The leading Nazi student of US racial laws was Heinrich Krieger, a jurist who studied at the University of Arkansas School of Law in 1933–34. There, he researched how laws across the US segregated and disenfranchised Native Americans, African Americans, and other disfavored groups like including Asians, Filipinos and Puerto Ricans. Krieger wrote the memorandum relied upon at the meeting June 1934 in which the Nazi racial laws, known as the Nuremberg Laws, were hashed out. Just as the Jim Crow Laws prohibited and criminalized intermarriage between Whites and Blacks, though as his book points out these types of laws existed in 30 states, many outside of the Jim Crow south. So the Nuremberg Laws prohibited marriages with Jews and threatened punishment. The Nazis departed little from their US model except insofar as that they found it too severe.[11] The so-called one-drop rule, classified as non-white anyone with even a single ″Negro″ ancestor. This was disturbing even to National Socialist policymaker, who shuddered at the ‘human hardness’ it entailed. According to the Nuremberg Race Laws, a ″full Jew″ was only someone who had three or four Jewish grandparents; there were also – in National Socialist terminology – ″half Jews″ and ″quarter Jews″, but they were not affected by the same discrimination.
============================================
Historical Events of Jewish Hatred prior to WWI
Early Church Fathers: Some early Christian writers expressed negative views of Judaism and the Jewish people.
Middle Ages: The Middle Ages witnessed a significant rise in antisemitism in Europe, fueled by religious and social factors, including pogroms, forced conversions, and expulsions.
The Crusades: The Crusades, although primarily aimed at the Muslims, also led to violence against Jewish communities.
Medieval Accusations: Jews were often accused of ritual murder (blood libel), host desecration, and other heinous acts, leading to further persecution.
Papal Bulls and Decrees: Some popes issued decrees that restricted the rights and freedoms of Jews, while others sought to protect them.
Ghettoization: Jews were forced to live in separate, walled quarters (ghettos) in many European cities.
Modern Antisemitism:
Influence of Christianity: The legacy of Christian antisemitism has contributed to modern forms of anti-Jewish prejudice and discrimination.
Holocaust: While not solely attributable to Christian antisemitism, the Holocaust, the systematic murder of six million Jews by the Nazis, occurred within a historical context marked by centuries of anti-Jewish sentiment, including Christian anti-Judaism.
==============================
One in five Americans aged 18-29 believe that Adolf Hitler had “some good ideas” according to a new poll of 1,000 US voters conducted by the Daily Mail. The poll results also found that 21 per cent of black voters and 19 per cent of Hispanic voters thought the Nazi dictator had some redeeming qualities. – Jewish Chronicle 20
=======================
Turning Point USA: “Today’s Campus Rebels Embrace Ayn Rand” 2024
Rita, thanks for your wonderful scholarship on this issue.
You are welcome. I’m an amateur that reads a ton of non-fiction.
You are more than an amateur! It’s a welcome deep dive as opposed to the biased one-sided arguments from the MAGA crowd!
“It’s our response to a world where too many people are forgetting — or even denying — what really happened. We wanted to create something that speaks directly to our generation.”
As this is a mobile exhibit, I suggest setting it up on the delta in Watertown Square every weekend, where protestors are “forgetting — or even denying — what really happened” on October 7th, 2023. Appallingly, almost 600 days later, Hamas is still leveraging the lives of hostages they seized from among the few survivors of their butchery. Even more appallingly, the world, even our own community, condemns Israel for its efforts to defeat Hamas and retrieve its citizens from bondage. The encamped protestors never mention the atrocities inflicted by Hamas, never demand the return of the hostages (or their remains), never call for Hamas’s surrender—which would end the war instantly. They can’t have forgot. They must be denying. Shame them, even if they’re shameless.
You cannot conflate Hitler and Hamas, or Hamas with the Palestinians.
A European power decimating a particular ethnicity is different from the conflict between the two semitic peoples in the middle east. In one scenario, the Jewish people are an attacked minority. In the second, they are fighting against other claimants to the land.
Here is another example, calling Netanyahu the devil is anti-Semitic because it calls upon tropes created by the early Christian Church. Calling Netanyahu a corrupt dictator is not because it criticizes how he governs. The Israeli Supreme Court has charges against him for this. The first judges him by his features or beliefs, the second by his character or actions.
I applaud the educational aspect of this program. Is there also a program that teaches about the Genocide of Palestinians that has been going on since at least 1947 and is now on steroids? In the 1930’s maybe some people could claim that they didn’t know what was happening to the Jews and other “undesirables”. Today no one can claim they don’t know about the genocide taking place now. I know there are many different genocides going on in the world but we donn’t see them on the television news. SILENCE IS COMPLICITY..
It’s great that the students collaborated to create this memorial. So important to remember the horrible tragedy of the Holocaust.
To Kathy Felgran, please get your facts straight. There is no genocide of the Palestinians. In fact since 1948 their population has grown from under 1 million to more than 5.5 million today. That info is widely available. Secondly, the legal definition of genocide includes intent. Israel is not intentionally trying to wipe out the Palestinian population despite the rhetoric of a few extremists. If that was the aim Israel would have easily done so long ago. Israel is at war with terrorists, those who harbor terrorists, and those who seek to destroy its existence, all who embed themselves throughout civilization populations in Gaza and the West Bank. To call this a genocide mocks the memory of those who lost their lives from annihilation. War is tragic and while it is painful to see such suffering, Hamas has been able to stop it since 2005 but chooses not to.
I would add to this that as someone who cares deeply about all children, if we are to seriously seek to support Palestinian children, we need to look at why UNRWA has been allowing the grooming of Palestinian children to become terrorists, and why Hamas seems to have money to fund malicious mass murders that they know will harm Palestinian civilians while intentionally starving their children and using them as human shields. This is child abuse and if schools did this here I’d report them to the Department of children and family services.
Well said. Thank you.
I do know my facts:
From Lancet, July 10, 2024
“Applying a conservative estimate of four indirect deaths per one direct death to the 37,396 deaths reported, it is not implausible to estimate that up to 186,000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza.”
from https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(24)01169-3/fulltext
If you don’t like the term “Genocide” call it what you will. Killing that many people, including women, children, the elderly and disabled, plus medical workers and journalists is immoral no matter what you call it.
Regarding intent, it’s hard to kill 186,000 people by accident. Regarding the increase in the Palestinian population most Palestinians no longer live in land under Israeli control.
By the way, Netanyahu announced yesterday his goal is for Israel to control all of Gaza and to have Trump implement his plan to make Gaza the Riviera of the Middle East.
“Applying a conservative estimate of four indirect deaths per one direct death to the 37,396 deaths reported, it is not implausible to estimate that…”
Is that what passes for science at The Lancet these days? Two “estimates” and a “not implausible”? Physician, heal thyself.
Why doesn’t Hamas surrender in the war it started on October 7, 2023, and release the hostages it seized that day—or the remains of the bodies of those who died in their dungeons? When it’s “not implausible” that would end the war not in days, but minutes. More to the point: why doesn’t every decent person demand that they do? Yet they don’t. Very strange.
And you rely on The Lancet for facts? Isn’t this the same The Lancet which had to walk back its report of 650K casualties in Iraq?
As NCI reported in 2013: “Based on the statistical methods, the researchers are 95% confident that the true number of excess deaths lies between 48,000 and 751,000—a large range” More like a dart board – versus actual statistics.
The Lancet’s editor Richard Horton, has twitted:
“800 000 Palestinians have been imprisoned on political grounds since 1967. Often on no charge and with no trial. And this is justice?”
“The Palestinian cry: ‘We want our country.’ For those of us who take our nations for granted, how can we be silent when we hear this plea?”
Mr.Horton uses The Lancet to express his own personal bias against Israel. This is not The Lancet we knew from years ago. Follow their reports with caution, a lot of caution.
Learn more about Mr. Horton here:
https://unherd.com/2023/10/the-lancet-was-made-for-political-activism/
If you are aware of the Great March of Return (see below ) you will understand the background to the October raid into Israel. I agree it was an act of terror by Hamas, because they attacked civilians.
GREAT MARCH OF RETURN
2018-2019 A grassroots initiative, saw tens of thousands of Palestinians, peacefully and unarmed, demonstrating for the right to return to their homes. Whole families walked together on Friday afternoons, sometimes picnicking along the way, toward the border fence that trapped them inside Gaza under an Israeli sea and land blockade that didn’t allow for fishing, trading, or importing food and medical supplies. Israel used brigades of snipers to pick off marchers with either shots to the head or in both legs with dum dum bullets that exploded on impact resulting in double amputations. Children and women, people in wheelchairs were also targets for the snipers. 223 Gazans were killed (46 were children) and 8,000 seriously injured, with shots to arms and legs resulting in amputations. That was the background that led to the events of
October 6, 2023. (Facts and figures are from the UN, and B’Tselem, an Israeli Human Rights organization, and other International Sources.)
The catastrophic events of October 7, 2023, resulted in a staggering loss of Palestinian life. The confirmed death toll of 61,700, a figure that does not account for the countless individuals still entombed beneath the rubble. That surpasses the total number of US military fatalities during the entire two-decade Vietnam War. This immense suffering is further underscored by the heartbreaking details: over 17,000 children have been killed, more than 200 journalists lost their lives while documenting the unfolding tragedy; 430 aid workers, dedicated to alleviating suffering, were killed in the line of duty; and a further 1,400 medical personnel, ranging from ambulance drivers to doctors and nurses, were among the victims. The human cost extends beyond the immediate fatalities, with at least 18,000 children now orphaned. 57 children have now died from malnutrition.
Do you really believe that human rights groups are grooming children to become terrorists? All the kids need to do is see their families’ dead bodies and scattered remains to instill a hatred of the Occupiers. Can you blame them?
Sincerely,
Kathy Felgran
Here’s a modest attempt to balance your pro-Hamas propaganda with another report. You can read the entire text at https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/march-of-return.
”Nakba Protests
The Israel Air Force dropped leaflets over the Gaza Strip warning Palestinians not to approach the Israeli border on May 15, 2018, or take part in any violent activity aimed at damaging the border fence or harming the soldiers deployed along it.
To the rioters, you are taking part in violent riots which jeopardize your lives. Hamas is taking advantage of you in order to hide its failures and is threatening you and your family members.’ well-being. Do not let Hamas cynically use you as its puppet. Stay away from the security fence, from terror instigators and the violent rioters! Save yourselves and prioritize building your future!
A second leaflet accused the Islamist group of prioritizing the protests over the humanitarian needs of Gaza’s citizens:
Hamas promised to improve the Gaza Strip’s infrastructure – have they? Hamas promised to establish new medical and educational centers – have they? Hamas promised to tend to civilians’ needs – have they? Hamas promised that participating in their riots would improve your lives – Do you think that’ll happen?
Hamas planned to mobilize 100,000 people to attempt to break down the fence and attack Israeli communities. The group fell far short of its goal. An estimated 40,000 demonstrators threw stones at soldiers and burned tires on May 14 as the United States formally opened its embassy in Jerusalem. During the riots, here is a sample of the threats Israeli forces had to neutralize:
12:58 p.m. – Bomb explodes.
1:15 p.m. – A terror cell sought to plant explosives by the border fence and opened fire at IDF forces.
1:30 p.m. – Fire opened at IDF forces.
1:45 p.m. – Fire opened at IDF forces by eight terrorists.
2:09pm – Three bombs explode.
2:53 p.m. – Five pipe bombs exploded.
3:10pm – Bomb explodes.
7:02 p.m. – Terrorists opened fire at IDF troops.
17 kites carrying flammable materials were flown from Gaza into Israel, causing fires in 23 locations.
The IDF killed three terrorists who tried to plant an explosive device in Rafah and the IAF launched multiple airstrikes at Hamas targets inside Gaza.
Reporter Yonah Jeremy Bob described what he saw: “While there were nonviolent Palestinians demonstrating, thousands of Palestinians were also involved in more aggressive or hostile actions, and the numbers were so large that it was hard to imagine that most of them were not pawns.”
During the protests Israeli forces captured several Palestinians attempting to cross the border from Gaza and learned details of Hamas tactics. For example, the Shin Bet discovered Hamas offers Palestinian families in the Gaza Strip $100 if all family members participate in the protests. All schools and higher education institutions in Gaza were closed and Hamas forced merchants to declare a general strike so Palestinians would not have other activities on the days of protests. Hamas provides transportation, tires to burn, Molotov cocktails and flaming kites. Hamas terrorists are forbidden to approach the fence so they will not be shot or apprehended by the security forces. They are only to advance if the fence is breached, in which case their assignment is to carry out terror attacks.“