It was with a deep sense of consternation that I read the article, “Time to Raise Our Voices” (August 13, 2020). Who but the Jews have been raising “our voices” throughout the years against discrimination and its effects? From the Garden of Eden to the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s and on into the current racial tension it has been the Jews more than any other per capita ethnic group to raise their voices. From the giving of the Torah to the tragic deaths of Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, the Jews have given their blood, sweat and tears to the fight against persecution and discrimination. While Jews were getting killed in Pittsburgh and Monsey, many Jews came out to support Black Lives Matter. Much has been made about the achievements of Jesse Owens in the Olympics held in Nazi Berlin Germany in 1936, but little has been made about Marty Glickman, who was an American Jew who was not even allowed to run in the 1936 Olympics for fear of offending Hitler.
The article urged teachers to go beyond “formal statements” by “engaging our students in uncomfortable conversations with uncomfortable silences, often with the goal of examining and challenging uncomfortable truths, for teachers and students alike.” The death of George Floyd should not have been so shocking to Americans. After all, segregation and discrimination have been part of the landscape of America since the beginning of the country. Lynching has been a mainstay of southern justice. Leo Frank, a Jew, was unlawfully lynched in 1915, and Emmett Till, a 14-year-old Black American, was brutally beaten and lynched in the 1950s for allegedly whistling at a white woman.
Having taught American history in middle school, high school and college, in both public and Jewish schools, I can safely conclude that Jewish students do not know enough about their own history, which would include the legitimacy of a Jewish state, to even embark on an understanding of the “peculiar institution” of slavery and racism indigenous to America. Why are so many American Jewish students easily attacked in colleges? Why is the “squad” of Congress permitted to get away with what they do?
How do you expect a white Jewish teacher to teach America Black history when it is a challenge enough to teach Jewish history? It is a given that an effective teacher needs to know his/her subject matter and needs to have a skill to effectively present that material in such a way that it goes beyond passing a test? How many Jewish teachers are familiar with the African slave trade? How many yeshiva teachers know that Africans enslaved Africans? How many teachers know that African-Americans owned slaves? How many teachers in a yeshiva know what the Middle Passage was like? How many teachers know what a speculum oris was? How many teachers know what indignities were part of segregation? Just what did Rosa Parks have to overcome? How many Jewish teachers know what it is to be Black? How many Jews and non-Jews know what it was like to go through the Holocaust?
The sad part about all of this is that my experience is one in which administrators and parents are not always willing to support teachers, whether it is teaching about the Afro-American narrative or the Jewish story. Truth does not always “set you free,” not when it comes to teaching. My experience has been if it makes the students of today uncomfortable, avoid anything that might trigger the discomfort.
I had a scholarship in American Black history and a government fellowship in civil liberties at Columbia University. I also had a fellowship in Holocaust studies that took me to Auschwitz and Yad Vashem for a month of study. I was fortunate enough to hear numerous survivors and celebrated authors on the Holocaust. I consider myself pretty well educated in Black American history and the Holocaust. I have taught courses in Afro-American history, racism, genocide and the Holocaust as well as the Modern Middle East. I have lectured on these subjects at colleges and high schools.
I first started my teaching career as a social studies teacher at a junior high school in 1960. It was one of two junior high schools in the city, one a white-bread suburban campus and the other and integrated factory-style structure in the older section of town. Keep in mind that the 1960s was a period of racial tension and civil disobedience. My job was to teach the protests of the American Revolution and the issues of the Civil War and its aftermath. On the one hand, in the American Revolution, the rebels were the good guys, but in the Civil War the rebels were the bad guys. Now, how do you explain this to seventh graders? Almost like trying to explain protestors and looters who claim to be protestors. Factor in the issue of slavery and its legacy and you are walking a minefield, especially in the 1960s. Fortunately, the first principal I had was very supportive, but when the second principal took over, he tried to limit any deep discussions of the treatment of Black people. I was told to go easy on the treatment of black people who were enslaved. When I approached the Dred Scott case in terms of today’s attitudes toward Black people, I was told to keep the Dred Scott case in the textbook where it belonged. A film on the KKK that I had ordered was sent back without my knowledge—it might unnecessarily upset certain people. By 1968, I had left the junior high school and began teaching in a yeshiva high school in the afternoon and a public high school earlier in the day.
In the public high school, I planned, with an African-American guidance counselor, to have an in-service trip to Harlem for history and English teachers that was scheduled for February. Somehow, at the last minute, the Harlem trip was replaced with an outdoor art show in frigid Central Park. No real explanation.
At one point, the parents of a black girl greeted me in the principal’s office one morning. Their complaint was that the word n***** was used in my class. I had to admit that the word was used in a derisive way about General “Black Jack” Pershing because of his open praise of black troops. In the discussion a student uttered the forbidden word. With the principal saying nothing in my defense, the parents asked me to promise never to use that word in class, to which I refused. The parents threatened me and my future as a teacher. Luckily, I was defended by a Black teacher. The principal never said anything publicly about the encounter but complimented me privately. By the way, the person who uttered the “N” word was the daughter of the parents who threatened me.
As I was getting to be an elder statesman in the public high school, my class assignments seemed to fit a political design rather than my established personal preference. I retired from public school teaching in 2006 in order to devote my energies to full-time teaching in a yeshiva.
The real challenge for me was to combine my understanding of the Afro-American experience with a deeper examination of the Holocaust. One would think that this was a wonderful opportunity. Sensing that the girls I taught would have a strong understanding of slavery, I approached the idea of comparing slavery in Egypt (Pesach) with slavery in America. After all, the students spent at least eight days a year on remembering the Jewish experience. The students were asked to design a Haggadah that would encapsulate the life of a slave from a Jewish perspective and an American perspective. That worked out pretty well.
When it came to teaching the Holocaust to a group of 16- to 17-year-old Jewish high school girls, I was to sanitize my instruction. The movie “Genocide” was considered too graphic for these girls. I had been using that film in public school and yeshiva for decades. But the girls of the 21st century “may have trouble sleeping at night.” When I set up an artificial scenario in which I asked students what they would be willing to do to survive in an autocratic environment similar to Nazi Germany, I was told that this would be too dangerous, making these girls too uncomfortable. I had been doing these lessons for more than 30 years; nonetheless, I was asked to no longer teach the Holocaust in a way that would make these students so upset that they might cry or worse. I had taught my daughter and my niece using these methods.
George Floyd had committed a petty crime. For his crime he was brutally murdered, and the police responsible for the crime have been duly charged. Not all police, black or white, should be painted with the same broad brush. Every policeman and every person who commits a crime should receive a proper judicial outcome. Killing a black or white child in a playground should matter, regardless of the skin of the perpetrator or the child. The responsibility for all Jews for all times does not begin or end with the unfortunate death of George Floyd. The Torah provided a blueprint for tikkun olam, and it is good for all time. The time to raise our voices did not begin in 2020 but at a mountain thousands of years ago. The king of ancient Israel had to carry around the Torah wherever he went. We should expect nothing less from a yeshiva.
Joel Glazer is a newly retired high school US history teacher, prolific reader, huge Yankees fan, game show enthusiast, and patriarch of a large family. He’s the author of “It Happened in My Classroom,’ which can be obtained on www.lulu.com.
