A look at the sixth issue of PRISM and one is struck by its cover art and its pathos. Symbols of the Jewish faith, a menorah, a kiddush cup, are strewn together with remnants of a life—a violin, sheet music, a shoe, and torn pictures. In a framed photo to the right, a young boy, dressed for the cold, carries a violin case and appears to look forlornly at the scattered artifacts, including a yellow star with the word Juif on it.
Karen Shawn, Ph.D., a resident of Teaneck, is the founding creator and editor of PRISM: An Interdisciplinary Journal for Holocaust Educators, an outgrowth of her life’s work: teaching teachers how to teach about the Holocaust.
Born in Albany, Shawn’s father, Bernard, was an Associate in the New York State Department of Education in the field of Special Education and her mother, Rosalie, was the principal stenographer and secretary for the Assistant Commissioner for the New York State Department of Health. Her home was steeped in Yiddishkeit, but she had no traditional religious education or observance, says Shawn.
Shawn was educated at Adelphi University, where she received her B.A. in English. She also has an M.A. in English Education from New York University, went for a Fellowship in Holocaust and Jewish Resistance at Yad Vashem, Jerusalem, another Fellowship in Jewish Education in the Diaspora at Hebrew University, Jerusalem, and a Ph.D. in English Education from New York University.
Presently, aside from her duties as editor of PRISM, Shawn is a Senior Fellow and Visiting Associate Professor of Jewish Education at the Azrieli Graduate School of Jewish Education and Administration of Yeshiva University, and Director of Educational Programming at the Jerome Riker Research Foundation for the Study of the Persecuted Child in New York City. She is also a board member and director of teacher education for the International Study of Organized Persecution of Children of Child Development Research.
Shawn’s teaching and research interests have centered on Holocaust education with a focus on literature and film; teacher education and mentoring; curriculum development; the role of online classroom communities in building resilience and reflection in pre-service teachers; and students’ coping strategies as they learn about the Holocaust.
For most people, just a small glance at that horror from archives, books, museums, pictures or film presentations takes more than a strong stomach; it also takes a large box of tissues. But to teach teachers how to teach about this takes strength as well as resilience. Shawn said, “I absolutely understand how difficult this learning is. I know when I talk to my students— that’s one of the things I say—that nobody leaves the Holocaust Museum in Washington saying ‘Wow, let’s go get some ice cream and come right back, I can’t wait.’”
“I came to it from a different perspective and that was in 1985 on a trip to Israel when I visited the Ghetto Fighters’ House Museum in the Western Galilee…It was actually the first Holocaust museum, and pre-dates Yad Vashem. It was built on a kibbutz called Beit Lohamei HaGeta’ot,” the home of fighters who survived the Warsaw Ghetto uprising.”
Shawn says that when the survivors came to Israel, they wanted to live together and decided to build the museum on the grounds of their kibbutz. “Their little collection of artifacts grew into a world-class museum…I was just completely taken by the presentation and the whole concept of resistance, which is their focus.”
The next year, Shawn came across a notice that the Jewish Labor Committee was offering fellowships for teachers to go to Israel for a month to learn about the Holocaust.
Shawn said she knew she had to go because she was, at the time, teaching the Diary of Anne Frank. “I knew that I wasn’t doing a good job. I needed to know more; I needed to really understand the Holocaust, not just Anne Frank.” And so, she applied for and won the Jewish Holocaust and Resistance Summer Study Fellowship.
For a month, she and the other fellows learned at Yad Vashem, Haifa University, and the Ghetto Fighters’ Museum. “We learned not only from the best historians in the world, but we learned and were taught by survivors as well. We were led by two of the most important survivors in the field of education, Vladka and Ben Meed, founders of WAGRO, the landsmanschaft for ghetto fighters and Warsaw survivors, who were also responsible, in great part, for the World Gathering of Holocaust Survivors in 1981, who founded the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and who supported the American Friends of the Ghetto Fighters House, the Educators’ Chapter of the Jewish Labor Committee, and the American Federation of Teachers.”
They learned about the Holocaust and how to teach it. Shawn said that every day they met with, spoke with, and got to learn from survivors. “Every single survivor with whom we spoke said to us, ‘This has to be your mission. You are our memorial candle. When we are no longer here, it will be your obligation to tell the story.’ That’s why I do this work.”
Shawn went back for four more summers and learned as much as she could. Afterwards, she started her Ph.D. dissertation in curriculum development and knew that she had to focus specifically on Holocaust education. “That was what I was going to devote my life to.”
Asked what she considers the most important thing about the Holocaust that must be taught, Shawn says, “For me, the most important thing is to understand the Holocaust from a personal perspective, from the individual perspective. This is not new information. Now we understand the importance of personal narrative, but that’s why I do what I do, because I learned from survivors.”
This does not diminish from the necessity of learning from historians and contextualizing every survivor story but, “history alone simply cannot do what we need to do to help people understand both the enormity of this event and the intimacy of the event. We have to help students understand what happened to Jewish people every day of the 4,400 or so days of the Holocaust.”
While some have been taught that Kristallnacht on November 9, 1938, marked the beginning of the Holocaust, Shawn says, “We date the beginning of the Holocaust from 1933 with the rise of Hitler…Michael Berenbaum has said that Kristallnacht was the end of the beginning and the beginning of the end.” The Holocaust is dated by historians as ending in 1945.
In 1989, Shawn won a fellowship to spend seven months in Israel.
“I devoted myself at that time to courses at Hebrew University, at Yad Vashem, and again at the Ghetto Fighters’ Museum…At the end of that time, one of the Yad Vashem historians asked what I thought of the classes and summer institutes that they offered.” She said the classes were phenomenal as far as the history was concerned, but there was no pedagogy being taught and, as a result, when American teachers go back home, they’re often the only teachers in their school teaching the subject. They alone have to make sense of all of this history and try to translate what they’ve learned into something that an eighth or ninth grader in a small town in the middle of the country can understand. “They asked me if I could come back and teach, to be their educational instructor for their summer program.”
She did this for 10 years, continuing to learn the history while teaching, in a 22-hour seminar, the elements of teaching the Holocaust, brainstorming with the participants how they could make this history into an effective unit of study, given their time constraints. “The more I learned, the more I knew how little I know. This is a lifetime of study. As teachers, our goal can never be to teach the definitive course on the Holocaust because such a thing is not possible…Our goal should be having our students leaving our room wanting to learn more.”
This is what she’s devoted her life to: to teaching the understanding that Jewish people had hopes and dreams and goals, all the while they lived. We know how the Jews died, but very few people know how they lived, how they actively responded to their ever-changing situation, how they defied the Nazis in whatever ways they could. She said we have to learn what the Jews understood of what was happening at that time.
Shawn says PRISM, published by the Azrieli Graduate School of Jewish Education and Administration of Yeshiva University, began in 2009, four years after she came to Yeshiva University. Her dean, Dr. David Schnall, asked if there was anything she wanted to do in addition to teaching her classes. “He’s an incredibly supportive man.”
There she met Dr. Jeffrey Glanz, who was new to Azrieli. Both had worked for a magazine called Dimensions, a Holocaust history magazine put out by the Braun Center of the Anti- Defamation League. Shawn had written teachers’ guides for the issues. Unfortunately, it had gone out of business. Now these two professors decided to publish a journal that reflected its high standards. It would be written to the highest academic scholarly standards but it also had to be accessible to students. Shawn wanted the journal to also include art, poetry, and short stories, to be interdisciplinary.
“We decided that we’d solicit contributions from writers of every field on one central topic about the Holocaust. That’s how I came up with the name “PRISM”…to indicate that the journal examines the Holocaust through a variety of lenses.” And Shawn continues to look through those lenses.
By Anne Phyllis Pinzow
