Holocaust is ‘still affecting people,’ UA panelists aver
FAYETTEVILLE — The Holocaust is “still affecting people today; even if you think you’re not affected by it, you are,” said Jennifer Hoyer, associate professor of German and founding director of Jewish studies at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville.
The Holocaust “has always been something we have a hard time finding words to describe, and that continues,” added Hoyer, who moderated a panel on the Holocaust — and the way it’s impacted generations and variegated academic studies — Thursday night at the university’s David W. Mullins Library.
However, as painful and arduous as it can at times be, that “reflection needs to happen,” she said.
That “hate is still with us today, and it’s why [Holocaust education] matters,” said Kevin Simpson, chairman of the psychology department at John Brown University.
“We need to tell these stories so they don’t disappear into the ether” when the last remaining Holocaust survivors die, he said.
Hoyer has had students take her German classes because they’re white supremacists, and they want to learn the language used by the Nazis, she said.
“That still happens today,” she said.
In 2019, the FBI reported, Arkansas had more cases of antisemitism and extremism than the prior 15 years combined.
But, with education and awareness, hope and optimism can take root, Simpson said.
“If you fill the void of ignorance, you start to get momentum,” he said.
Fellow panelists from UA-Fayetteville included Greg Herman, associate professor of architecture; Amelia McGowan, assistant professor and immigration clinic director for the School of Law; Toby Kline, Ph.D. candidate in public policy; and Mia Bingaman, an undergraduate psychology major.
Roughly 6 million Jews
were murdered during the genocide by Nazi Germany and its collaborators. Romani people, Poles, Ukrainians, Soviet civilians and prisoners of war, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Black people, people with disabilities, communists and gay individuals were also targeted in the systematic mass killing.
Herman can trace his genealogy back only a couple of generations.
“Most of my family was murdered” in the Holocaust, he said. “As a Jewish person, this hits me at the root.”
Though he grew up in a predominantly Jewish sector of Cleveland and had “awareness” of the Holocaust, he attempted to “resist being conscious of it” as long as he could, he said. However, as he aged and moved, he saw his “responsibility” to confront it.
And genocide didn’t end with the Holocaust, said McGowan.
“These horrors are still happening to people, and we see the echoes,” she said.
Through research and study, “we started to realize there was an ordinariness to the evil of the Nazis, which [prompts] us to examine societal forces that are still with us,” Simpson said.
“‘Us versus them’ is very embedded in us, and that psychological othering can be mobilized to very bad ends,” but an awareness of those dark forces in humanity can attenuate their power, he said.
When Bingaman tells peers she’s studying the Holocaust, most shake their head and tell her it’s “too depressing” of a topic for them, which she finds “disheartening,” she said.
“It is a heavy thing to think about, but it needs to happen,” she said.
Kline is often asked why she studies the Holocaust and its relationship with public policy.
“I have to explain why they should care,” she said. “It’s incredibly important we teach our students about the Holocaust, and I hope through teaching it, I won’t have to explain to people why they should care about the Holocaust.”
A 2020 survey of Americans ages 18-39 across all 50 states by Schoen Cooperman Research concluded that Arkansas ranked last in the nation in knowledge about the Holocaust. In the spring of 2021, the Arkansas Legislature passed a bill requiring Holocaust education in public schools.
It’s also important to remember the Jewish community didn’t end with the Holocaust, Hoyer said.
“A lot happened before the Holocaust, and the Jewish community still exists now,” but, for many, the Holocaust is all they think about when considering Jews and their culture, she said.
The Holocaust impacted every academic discipline, Herman said. For example, since the Nazis were “intolerant of thought that was ‘out of line,’ particularly in areas of art and design,” many creative Jews fled Europe to settle in the U.S., where they disseminated their ideas to countless young architects and designers — often through universities — so many modern buildings “have that relationship to the Holocaust,” he said.
Thursday’s panel discussion complemented “Americans and the Holocaust: A Traveling Exhibition for Libraries,” which is on display through Dec. 8 at the library, the only time the exhibit will be in Arkansas during its tour of the country.
The exhibition is an educational initiative of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., and the American Library Association.
Among other details, the exhibition illustrates the way in which stringent immigration laws prevented many refugees and asylum-seekers from finding safe harbor in the U.S. during the Holocaust, McGowan said. As a result of the Holocaust, there’s been an international effort to protect refugees, with the creation of international standards, which is “a definite improvement,” but many of the same barriers faced by those who tried to enter the U.S. during the Holocaust still exist today, she said.
A decade ago, this traveling exhibition wouldn’t be possible, because “you didn’t talk about” America’s response and reaction to the Holocaust, Hoyer said. That represents valuable progress, and “there’s more to come,” she said.
More discussions are paramount, because they promote critical thinking, Kline said. “We [ought to] debate these nuanced topics,” he said.
Hosts for the exhibit have been asked by the American Library Association to offer local, companion programming, such as Thursday’s panel discussion. The next event in conjunction with the traveling exhibition is Dec. 7 at 6 p.m in the Fayetteville Public Library.
Courtney Doi will share the story of her grandmother, Judith Klein, who left Berlin in December 1938. Klein’s father, grandmother, two aunts and two of her siblings died in concentration camps, according to the university. Doi will discuss Klein’s journey out of Germany as a teenage refugee, her extended family’s experiences across Europe during the war, Doi’s own travels to Germany to further understand her family history, and how modern genocides can be prevented.