A thread about my experiences as a public school kid with Holocaust education and how I found it disrespectful and traumatic:

When I was in school, the Holocaust was always taught as a historical blip or anomaly which Jews are supposed to have learned from. In fact, antisemitism as a whole was presented like this moral panic that appeared in 1918 and disappeared in 1945 with the ending of WWII.

We never spoke of how ingrained antisemitism was and is to European (and consequently western) culture and that it continues to exist in this day and age. And when antisemitism supposedly ended in 1945, Jews were supposed to look inward and do some self-reflection.

We never discussed the lessons the west learned, just how Jews are apparently supposed to have learned how to be nice thanks to the Holocaust. It felt like the schools were more concerned with assuring European kids their ancestors weren't monsters.

This inevitably led to universalizing the Holocaust. I had so many classmates tell me, shocked, that they too would have died because they don't like Hitler/have brown hair/were Ukrainian, as though their hypothetical experiences and my family's real experiences were the same.

Of my Ashkenazi family, only 2 people survived. We still feel that trauma and impact. But that didn't matter to my teachers when they showed graphic images of naked Jews piled in mass graves or emaciated prisoners who reminded me of my family or myself.

The subtle lessons were more clear once the units on the Holocaust ended. My classmates suddenly pulled out ever Hitler and oven joke they could think of without much pushback from the teachers. These jokes turned to threats if I ever pissed any of my classmates off.

I value a lot of the public school education I got, as crappy and underfunded as those schools were, but I absolutely do not value or miss the units on the Holocaust.