HIST 490
Memory, History, and the Extermination of the Jews of Europe
Last Offered Spring 2022
Division II Writing Skills
Cross-listed JWST 490
This course is not offered in the current catalog

Class Details

This course is about the postwar legacy of the Holocaust. Nazi Germany’s extermination of European Jews has become a moral and cultural touchstone for people in Europe and in many other parts of the world. This tutorial explores a series of topics from the immediate aftermath of the Second World War to the present. Engaging with a wide-range of sources, we will wrestle with historical, legal, moral, political, and cultural issues and debates that have emerged out of the confrontation with the extermination of the Jews of Europe. They include: Why was the Holocaust “unprecedented” and “unimaginable”? Is it a Jewish story or universal story? Does the Holocaust raise different issues than other historical events for the historian? How should the Holocaust be represented in words and images, and what are the implications of different means of representing it? Has Germany faced up to its past? Were Germans also victims of World War II? Who were the “bystanders” as compared to the “perpetrators”? Were the postwar trials of perpetrators a travesty of justice? What “lessons” have we learned and should we learn from the Holocaust? By the end of the course, students will have grappled with the ongoing controversies that have arisen among scholars, artists, governments, and lay people about the meaning of the Holocaust for the postwar world. In a world in which extraordinary acts of violence continue to be perpetrated and many nations’ pasts are marked by episodes of extreme criminality and/or trauma, exploring the manner by which one such episode has been remembered, avenged, and adjudicated has relevance for considering other societies’ efforts to confront their own traumatic pasts.
The Class: Format: tutorial; tutorial; class time consists of weekly one-hour sessions with the instructor and a fellow student
Limit: 10
Expected: 10
Class#: 3677
Grading: no pass/fail option, no fifth course option
Requirements/Evaluation: Every other week the student will write and present orally a 5- to 7-page paper on the assigned readings of that week; on alternate weeks, the student will write a 2-page critique of the fellow student's paper; a final written paper on the issues raised in the tutorial to cap off the semester's work.
Prerequisites: permission of instructor
Enrollment Preferences: History majors and Jewish Studies concentrators
Distributions: Division II Writing Skills
Notes: This course is cross-listed and the prefixes carry the following divisional credit:
JWST 490 Division II HIST 490 Division II
WS Notes: Bi-weekly 5- to 7-page- papers. Students will receive regular and individualized feedback on their writing to help them work on different writing issues throughout the semester.
Attributes: HIST Group C Electives - Europe and Russia
JWST Capstone Course
JWST Core Electives

Class Grid

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