The following is a transcript of Episode 3 of the Perfect Jewish Parents Podcast. Note: This is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation, please excuse any errors.

Masua: Hello and welcome to Perfect Jewish Parents, a new podcast from the Shalom Hartman Institute about the joys and always of raising children Jewishly.

I’m Masua Sagiv, I’m scholar in residence for the Sham Hartman Institute. 

Josh: And I’m Joshua Ladon, director of Education for the Shalom Hartman Institute. 

Masua: Hi Josh, how are you today? 

Josh: Thank God. 

Masua: So my daughter is taking a course in school about the Holocaust and she’s reading the graphic novel Maus. So she asked me whether I read the book. And I said that I didn’t, and she started telling me what’s it about. And I cut her off. I told her, I’m so sorry, but I just, I can’t, I don’t wanna know. You know, I grew up in Israel. I am a third generation, of Holocaust survivors. All of my grandparents were survivors.

But that’s, I mean, you didn’t have to be third generation, for the Holocaust to be everywhere around you in Israel. It was in the narratives, it was in the books, it was in the movies, it was in the shows, it was in schools, it was in the public square, it was everywhere. 

And we were meant, first of all, to be shocked. The more horrified, the better the lesson stuck. And the second thing was the narrative we are supposed to understand that the only solution, the lesson from the Holocaust is a strong, sovereign state of Israel. I know that’s not the experience that you grew up in, right?

Josh: No, it’s actually, it’s so interesting. I was not a great Hebrew student, but the moment I realized I was like finally functional as a Hebrew speaker, I was living in Israel, and I was in Hebrew ulpan and I went to a ceremony for Yom HaShoah, for the Holocaust Remembrance Day. And the person who was speaking there was saying, never again, never again. And I realized, oh, he’s talking about a never again in a different way than I grew up thinking about never again. For him, it was never again to this happen to the Jews. Right? The Jewish state is, and that’s like when you go to Yad Vashem in Israel, you walk out and you see the hills of Jerusalem and that’s the saving grace.

And as a North American Jew, as someone who grew up strongly affiliated in the Reform movement, never again meant like, never again to this happen to humanity. We talked about 11 million victims.

Masua: We’ve talked about 6 million. 

Josh: Yeah. And so I think that for me, I get a little angsty when the Holocaust is only about a Jewish story and at the same time, it’s obviously a deep part of my collective memory, even if my family were not victims. And yet, my response is a little bit universal, although I’m always trying to temper that with the particular.

Masua: So I don’t even have that. My response is just angsty. Right. I mean, it’s just, ever since I became a parent, I just, I shut everything down. Whenever Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day is approaching, I don’t wanna hear. I don’t wanna talk about it. I don’t wanna see anything. And, you know, for a few years with the beginning of parenting, it worked out well, right? Because you don’t, I mean, you don’t have to engage with the Holocaust. 

But now when I have my children more involved than are studying about that, and then when my daughter came to me, and I said, I don’t wanna talk about it. I realized something. I realized that I’m duplicating something that my parents’ generation grew on, because when my parents grew up in Israel, no one talked about the Holocaust.

Josh: Wow. 

Masua: Because it was so traumatic, and now I realize that I’m doing the exact same thing. 

Josh: It’s interesting, like no one talked about it, but at the same time it was ever present. And I also think that what you’re saying is it’s really easy when you’re a parent to not engage in those things differently, that you actually want to, when it feels scary. 

Masua: So it was until the 1960s, no one talked about that, and then everyone talked about it, it was like insane because we can’t find a balance between not talking about it and just, you know, like, suffocating us with trauma and images. 

And, you know, again, as aparent, it’s so easy to imagine the horrors. And you don’t wanna imagine the horrors. But I do understand that avoidance is not a good strategy. Especially when I want my children to be able to talk with me about what’s going on. And I’m pretty upset to understand that I’m duplicating a very problematic moment in our history. So, fortunately, we have a parenting podcast. 

Josh: Thank God. 

Masua: I know. So we invited Morgan Blum Schneider to talk with us today. Morgan is the director of the Holocaust Center for the Jewish Family and Children’s Services of San Francisco. And we spoke with her about the question that every Jewish parent have to deal with.

How do we talk with our children about the Holocaust? When do we start? What do we talk about? How do we deal with fear while acknowledging what you just said, right, our power and our privileges? How do we navigate the universal and the particular messages of the Holocaust? And we also talked about our schools. How do our schools handle the issue and what is our role as parents in this sense?

Join us for this conversation after this short break.

Josh: We’re joined today by Morgan Blum Schneider, the director of the Holocaust center for the Jewish Family and Children’s Services of San Francisco. Morgan, thanks for coming.

Morgan: Thank you, Josh. I’m really excited to be here today. I’m a big fan of Hartman. I’ve had the chance to study with you throughout my time at JFCS. I’m just honored to be in this role to guide more than 28,000 students and teachers and community members each year to remember with responsibility. I’m a Bay Area native and I have a passion for education and questions.

Josh: I wanted to talk to you about this experience I had with my nine and a half year old after Yom HaShoah, the Jewish community’s Holocaust Remembrance Day, we were coming home from a ceremony my eldest who’s nine and a half, she said something to me, like, do you ever get concerned? Are you ever scared during the ceremony. And I said, are you talking about like, is the Holocaust going to happen again? And she said, not that the Holocaust is going to happen again, but these are scary things and I’m worried something’s going to happen to me or something’s going to happen to you.

And I realized in that moment that the Holocaust, as a scary thing, that I was attentive to, but I wasn’t attentive to like, oh, it’s not just about fears that the Holocaust might happen again, but it’s also about a fears of like, something might happen to me in this moment that the boundaries of anxiety or concern for little kids is not the same, that the boundaries that I have, I’m able to contextualize it.

I want it to talk to you a little bit about, how do we navigate the scary parts of Jewish history of the Holocaust in particular, and how does that impact sort of our goals and purposes of Holocaust education and the conversations we have with kids in our homes.

Morgan: Well, I think that it’s really unique to each family. So first off we have to think about what are the dynamics of the family? What’s the own family’s history? Is the Holocaust, the grandparents’ story? Did this family grow up in the United States? Did they grew up in Israel? So there’s a lot of factors to consider before you even get to the point of introduction and age appropriateness, in my opinion.

And I’ll be honest, this conversation has changed inside my head from the time before I was a parent to being a parent of young children right now. So I have two daughters and they are four and six. And so this is becoming relevant in my own household. And it’s not just a philosophical conversation that I’m having with parents that call the Holocaust Center are referred to us. 

I think that there’s like a key moment in childhood development, which of course, as we know, children start walking at different times. Children start reading at different times. So it’s hard to make this assumption that at this exact moment, at the age of 10 or at the age of 13, they become ready for a discussion about the Holocaust, but it’s about when can they really understand the difference between a threat of the past and a threat of the moment. And I think that what’s challenging is a lot of vocabulary that’s used to discuss the Holocaust is part of the vocabulary of today.

So let’s just break down the word concentration camp for a moment. When we hear the word camp, what do our kids, my kids, ages four and six think of? They think of swimming, and

Josh: Summer camp. 

Morgan: Exactly. They don’t think of concentration camp, but all of a sudden when they hear this word in passing, they’re confused because, they may hear it at school or in their synagogue or in their community, or part of a family history. And if it’s not delivered with historical context, then their mind immediately goes to the reference in which they’re familiar. And that becomes really confusing for them.

Masua: It’s also weird. I mean, we grew up on a different world in, in a lot of senses. So when we grew up, we saw Lion King in a very early, inappropriate age or we read the Grimm Brothers, again, very 

Josh: Right, like, German nursery rhymes are like, go to bed or we’re going to hurt you. It’s not like a fantasy that’s like calm and easy. 

Masua: Okay. Yes.

Morgan: If you look at like a nursery rhyme, Little Red Riding Hood, right? So like where the wolf is going to come after you. It’s really clear to a young child that that is something that is in the land of fiction, right? And that, maybe they’re a little bit afraid, and there probably is a developmental age in which they may be afraid that a wolf is going to walk into that bedroom, but at a certain point, it’s really clear to them that that’s something that lives in a storybook or in a movie. And isn’t something that’s real. 

But when we start talking about a moment in history and a time where your great-grandmother is a character in this history and there’s languages that are referred to from that period of time, but that are also sometimes spoken at your dinner table, it becomes really confusing and it’s not as easy to decipher from something that feels like an immediate threat to something from the past. 

And so, when I speak with members of what I call the Israeli diaspora that live here in the Bay Area, where the parents grew up in Israel, but they’re raising their children here in the United States, in California, there’s a big disconnect, because for the parents, they were never introduced to the Holocaust because it was just like part of the narrative of being Israeli. But their children who are growing up here and often public schools or secular schools, they’re going through this formal introduction to the Holocaust. And it’s a space where I noticed it’s uncomfortable, and we’re trying to figure out how to navigate it. And we do it together. 

Masua: We’re talking about the Holocaust, but we’re really talking about something more general here. And that’s the scariness in Judaism or in being Jewish. And this scariness, as an Israeli is very real for me. I know that we’re talking about our children, but let’s be honest, I am at times afraid myself. So how do you deal with the fact that you don’t want to be afraid as a parent, and then you both need to navigate how you talk with your kids and how you don’t transfer to them, some of our trauma?

Morgan: It’s a good question. The way I’ve approached it first as an educator, before becoming a parent myself, is, let’s not meet the key characters in like in a family Holocaust story in 1938. Let’s go way further back. Because what I think is really important is that these people were not born in Auschwitz. These people were not born as victims of the Holocaust. They have this thriving, many people, thriving, Jewish civilization, and life. We know more than a thousand years of Polish Jewish history and in Hungary and in Germany and in what was Czechoslovakia, it’s very similar. 

So often I advise people is start the story way before, start at the very young age of if you’re sitting at the Passover table, what is a tradition that comes during your family’s celebration of Passover that is carried on from, you know, life before, life in Europe, if that’s your family history. Who are these people? How did you celebrate birthdays? What was, you know, you’re named after this ancestor, who was that person, and what was the legacy of that? 

So I find that it’s really important to build a positive association with life in Europe, before we introduce the Holocaust. And that can start at a very young age, right. We can start those stories before our kids can even talk and ask the questions and as they get older, we begin to introduce that. But again, if there’s a grandparent or great grandparents sitting at the table where this is a huge part of their identity, I think that that approach goes a different way.

Masua: So I, I need to push back on this a bit, 

Morgan: Please.

Masua: Because well, first of all, let’s talk about what are we doing around the table when we have different ages and different family members. So that’s in a second. But I understand how important it is to talk about the world before and the Jewish civilization that we had and lost. But I do want to ask and push on this also, is there a value in talking about the Holocaust itself or in acknowledging and owning the fact that there are scary moments in being Jewish, and that there are persecutions and there is a vulnerability,

Morgan: I mean, I think there’s, we’re parents. We want to protect our children. We want to keep them safe. We put them in car seats. We put sunscreen on them. But I think that it’s about their own Jewish identity. And do we want their identity to be rooted in fear or do we want their Jewish identity to be rooted in pride and in passion and love for amazing food and language and so many different things. 

I mean, I guess the question is so unique to each family because what does it mean to be Jewish in your family and for so many families that is so deeply interwoven with the history of the Holocaust.

Masua: I mean, we talked about four year olds and six year olds, but I do want to enter into the conversation what I see. I mean, my older kids are 13 and 10. They hear around them a lot of kinds of conversations and they read the news, and, 

Josh: It’s like, they hear things where you like, don’t think that you’re like, how did you hear that, but if I ask you to put dishes away, that’s like, they don’t hear.

Masua: Oh, yes. And then they bring it home. So how, I mean, I would love to not let fear control my Jewish identity, although even if I would want Jewish identity in my family to be, like prosperity and the amazing Jewish world that existed before they hear things, whether from their grandparents or from their schoolmates or from what they read, and then, how do you navigate the fact that they hear about it. They hear about growing anti-Semitism. 

Morgan: I’ll say this. You know sometimes we think that only dark lessons can come from the Holocaust, but I actually want to flip that over. Through my work at Jewish Family and Children’s Services, we have a group of 3GSF, kind of like people from their twenties until their forties who are descendants of the Holocaust and identify as the third generation. 

And we have a lot of conversations around this and one of them is about resiliency and how we don’t just want to talk about the stories of suffering that get passed on from generation to generation. But like, what did our grandparents teach us about resiliency? I always try to reinforce what’s being beautiful and special about being Jewish. But then also talk about, there are risks in the world, whether you’re crossing the street or whether you might be in a space where people around you don’t know what being Jewish is, and they might have a lot of questions.

Josh: This is helpful in thinking about my eldest who made these statements of anxiety. Cause like, we were hanging out with some friends and she was like, well, every Jewish holiday is about someone came to get us,  you know, the old joke of like everyone’s out to get us, we survived, let’s eat. And I was like, that is not true. That is a reflection of you being a post-Holocaust American Jew. And I said, you know, like, there’s this essay by David Hartman, “Auschwitz or Sinai,” which he writes, in 1982, in relationship to like Israel’s existential questions that come out during the Lebanon war in which he’s like, do we want Auschwitz to be our defining characteristic? Or do we want Sinai, meaning, Jewish victimhood or Jewish creativity?

When you were speaking, Morgan, of like the Holocaust can also teach all these positive things, I was thinking about when she got off the bus after Yom HaShoah. And she said, oh, we heard from a Holocaust survivor, a woman she knows in our community and she and her best friend are like, this was fascinating. And did you know, she did this and this is what Holland was like before the war and during the, it was just an opportunity to see, like, she wasn’t scared. She wasn’t afraid. She was like, wow, this person in my life is really important and has this profound experience. And I want to know more and being able to say, yeah, there are moments that are scary. 

Maybe I’m overly allergic to Jewish victimhood, is one of the things you’re pointing out, because those moments in which we have been victims are also opportunities to think about a larger narrative, a set of affects that we want our kids to encounter, being resilient, being resourceful, being, experiencing joy and pain. It’s a helpful shift for me.

Morgan: It’s also interesting, I mean, think about, let’s go back to the Yom HaShoah, right? That’s how this conversation began. In Israel, they often use the whole term,

Masua: Yom HaShoah, V’Hagevurah, basically being a hero. So it’s both Holocaust Day, yeah, how would you say it?

Josh: Day of heroism? It speaks to the difference also between Yom Hashoah and like international Holocaust Day, right? Yom HaShoah is tied to the, 

Morgan: The Jewish calendar. 

Josh: And the uprising of the 

Morgan: The Warsaw ghetto.

Josh: Warsaw ghetto, as opposed to just being like, sort of Jews, 

Masua: Yes, but that’s also a national like Zionist narrative, that for years, didn’t let the survivors talk about what happened there, because

Josh: Can’t be weak.

Masua: Only, yeah, you have to be strong 

Morgan: It was a story of the partisants, a story of the resistance. And, but I’m just, I talk about how in Israel often the full name is used, but in the United States, you know, almost 90% of all programming, it’s Yom HaShoah. Which community kind of gravitates to which narrative. If you go to Holocaust museums all over the world, each one is very unique.

So if you go to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in DC, they built it to establish you to look at it through the lens of the US Army liberation, that’s that’s first what you see. If you go through Yad Vashem, you’re looking at it through the perspective of the survivors who first came to Israel. And in Germany, I mean, I would say they do it a little bit different.

Josh: Germany it’s like for influencers and posting on Instagram.

Morgan: Well, Germany actually has so many, it has more Holocaust memorials per square foot in Berlin than anywhere else in the world, but, and they have so many different perspectives. But the reason I bring this up is it’s like we, as parents have this opportunity to what lens do we want? Do we want, you know, like these museums have decided the lens. What name do we use? Do we use the shorter version, Yom Hashoah? Do we use the longer version, which is more common in Israel? We have a little bit of a control of the lens. Like kids will hear stories all the time, whether we’re talking about COVID, whether we’re talking about sex education, whether we’re talking about the Holocaust and we as parents have that opportunity to say, what are we going to pick out from this and continue the conversation.

Josh: One of the things that you’re reminding me of is there’s this desire to keep our kids safe. And the over-desire to keep our kids safe means they actually never get to experience the world. We don’t want them growing up in a bubble. We want them to be exploratory. Some of us have more willingness to be adventurous or not, but we want them to become independent actors in the world. And yet how can we minimize risk and allow them to be experimental individuals who engage the world?

And that requires recognition that there are sad things and there are scary things and your parents will keep you safe. Your family cares about you. I think what feels particularly hard about Holocaust and Jewish vulnerability and as kids get older, I think these days, they’re more aware of the sort of rising antisemitism that’s happening in America and globally. So like how those both may influence one another, but not necessarily be confused.

Masua: We also live in a world and an environment, which is what, I go back to what I said before. The world we grew up in and the world that our kids grew up in are really different worlds, both in the sense of the distance from the event itself, but also the moral and ethical world that we live in right now, and I’m talking about American Jewry, is a world where the vulnerable is usually perceived as the moral and the powerful is usually perceived as the immoral.

And there’s something almost convenient in picturing yourself as the vulnerable, because then it’s a bit easier not talking about your responsibility as the powerful, and that’s also something that we need to balance and, and we need to keep, I mean, when our kids go back home, or when we are talking inside our home about persecution and about the Holocaust, there’s also a challenge not to stay there and to also talk about the fact that we are privileged and that we have responsibilities in the world and to try to hold both being powerful and being vulnerable.

Morgan: I’m really glad that you brought up that point because I think we have to decide as parents, what is our goal for introducing the Holocaust? Is it to share our family history? Is it to inspire them to be morally responsible, socially strong, and empathetic human beings? Is it to make them feel connected to the Jewish community? Is it make them feel proud of Israel? There’s so many different, it could be more than one goal, but I think that that’s really important. 

And I’ll end with just one story, which is, in my job, I have the opportunity to have many Holocaust survivors in my life. And I have, I’ve been working with the Holocaust center for 16 years. And I know this moment in time is very precious and I’ve, you know, they’re passing each year at a time and I want my daughters to know these significant and special human beings that are in my life. I’m not ready for them to know the dark history, but I bring them to meet these survivors and we visit with them and we bring them challah on Shabbat, and we do things and I take pictures all together.

And when the time comes, I will share with them these pictures and show them, you met this person. This is their story. And so I don’t feel pressured to have the survivor tell my 16 year old who’s in kindergarten her Holocaust story, but I do feel pressured to have them connect and build a relationship. And that moment in time, I hope will carry her forward when we live in an era where there are no Holocaust survivors with us anymore. 

Josh: So, Holocaust education is something that happens in Jewish schools and in American schools. When we’re thinking about navigating, not only the scary parts of the Holocaust, but thinking about formal education and what happens in educational institutions that our kids go to, there are a range of concerns and a range of questions we have as parents. I think for me, I’m often thinking about, what is the story being told? And also, how much is this being told about it’s a Jewish story? How much is this being told around, well, this happened to a number of people? And to what extent is this a metaphor for other things, or is this a area that we should be thinking about? 

Masua: And also I can just tell you, I mean, there were a few years when I wouldn’t send my kids to school on Yom HaShoah, back when we were in Israel, because it was so graphic. I feel like we need to understand better, not just as educators, but as parents as well, what are some of the way to educate our kids about the Holocaust.

Morgan: It’s a really great question. I’ve had this question come through my door for now almost two decades. I’ve been with the Holocaust center now for about 17 years. And I think we have to ask ourselves, are we asking how the Holocaust should be taught for Jewish students? Are we asking what is the responsibility for us as members of the Jewish community? Are we asking what our expectations are for the schools and for the superintendents and the principals in helping to set the beat of this drum. 

So there’s kind of many different approaches to this, but I think it goes to, the first question is how do we introduce it? And what is the appropriate narrative? I’m going to talk for a moment first about the public school setting, because at the JFCS Holocaust center. We work primarily with public schools. It’s a reflection of the population in which we live.

Josh: Most people are going to public schools. 

Morgan: Yeah. And that’s who we serve. And I think that it’s really complicated to be a Jewish student in a public school or in a secular school classroom.

I mean, my daughter’s in kindergarten and she’s one of two Jewish kids in her class. And so what does that mean for her and when a discussion of Jewish history, whether it’s Holocaust or otherwise, comes up, do the teacher and the students look towards her? So, no, they’re not teaching the Holocaust in kindergarten, but I say that just when a conversation comes up around a celebration of Chanukkah or something like that. 

Masua: Is it mandatory? Do you need to teach the Holocaust at schools? I know that in New York in one of the regulations it’s in there, but?

Morgan: It’s a really good question. So there are about 14 states in the country that have some type of a legislation or a mandate. It looks differently in every state. In California, we were actually one of the first states to create a mandate, it was done so in 1985, to teach Holocaust and genocide. The language of that mandate has gone through a great evolution since that time. 

And actually we’re upon a really exciting era because governor Gavin Newsom has just established a governor’s council on Holocaust and genocide education. So that’s actually taking it to the next level. And for the first time in California state history, they’re putting funding behind that mandate, because the mandate was in many ways a guide, but it isn’t included on the state testing and it was never funded. So you’re expecting teachers throughout the state of California, as our case study, to carry out this mandate with no training. And if their school district wanted to provide training, the school district didn’t necessarily have any funds to do so. 

So you’re asking a lot. So a lot of the teachers throughout the state of California are referring to their own high school knowledge about the Holocaust to teach. And for many teachers it’s been quite some time since they’ve been in school. And so going back to what you mentioned in Israel, this kind of traumatic exposure to the Holocaust with, you know, graphic images or film footage and things like that.

Masua: Which is changing, I should be fair. I mean it’s changing in Israel also. 

Morgan: It’s constantly changing and the way that we learned about the Holocaust and the way that now, you know, the children are learning about it, who are in middle school and high school state is very different. 

The Holocaust center here in San Francisco, when I joined was in the Federation building. We were in the lower level, and the security and the building was often run by Israelis and the Israeli guards they would call me and say, there’s your package, yoy have mail. And I would say, okay, can you bring it down? And they, and they never wanted to come downstairs. And I asked them when I came in, once, like, why don’t you bring the package downstairs? 

We don’t want to see what’s in the Holocaust center. And I was like, why what’s there to see? And they thought, well, you’ve got pictures and film footage, and I’m like, no, it’s like, we have books on the walls. And it was a very interesting moment of what it meant for these individuals who grew up in Israel and what they associated a space the teachers about the Holocaust. 

So, but back to our question on what they’re learning in school and what’s mandated, is I think that some teachers will take a paragraph from the Diary of on Anne Frank, and then move on. Like they take it from the history book and then that’s it. And check, we’ve included the Holocaust. Some teachers will spend a month, with a deeper study on the Holocaust and include survivor testimony and whatnot. 

Josh: So you, you said, and this is instructive, you said, oh, it’s about Holocaust and genocide. And those feel like both two interrelated concepts, but also two very different concepts. I grew up as like a good Reform Jews, so we didn’t talk about 6 million Jews. We talked about 11 million people who perished during the Holocaust. The Holocaust feels like a moment in time and event. 

But genocide, there are a lot of genocides. So how do you navigate sort of the unique story of the Jewish people in these public school classrooms and as a parent trying to talk to schools. Is this about the Jewish story or is this about a larger goal of, we often hear of like, oh, so it won’t happen again. And I’m like, good luck with that. Like, there are genocides all the time. So how do you navigate the, sort of the particular and the universal?

Morgan: My approach towards teaching the Holocaust and to teaching genocide is to focus, not on a hierarchy of suffering, but to focus on uniqueness. And I believe that the Holocaust was absolutely a unique event in history as was the Cambodian Genocide, as was the Armenian Genocide, as was the Rawandan Genocide. I try not to create this tug of war of who suffered. more, that in one event, people were killed at a faster speed, and in another event people were killed by the government, in another event. I mean, I think you could exhaust yourself. 

We look even at the Holocaust itself. Was the experience for those who were in Poland worse than those who were in Hungary, than those who were in Germany?

Josh: It just seems like the worst Jewish question or like, oh, you were in Hungary? I was in Poland!

Morgan: I’ll tell you what, I mean, in the years when the Holocaust Center was kind of a meeting place of survivors and they would come and they would have coffee and bagels and hang out, it would be a constant tug of war of a hierarchy of suffering, I’m just being honest.

Masua: But I think this is also very Jewish.

Josh: Right.

Morgan: But I’ll tell you, it’s really interesting. So to think about the Jewish students in a public school classroom when all of a sudden, if you turn in the history book and it comes to World War II. And depending on who the teacher is there maybe an hour, a week, a month in a study of the Holocaust, how does it feel to be that Jewish student in that classroom at that moment who maybe, you know, like in my children’s case, of one or two Jewish children in our classroom? 

And it’s a really complicated moment because for many Jewish students in the United States, they’re formally introduced to the Holocaust first, either at home, if it’s part of their family history or if their family chooses the religious school path. And so when I went to religious school, I feel that it Holocaust wasn’t taught in a historical way. It was like, this happened to us. It was terrible. We were victims and it was very emotional. There was no like, Hitler was voted in as chancellor. There was no historical context. It was just a lot about the drama behind the Holocaust. 

And then all of a sudden, there’s that student who learns about it in religious school, in that context. And then they’re sitting in their public school classroom, and the teacher teaches about it as a moment in history. And that one student might feel as part of the Jewish community really torn. Here’s my teacher teaching about the Holocaust, not with emotion, but like they taught about World War I. Like they taught about you know, the French Revolution.

And I think that that’s really complicated for our Jewish students, because they think why isn’t this taught in a different way? Why isn’t their emotion top behind this? And then you, I’ve talked to many of our teachers who feel, I have a Jewish family in my classroom. What do I do with this? Am I going to offend them, am I saying the right thing?

Josh: Right. It’s also like the assumption in America is I think that Jews are European and like, especially in California, the like variety of Jews, there’s a huge Persian community, there’s a huge Israeli Mizrachi community, there are Jews of color. It’s just like a, such a, there’s like the Russian immigrants from like the nineties from 1990s.

So like the notion of like, the turning to the Jewish family or turning to the Jewish student and be like, well, now it’s your turn. And it’s like, wait a minute. And so like, I’ve seen both examples of like the, the like emotionless or the like, oh, Masua, you’re a Jew. Tell us about the Holocaust.

Morgan: And it’s really complicated cause it’s lot. And you have families who don’t identify in the school setting. I mean, antisemitism is real. And there is a fear factor. And we live in a bubble here in the Bay Area, but there are many Jewish families all over this country who do not self identify in a space like the public school that they are Jewish. And that’s a real thing as well. 

So how might it feel for a Jewish student in a classroom where they are not publicly identified as Jewish and, and now there’s a discussion of the Holocaust. So it’s a constantly complex moment. The Holocaust is often introduced, kind of in middle school, seventh and eighth grade in a public school classroom. It’s traditional, I should say, that it’s introduced through reading of Night or The Diary of Anne Frank. 

And what I often say to the teacher is send a letter home or an email or whatever, at least four weeks ahead of time to let the families know We’re entering into this unit of the Holocaust. We’re going to start it on March 1st. These are the books we’re going to read. This is the film we’re going to watch. This is what we’re going to talk about. Cause I explained to the teachers, you don’t know who’s in your classroom. They may be Cambodian refugees with a story that connects to genocide. They may be Jewish. They may be of any background. This is a very sensitive topic and families need heads up. 

Masua: Also connected to this. I mean, we also live in an era where there’s a lot of use in the language of Nazis or symbols. I mean, we seee here in the United States, we see in the Ukraine war, a lot of youths in terms like notification, so it is a moment in time, a story that may be the Jewish people’s story or a universal story, but it’s also deeply connected to the culture and the world we live in. 

Morgan: Just like the word ghetto, right? You know, I mean, are we, when we say the word ghetto in the Jewish community, your mind goes directly to the Warsaw Ghetto, perhaps, but the word ghetto means something very different as, 

Josh: In the American context. 

Morgan: Yeah, and as an adjective. And I think that it’s complicated. And we want to think about also in a public school setting, how to ensure that the Jewish people are not only connected to the story of the Holocaust. And that’s something, you know, often we get calls at the Holocaust Center, whether it’s a parent or a faculty member at a school that says, you know, my son or daughter is in second or third or fourth grade, can we have a Holocaust survivor come and speak? 

Josh: Worst recess ever. 

Morgan: And, you know, often it’s hard because if I, if I come right out of the gate and I’m like, no, then you can imagine the conversation. It’s not going to necessarily be that successful. What I want to do in that moment is, thank you for being an advocate on your campus for expanding the curriculum. Thank you for being a parent who’s involved. It’s most often the parents let me be honest. 

And what I try to do is I want to show them the arc in an opportunity. And sometimes it’s just easier to do in an independent school than it is to do in a public school because the constraints are on curriculum. are A little bit more fluid is how. Elementary school these early years to lay a foundation. How is Judaism taught? When is world religions taught? What do the students know? So that we’re laying this foundation of understanding who the Jewish people are before we arrive at the events of the Holocaust. 

And I find that to be really crucial and I explained that, you know, acknowledging Chanukkah, it’s acknowledging the Yiddish language. It’s acknowledging the various different traditions and the contributions of the Jews to society and the world around them, especially in Europe.

Josh: You’re saying in, particularly in the European context, given that the Holocaust is primarily related to Jews in Europe.

Morgan: Exactly. Right. In a perfect world, of course, we’ve been learning about Jewish communities all over the world, but we have to be realistic of like how much real estate in the school curriculum they’re going to spend on this.

But my goal is, and I say, is that, I don’t like to tell a story, unless you can tell it all the way through. So for example, when we get to fifth grade and sixth grade, what are the lessons we want to start with? It’s often the lessons of the Kindertransport. It’s the lessons of hidden children. Because I always say, don’t introduce a topic unless you’re ready to tell the beginning, middle, and end.

Like, for the example, the story of Anna Frank, right? Yes. She was, you know, a young girl in hiding and we can relate, many kids can relate to her and to her trials and tribulations of being an adolescent. But when your child asks you, well, what happened to her? And you say she was sent to Bergen Belsen and people say, well, what’s Bergen Belsen? And then you say, well, that was a place I’ll tell you about later. Like that’s not the greatest end to the story of introducing. So I would say, don’t start with the story of Anna Frank, if 

Josh: It’s not, it shouldn’t come with a cliffhanger. You need to know the boat sinks. 

Masua: I have to tell you, this always bothered me the fact that the, when my kids learn about, almost the first thing they learn is about kids’ experience in the Holocaust. And I mean, first of all, it terrifies me because, you know, it takes me to places which I don’t want to be as a parent. And the second one, it makes them relate. Why do we want them to relate to I mean, I just, I don’t 

Josh: Yeah, but there’s something about play that’s important. Like, I remember distinctly being nine years old and going to the JCC after school and then a friend and I would like run around and pretend we’re hiding from Nazis. Like there’s some element of like, when you, 

Masua: No! Did you?

Josh: Yes, cause that’s what the world of play does. It allows you to work out sort of your anxieties and your concerns and 

Morgan: I guess the question is how were you introduced to the Holocaust? But that could be a conversation for another time. I mean, I think all of us were introduced in a different way. I was a child. That was very, 

Josh: I, yeah, like, clearly this was important. How did you get into it? 

Morgan: I mean, it is not part of my family history. I’m a fourth generation San Franciscan. I tell the story that my mom gets a call from the school librarian when I was in fourth grade. And the librarian says, we’re really concerned with Morgan. And she says what’s wrong? And she goes, she only checks out books on the Holocaust. And my mom said, oh, we know, she’s read everything at home. She’s now onto the library. And that was really kind of the beginning. And for me, I, I was passionate. I found every opportunity. I studied Righteous Among the Nations in my seventh grade term paper. I studied post-traumatic stress disorder in Holocaust survivors. And senior year in high school, continued on with my studies and into where I am today. 

But I think. You know, if, if I was advising my own mother, right. I would have said don’t, you know, let’s, let’s scale it back. Let’s think about what kind of books, you know, you want to introduce to your daughter. 

Masua: Can you explain why, though? Why start with something that they can relate so much to? I mean, I know that my seven year old, when he was I mean, two years, ago, he was stressed by it, 

Josh: Right, so maybe a five-year-old,

Masua: Yeah, probably, he shouldn’t, he shouldn’t, be exposed to it 

Josh: There’s not like a good, five year old, PJ library picture book. 

Morgan: You actually know what my favorite book is for, you know, there’s a book, 

Masua: No butterflies in the ghetto.

Morgan: No. And I went in, I wouldn’t introduce that, you know, what I would read, you know what I read to my, to my kids at that age? Too Many Latkes. It’s a story about Chelm. It’s a great story about Chanukkah, because I want to introduce Jewish society in Poland, and Chelm, as you know, as you guys know, is, has a great, humorous story to it. Like Chelm, not, hell no. like, we need to, we need to make that division and what’s appropriate. 

And so it’s not that I think teaching about from the children’s perspective is appropriate just because they’re children. I think that we want them to be able to see through the eyes, but we still want to make sure that even if it’s a child, who’s the protagonist in the story, that the story is still age appropriate. And that’s why I don’t believe that you, at the age of 10, you know, I look at actually the B’nai mitzvah year, I think 13, when you become adult in the eyes of the Jewish community, that that’s actually a turning point to when you can look at more mature approaches to Holocaust. But before that age, I really feel strongly that, read a story that you can look at the beginning, middle, and end, which is like the Kindertransport.

Josh: Let me go back. The moment you said, oh, I would have suggested to my mother doing something else, which is to say for those of us as parents who may, you know, occasionally get involved in our kids’ schools and may send emails or make phone calls. I never do that. No, no, no.

I’m wondering, like, what are the set of questions that we would want parents to lift up in the eyes of teachers in the eyes of administrators, like what are great questions to ask a school about the concerns of teaching Holocaust and genocide in educational settings. 

Morgan: I would ask the question in a non-judgmental way, at what age, if you can capture that tone in your email, how does the school approach teaching the Holocaust, at what age, and how is it taught? Essentially as a building block, like what’s taught before. And I would ask the question, when does the study of Judaism, is it in world religions, at what age? Because that’s a conversation, my daughter’s in a K-8 school right now, and I’m having the conversation with them of how can we lay the building blocks in the younger grades to prepare them for learning about the Holocaust in middle school. 

So, and I would also say, how are the teachers supported in their study of the Holocaust and in their preparation? Because I think that it’s so important that the teachers feel confident and comfortable in that space as much as you can when teaching about Holocaust or genocide, and that the teachers continue to be supported. And, in a, again, in a nonjudgmental pushy way, you know, could you connect them with resources in the community? They can connect with us at the JFCS Holocaust center, with the ADL, with Facing History, with the USHMM, depending on where you are in the world. There are so many resources available. And I think that it’s a lot to sort through and a lot to decipher. 

And as much as we can try to support the teachers who have this job of shaping. our youth, and also communication, to allow it to be, I mean, one of the beautiful things that came out of the pandemic and virtual education is that so many of our survivor testimonies are now on Zoom. And now we invite the parents. And I really believe when we’re addressing antisemitism in our society, that it has to be a holistic approach. If you want to make change, you can’t just do workshops for students. You have to start the conversation first with the school administrators, then with the teachers and the faculty empower them and give them the resources, then to do work with the students and also to do family education.

Because if you work and the conversation starts in the classroom and continues to the dinner table or the backseat of the car, or wherever families are talking, that then we can really address anti-Semitism and hate and empower our youth to be socially responsible and empathetic individuals. 

Masua: Beautiful. 

Josh: Thank you for,

Masua: Thank you, Morgan. 

Josh: Great ending. 

We’re ending each one of our episodes with a sort of on one foot lightening round question that each of us have to answer challenging questions about God, religion, life, philosophy that our kids ask. How do you answer it, on one foot? You got one answer, really quickly. You ready?

Masua: No. 

Morgan: Who’s going first? 

Masua: Not me, 

Josh: Morgan. You’re going first. Great. Okay.

Friend wrote in and asked my child turned to me and said, do I talk to God? And what do I talk to them? about? What do I answer them? 

Morgan: I would say, what are you passionate about? What do you need answers to? What can nobody else answer for you right now? 

Masua: I’m going to take your answer and ask them back. Do you want to talk to God? Why do you want to talk to, God? And you basically, you can feel free. You don’t even have to talk, because whatever you feel, is your conversation with God. 

Josh: Nice. I’ll say my standard answers. I do talk to God. I have a siddur, but I also just open up sometimes. And for me, I open up, I say whatever I want, but there’s also a standard statement of open up my heart, which I say a lot of times when I just know I need to be more empathetic and sympathetic to the people in my life, especially my spouse and children who, occasionally, although very rarely,  might have, get challenged by. So I need to open up my heart. So I would tell my kid, I say, open up my heart. I say that over and over again. 

Masua: I didn’t understand that you’re asking if we’re talking to God, I thought that you asked, 

Morgan: What should they say to God? 

Masua: Yeah. 

Morgan: Which I felt in a way, just to like, I, wasn’t going to say this in the moment, but like, does my child believe in God? Do I believe in God? Like, you’re kind of making the assumption with the question that both parties believe that there is a God.

Josh: The kid says to you,

Masua: No, no, it’s okay. Yeah. Child, you are assuming that I believe in God.

Josh: My child said to me, do you talk to God, and what do you say?

Morgan: No, because I didn’t understand that you were saying

Masua: Because you said I, when you quoted the kid.

Josh: So Morgan, your child says to you? Do you talk to God? And what do you say to them? What would you say? 

Morgan: I would say that sometimes I ask questions to a greater power sometimes, and most often I ask questions to myself. And most of the time I ask questions to your father and those questions are different depending on the day, depending on the moment. And depending on how I’m feeling, always continue to ask questions. 

Josh: Masua, your child turns to you and says, do you talk to God? And what do you say? How would you answer? 

Masua: Yes. Both as different prayers and, at times, what I feel is my conversation with a God. 

Josh: Nice. So I would say yes, I talk to God, sometimes with a siddur, and I have this statement, I say, which is, open up your heart, because that’s something I’m trying to work on. And the last thing, obviously, is I’d turn it to them. and say, what do you talk to God, do you talk to God? What do you talk to God about? 

Morgan: Thank you guys. Thank you.

Masua: Thank you, Morgan.

Josh: We’ll be in touch, hopefully only for positive things. 

Masua: Thanks for listening to our show. 

Josh: Perfect Jewish Parents is a production of the Shalom Hartman Institute, where we tackle pressing Jewish issues facing Jewish communities, so we can think better, and do better.

Masua: You can check out our world-renowned faculty, free, live classes, and events at shalomhartman.org. 

Josh: Our producers are Jan Lauren Greenfield and David Zvi Kalman. 

Masua: This epsiode was edited by our production manager, M Louis Gordon.

Josh: And our theme music is by Luke Allen. 

Masua: Maital Friedman is our vice president of communications and creative. 

Josh: This is a new podcast, so help us get the word out. Hit subscribe, and also rate the show.

Masua: If you have ideas for an episode, parenting questions, or if your kids asked you a question you want us to answer, send us an email to [email protected].

Josh: Thanks for listening, and we’ll see you next time.