SPECTOR
7
God on the Gallows
God on the Gallows: Reading the Holocaust through Narratives of
Redemption
Karen Spector
University of Alabama
“Where is God now?” is a question from the Holocaust memoir Night by Elie Wiesel and an
underlying narrative dilemma for the teachers and most student participants in this qualitative
study of three Holocaust units in secondary English classrooms in the Midwestern United States.
Using a narrative theory framework, this study explores how religious narrative frames are used
by participants to construct Jews and the Holocaust through their readings of Night, and more
generally how students wield such narratives in their pursuit of meaning. Also informed by the
work of Holocaust scholars, educational researchers studying shifting narrative identity, and those
studying the nexus of civic pluralism and religious framing, I build a bridge from which to view
the ways participants constructed meaning about the Holocaust and the implications for teacher
candidates, teachers, and teacher educators. Given that Holocaust literature such as Night and
Anne Frank: Dairy of a Young Girl are now canonical texts in English classes throughout the
United States, and given that lessons of tolerance or civic pluralism are often expected to accompany the reading of this literature, throughout the paper I discuss the affordances and constraints
of the narratives that students in this study used. I end by making recommendations for classroom practice.
Our cultural frames of reference and our preexisting categories which delimit
and determine our perception of reality have failed, essentially, both to contain,
and to account for, the scale of what has happened in contemporary history.
—Felman & Laub, 1992, p. xv
I sat in on the following dialogue between eighth graders in a small group
discussion of Night (Wiesel, 1982), a memoir about Holocaust survivor Elie
Wiesel’s experiences in his home town of Sighet, Transylvania and in Nazi
concentration camps. In the transcript below, students discussed whether or not
Elie in the memoir lost his faith because of his traumatic experiences (“Elie” is used
to denote the boy in the memoir while “Wiesel” is used to denote the author).
Research in the Teaching of English Volume 42, Number 1, August 2007
Copyright © 2007 by the National Council of Teachers of English. All rights reserved.
c7-55_Aug07RTE
7
7/18/07, 12:11 PM
7
8
Research in the Teaching of English
Volume 42
August 2007
HAWTHORNE: No. [Elie] was like gaining his religion in Sighet with Moshe.
[Moshe] was teaching him to be wiser, to be with God and stuff. He was
really faithful. Then when he started going to concentration camps, he was
like, “Where is God now?” He’s like, “If God were real and protecting us, we
wouldn’t have to come here.” So basically, he was like, “Screw that!” Especially that point where he sees God on the gallows, when they hung the
boy.
ELMER: Oh yeah. He was like, “God is here! We will be saved!”
HAWTHORNE: It means that God is dead, stupid idiot.
STELLA: It does?
HAWTHORNE: I can’t work with these people!
This interaction between Hawthorne, Elmer, and Stella (all participant names
were self-selected) demonstrates two conflicting interpretations of the same
murder in Night (Wiesel, 1982). As punishment for a suspected “crime,” and to
serve as a warning to the other prisoners, the SS publicly hanged a young boy at
Buna (a sub-camp of Auschwitz) while the concentration camp inmates were
forced to watch and then file past the gallows. Because the boy was so small, his
weight on the rope did not immediately kill him; instead, he slowly suffocated over
the course of half an hour. When Elie looked at the boy, he still saw evidence of life,
and someone in line behind him asked, “Where is God now?” Elie thought,
“‘Where is He?’ Here He is—He is hanging here on this gallows . . . ” He then added,
“That night the soup tasted of corpses” (Wiesel, 1982, p. 62; ellipsis in the original).
Just as Elie did in the memoir, students in this study regularly pointed out God’s
place in the Holocaust. Hawthorne believed that the boy’s murder pointed to
something like the death of Elie’s belief in God, while Elmer believed that God was
in the midst of the suffering and was up on the gallows bringing salvation to
Holocaust victims. Elmer’s reading produced a redemptive trajectory of the
memoir.
Religious narratives that mediate meaning have not been closely scrutinized
within the common practice of reading Holocaust literature in the public schools.
My data show that the pull to read the Holocaust through narratives involving
God nearly always caused participants to blame the victims—implicitly or explicitly—for their own suffering. This finger-pointing stood in opposition to one stated
goal that the teacher participants had for studying the Holocaust in the first place:
to increase tolerance for diversity. I argue in this paper that the meanings most of
the participants constructed about the Holocaust had more to do with their existing religious identity commitments than about any new way of understanding,
valuing, or seeing particular others in a dialogic manner (Bakhtin, 1981; i.e., increasing their tolerance for others). In this way, I tend to agree with Novick (1999)
who believed that we take away from the study of the Holocaust only what we
c7-55_Aug07RTE
8
7/18/07, 12:11 PM
SPECTOR
9
God on the Gallows
bring to it, yet I soften that argument to account for possible shifts in narrative
identity (in the sense used by Ricoeur, 1988) that can occur through an encounter
with the history and literature of the Holocaust in public school settings. Students
may emerge with new understandings that don’t “impoverish,” “decompose,” “ignore,” or “overcome” (Bakhtin, 1993, p. 64) the atrocities of the Holocaust by reference to existing “cultural frames” and “preexisting categories which delimit and
determine our perception of reality” (Felman & Laub, 1992, p. xv). But it is difficult terrain to tread in public schools.
Just as the Holocaust itself is a monstrous example of what can happen when
human beings are socially positioned as inhuman (pieces of wood, shit, and parasites), this article explores an example of how readings of literature and historical
events can socially position others in harmful ways. My hope is that by viewing
narrative frames as meaning making tools, pre-service teachers, English and history teachers, and teacher educators will gain a new perspective on the complexity
of enlisting literature in the project of tolerance, diversity, or multicultural education.
Framing the Holocaust
Narrative Frame as a Theoretical Construct
The idea of “narrative frame” undergirds the conceptual space from which I
observed the Holocaust units. A narrative frame is a sociocultural conception that
mediates meaning (See Barton & Levstik, 2004;Bruner, 1991; Wertsch, 1998, 2002).
It may make some information salient and other ideas and details insignificant,
straining out, as a gold miner would, the dirt in search of precious metal. A
narrative frame provides a window to the outside, an aperture that may embellish,
distort, or obscure from view that which would otherwise be seen differently
through another window. This theoretical “narrative frame” is not solitary, but
may coexist with other and even conflicting frames, any one of which is more or
less mutable in its constitution, its transience or stability affected by one’s level of
commitment to it and the degree to which one is aware that it is a tool. According
to Ricoeur (1988), the narrative identity of a person or group is ever changing,
allowing for a considerable amount of agency over time. Changes occur as one
rectifies one narrative to a preceding one (Ricoeur, 1988). The degree of mutability
within frames or the degree to which one can substitute one frame for another
depends upon the threat to individual or group identity commitments that
various events pose (Wertsch, 2002). Zealous commitment to particular narrative
frames creates impatience with ambiguity, resistance to change, and the need for
improvisation (see Holland, Lachicotte, Skinner, & Cain, 1998; Novick, 1999;
Seixas, 2000; Wertsch, 2002).
In the next section I explore how narrative framing and narrative identity
have explanatory power over the way some English education and critical literacy
c7-55_Aug07RTE
9
7/18/07, 12:11 PM
10
Research in the Teaching of English
Volume 42
August 2007
researchers have described the shifting identities performed in and out of the classroom, especially in connection with class, gender, and racial or ethnic differences.
Because religious perspectives have been left largely untouched in the arena of
critical literacy, I then provide a general view of how widespread religious narrative frames are in the U.S. and how they may conflict with civic frames. This then
builds the bridge to two examples of religious narrative framing within scholarly
work on the Holocaust (Felman & Laub, 1992; Schweber & Irwin, 2003) and the
religious framing of Night itself (Novick, 1999; Seidman, 1996).
Frame Shifting
Multicultural literature, of which Holocaust literature may be considered a subset,
is often expected to “help children identify with their own culture, expose children
to other cultures, and open the dialogue on issues regarding diversity” (Colby &
Lyon, 2004, p. 23). However, while dialogue might be expected, past research has
shown that European Americans often resist entering new cultural worlds (Beach,
1997; Singer & Smith, 2003), and teachers often avoid “dangerous” topics like race,
class, politics, and religion (Black, 2003; Glazier & Seo, 2005; Haynes & Thomas,
2001; Morrison, 1992; Weiss & Fine, 2000, 2005). As these researchers would argue,
simply supplying students with a multicultural pageant of literature is not
sufficient to establish dialogue about issues of diversity and inclusivity.
Many literacy scholars attempt to explore (and disrupt) hegemonic discourses
related to sociocultural positions, such as class (Hicks, 2002; Jones, 2006a, 2006b),
gender (Alvermann, Commeyras, Young, Randall, & Hinson, 1997; Dutro, 2001/
2002, 2006), and race (Beach, Parks, Thein, & Lensmire, 2004; Enciso, 1997, 2003;
Lewis, Ketter, & Fabos, 2001). These authors, and many like them, probe the way
schools (and the naturalized language practices in them) are complicit in reinforcing the economic and political status quo. Their work with critical pedagogy
provides examples of how teachers and students negotiate frame shifts. For example, Hicks found herself making “border crossings” (frame shifts) between
middle class and working class subjectivities with Laurie, a participant in her ethnographic study. Alvermann et al. found that one teacher participant in their study
did not feel comfortable pointing out how language “can reinforce stereotyped
thinking about one’s worth as a man or woman” (p. 96), while another participant
in the study seemed to be reinscribing gender differences even as he tried to disrupt them (unwillingness or uncertainty about how to bring about frame shifts).
Beach et al. found that the students in their study “varied in the degree to which
they addressed issues of race and affirmative action” (p. 25). One student in the
study, Corey, rejected the idea of institutional racism because it flew in the face of
the narrative of individual achievement (no frame shift). On the other hand, another participant, Devin, learned to consider institutional racism when critiquing
affirmative action policies (narrative frame as tool). Critical pedagogy and class-
c7-55_Aug07RTE
10
7/18/07, 12:11 PM
SPECTOR
11
God on the Gallows
rooms committed to social change might have been necessary for beginning a
critique of hegemonic discourses, but they were certainly not sufficient in effecting change or even awareness in all participants.
Religion as a Narrative Frame
While research exploring frame shifts in and out of English classrooms has been
plentiful, religious frames have not been so ardently pursued in our schools.
Religious frames, like other frames, are orienting worldviews shaped by language
within communities of practice (Geertz, 1979; Hall, Koenig, & Meador, 2004;
Peterson, 2001). It is important to note that U.S. citizens, in all of their class, race,
and nation-of-origin diversity, are religious, especially compared with members of
other developed countries (Haynes, 2001). In international public opinion polls,
the U.S. is repeatedly within the top three nations whose citizens say that they
believe that God exists, there is life after death, the Bible is the actual word of God
and should be taken literally, hell and Satan exist, and heaven and religious
miracles are real (see Bishop, 1999; Wuthrow, 2005). According to Roof (1999),
nearly 90% of Americans attend religious services. So why isn’t there more
teaching (and research) on how religious frames mediate meaning in public
schools? Noddings (in an interview with Halford, 1998/1999) gave two basic
reasons: a) “The primary fear is rooted in a mistaken view of the Constitution” (p.
29; i.e., that the First Amendment forbids teaching about religion); b) “A second
issue is ignorance. Many educators are not well educated about religion” (p. 29).
Additionally, I would add a third issue, which is likely a result of the first two
concerns: fear of controversy (even if the teacher does not transgress the important
“separation of church and state”).
As mentioned earlier, narrative frames can conflict with one another. This
conflict adds yet another layer of complexity. For example, narrative tools accepted
as “American”—freedom, progress, tolerance, equity (Barton & Levstik, 2004)—
do not always simply coexist with religious frames that may be more exclusionary
in nature (Nord, 1995; Wurthrow, 2005). While looking through a civic lens, it is
possible to believe that there should be equal protection of individual and group
rights under the law, and it is even possible to peacefully coexist with people whose
beliefs are at odds with your own, to the benefit of the common good; however,
when an exclusionary religious lens is sistered to a civic one, it is also possible to
wave a cheery “good morning” to a neighbor leaving for work while at the same
time believing that she will burn in hell for her wrong beliefs. One lens positions
the neighbor as a co-citizen, the other as a sinner. Wuthrow (2005) argues,
There are two discourses—two languages—in which people are accustomed to speaking, and these discourses often become entangled and confused. The language of civic
pluralism is pervasive. It is essentially a language of rights and tolerance. We emphasize
in this discourse the legal way of looking at things. When confronted with people of
c7-55_Aug07RTE
11
7/18/07, 12:11 PM
12
Research in the Teaching of English
Volume 42
August 2007
ethnic or religious backgrounds different from our own, we assert that of course they
should have the right to live wherever they want, attend public school, vote and do
whatever they want to as long as it does not threaten the public safety . . . All this is well
and good, contributing to the core culture that holds us together and permits us to live
in relative harmony. But it does not always coincide perfectly with our understandings
of religion. (p. 310)
This is the nexus that my research explores: how religious frames for understanding the Holocaust may implicitly or explicitly subvert goals of civic pluralism. I am
not advocating that Holocaust literature be used to teach such lessons; I am
exploring what happened in cases in which the literature was used in this way.
Many studies were designed to examine lessons of tolerance and increases in
ethical reasoning as outcomes of Holocaust study, but the studies did not look at
the way these “lessons” were discursively constructed through the positioning of
particular Jews, “the Jews,” or the Holocaust more generally (Bardige, 1983, 1988;
Brabeck, Kenny, Stryker, Tollefson, & Stern-Strom, 1994; Facing History and
Ourselves, 1993; Lieberman, 1981, 1986; Schultz, Barr, & Selman, 2001). Thus, for
example, students may report that they learned about the importance of multiple
perspectives (or other lessons) and still think Jews brought the Holocaust upon
themselves.
Reading the Holocaust through Religious Frames
Schweber and Irwin (2003) specifically looked at how religious narratives affected
teacher and student construction of the Holocaust. They conducted their research
in an English classroom in a Christian fundamentalist school in the Midwest. For
this Holocaust unit, the teacher participant chose to read The Hiding Place (ten
Boom, 1984), which is the story of a Christian woman who helped to hide Jewish
victims of Nazi policies and who ultimately became a concentration camp
survivor. The teacher participant explained to the class that Christians should
believe that Jews are God’s chosen people, but that God “also allowed [Jews] to be
hunted by enemies” because, it is implied, “Jewish people rejected Jesus” (p. 1704).
“Belief ” is the pivotal word here: Christians should believe and Jews failed to believe
by rejecting Jesus. Schweber and Irwin (2003) concluded that:
The importance of belief in these students’ lives, their fundamentalist Christianity and
its accompanying narratives, shaped their historical understandings so thoroughly that
other explanations for persecution during the Holocaust—such as biological racism
(Burleigh and Wippermann 1991) or Church-based anti-Semitism (Carroll 2001), economic depression or modern functionalism (Bauman 1991)—were ‘occluded’
(Wineburg 2001), rendered invisible as possibilities. (p. 1708)
It is impossible within the confines of this article to survey the debates regarding the causes and explanations of the Holocaust from Christian, Jewish, and
non-sectarian scholars (see Bauer, 2001; Burrin, 1994; Carroll, 2001; Dawidowicz,
c7-55_Aug07RTE
12
7/18/07, 12:11 PM
SPECTOR
13
God on the Gallows
1975; Goldhagen, 1996; Hellig, 2003; Hilberg, 2003; Katz, 1983; Littell, 1975; Penslar,
2005; Rubenstein, 1996; Rubenstein & Roth, 2003; Ruether, 1979; Schleunes, 1970;
Soulen, 1996; and Wistrich, 1996). It seems clear that for religious Christians and
Jews, some explanation of God’s inaction in history during the Holocaust is sought,
and this is often complicated by beliefs of some Christians that Jews are the chosen people of God or are responsible for the death of Christ (Rubenstein, 1996).
To elucidate some of the potential difficulties that may occur when Christians
construct meaning about the Holocaust, I will briefly explore a small section of a
chapter from Felman and Laub’s (1992) Testimony.
Felman (Felman & Laub, 1992) used Lanzmann’s film Shoah (1985a) and the
text from the film (1985b) to explore the incommensurability between the perspectives of bystanders (in this case, Catholic Poles) and the lived history of Jews.
At first the Poles were happy to see Holocaust survivor Srebnik as he returned to
Chelmno in the 1970s (a village in Poland and formerly the site of an extermination camp). They remembered the 13-year old boy with a sweet singing voice—a
boy who had witnessed the burning of asphyxiated (or nearly asphyxiated) fellow
Jews. The Poles were glad he survived; yet when Lanzmann asked the villagers to
“remember [when] Jews were locked in this church,” the Poles remembered from
within narrative frames that bore false witness to the events (Lanzmann, 1985b, p.
97). The Polish witnesses claimed to have heard Jews praying to Jesus and Mary
from within the church as they suffered from heat and hunger and awaited their
murder by means of vans equipped to asphyxiate them with gas. The witnesses
remembered that they had heard of the gold and treasure that Jews hid in the false
bottoms of cooking pots. They remembered that they had heard of the rabbi who
thought that the Holocaust was punishment from God for the Jewish role in the
death of Christ. In other words, they remembered that Srebnik’s fate was on his
own head and that they were completely absolved of complicity. Felman argued
that these witnesses “forged” the witness of others:
Thus the Poles misrepresent, once more, the Jews from the inside and the objective
nature of the Jewish destiny and slip, once more, across the boundary line between
reality and fantasy. They unwittingly begin again to dream reality and to hallucinate
their memory. In testifying to a murder which they go as far as to call suicide, the Poles
bear once again false witness both to the history of Nazism and to the history of the
Jews. (Felman & Laub, 1992, p. 264-265)
Felman goes on to write about “the (historic) silence of the church” and “the silence
of all given frames of explanation, the nonspeech of all preconceived interpretative
schemes, which dispose of the event—and the bodies—by reference to some other
frame” (p. 266). Felman and Laub (1992) show that these Poles framed Jewish
suffering from within their own Catholic perspective (they prayed to Mary and
Jesus), from the millennia-old narrative of Jews as Christ killers, and from the
narrative frame that places blame for the Holocaust on Jewish greed (gold hidden
c7-55_Aug07RTE
13
7/18/07, 12:11 PM
14
Research in the Teaching of English
Volume 42
August 2007
in the false bottoms of pots). The tendency to dispose of people by reference to
some narrative frame does not help build a reflective pluralistic society.
Even Night Is Framed
Before moving on to the methods, one more instance of narrative framing should
be considered: the framing of Night. Seidman (1996) argued that Night, in the
original French and in subsequent translations, was influenced by Francois
Mauriac, the Catholic Nobel Laureate who encouraged Wiesel to write the
memoir. Mauriac’s own redemptive reading of the Holocaust and his view of
human suffering may have influenced Wiesel to suppress the rage that the young
survivor expressed in what is arguably the first edition of Night, Un di velt hot
geshvign (And the World Remained Silent) (Seidman, 1996). Seidman further
argued that this Yiddish memoir fit its intended audience—fellow Jews—while the
French “mythopoetic narrative” is better suited to meet the needs of a gentile
audience who would be less likely to read a text that pointed an accusing finger at
the world that kept silent (p. 5). She makes clear that “the interpretation of the
Holocaust as a religious-theological event is not a tendentious imposition on Night
but rather a careful reading of the work” (p. 1), a work in which “Wiesel established
channels of communication between Jewish survivor and Christian theologian
while rendering the Holocaust harmless for Catholic pieties” (p. 16). In another
critique that speaks to the framing of the memoir, Novick (1999) argued that the
iconography in Night surrounding the hanging of the young boy panders to a
heavily Christian reading public that seeks a redemptive story. Wiesel “angrily
objects” to mention of fictionalized elements, and he maintains that Night is a
testimony of actual events (Wyatt, 2006).
Summary of Narrative Framing
I have pulled together various threads in the literature dealing with how narratives
are tools consciously or unconsciously used to construct meaning. Scholars
looking at non-Jewish audiences found that constructions of “Jews” and “the
Holocaust” were influenced by religious identity commitments brought to bear as
people remembered the events of the Holocaust (Felman & Laub, 1992) and as
people read and discussed ten Boom’s memoir The Hiding Place (Schweber &
Irwin, 2003). They found that Jews were positioned in ways that blamed them for
their own suffering. Seidman (1996) and Novick (1999) argued that Wiesel
anticipated that identity commitments would influence readings of the Holocaust;
thus they argued that Wiesel constructed his memoir purposely to attenuate
possible points of narrative disconnection (Jewish rage) and to introduce possible
points of narrative connection (the gallows as a sign of suffering and redemption).
Informed by the work of these Holocaust scholars and the work of those studying shifting narrative identity in relation to other social positions, my study explores how religious narrative frames are used by participants to construct Jews
c7-55_Aug07RTE
14
7/18/07, 12:12 PM
SPECTOR
15
God on the Gallows
and the Holocaust through their readings of Night, and more generally how students wield narratives in their pursuit of meaning.
Methods
I chose a qualitative “interpretative case study approach” (Merriam, 1998) for this
research because it was important to immerse myself in the day-to-day life of
classrooms exploring Holocaust literature, something missing from many Holocaust education evaluation studies. Within each case, I focused on how students
constructed meaning about Night and the Holocaust through implicit and explicit
religious narratives.
Contexts
This research took place across two contexts within a large metropolitan area in the
Midwest. Adams Junior High (a grade seven-eight junior high school) was the site
of two data collection periods—one in fall 2003 and the other in fall 2004. River
Hill Academy (a grade nine-twelve high school) was the site of a third data
collection period. The two schools were separated by 20 miles of Interstate
Highway and by considerable demographic differences. The Black to White ratios
at Adams and River Hill were the inverse of one other: Adams was 1% Black and
98% White, and River Hill was 98% Black and 1% White. Adams was largely
middle class; River Hill was largely working poor (see Table 1). Only a few students
at Adams thought that there was racial inequity in the metropolitan area while
nearly all students at River Hill were able to discuss personal inequities they
suffered based upon the color of their skin. Students at Adams were given the
option of taking accelerated courses; students at River Hill were all in inclusive
classrooms. Students at Adams, particularly in the accelerated program, were given
a tremendous amount of freedom in how and when they would complete their
assignments. The same was not true for students at River Hill.
These are broadly drawn categories of difference (race, class, classroom instruction), and I mention them not because I think they stand in for “thick” descriptions of the sites, but to make the point that from within these different contexts, more than 90% of the participants self-reported a striking demographic
similarity—Christianity.
TABLE 1. Context Information by Site
Site
Adams 2003
River Hill 2004
Adams 2004
Location
Outer Suburb
City
Outer suburb
Free/Reduced Lunch
3%
60%
3%
Class
Largely Middle
Largely Working Poor
Largely Middle
Race
98% White
98% Black
98% White
c7-55_Aug07RTE
15
7/18/07, 12:12 PM
16
Research in the Teaching of English
Volume 42
August 2007
Adams Junior High
Adams Township was a largely White, middle class community. Some people who
sent their kids to Adams lived in million dollar homes, but most maintained more
modest dwellings. Not knowing where to look in the community, it would have
been easy to by-pass the families who struggled economically, the families that
made up the 3% who qualified for free or reduced lunch. A shortcut to Adams
Junior High that squirreled between an amusement park and the football field,
however, gave the traveler a view of the Township not in harmony with the middle
class status that the statistics suggested. Tiny, formerly white, dilapidated shacks
line this street (and others like it). One such home, I came to find, would often have
a small arrangement of things for sale in the driveway: baby toys and a small table
one day, a power tool and clothing another.
The school itself was a mixture of 1960s and 1980s styles of architecture, testaments to the growth that Adams Township had seen in the past. With no more
room to build in Adams Township, the school population never changed much
from year to year. The district was small, but it earned the highest academic honors from the state.
Unlike their counterparts at River Hill, students at Adams were not particularly aware of tensions between Black youth and the police in the city. For example, in a discussion about discrimination in the city in 2003, the following exchange took place:
MRS. PARKER: Are there any groups, not religiously, but just any groups that
may be discriminated against?
TRIP: I think we are a good wholesome city. If you were talking aboutHOWARD: As weird as that sounds, I agree.
MRS. PARKER: You think because we are a good wholesome city people don’t
have prejudice?
TRIP: Not the majority of people. Back in the 50s or 60s, then maybe you’d find
prejudice against African Americans, but in this area I don’t think like right
now there is any major prejudice against any one group. I think there is
maybe 4 or 5 people who are prejudiced against, like Jews.
Whereas the majority of students at Adams in 2003 concurred with Trip’s
assessment that there was no discrimination in the city, in 2004, the talk of race and
social class turned on the argument that individuals had agency to better
themselves (not denying discrimination, but explaining it).
ANNABELLE: We didn’t put [Black people] there in the poor side of town. Everyone can work to get an Abercrombie shirt, or sweatshirt, or whatever. Ask
Dirk, he isn’t discriminated against. Are you?
c7-55_Aug07RTE
16
7/18/07, 12:12 PM
SPECTOR
17
God on the Gallows
DIRK: I have Abercrombie shirts, if that’s what you mean.
CLASS: [Laughter]
The one Black participant at Adams, Dirk, never spoke out loud about discrimination (he artfully avoided Annabelle’s real question above), but he wrote about it in
papers he turned in to me (e.g., “I’m Black and I get a lot of prejudice all the time”).
River Hill Academy
Twenty miles down the Interstate Highway from Adams Township was the River
Hill section, a large community only a few miles from the business center of
downtown. The area included a university, hospitals, several high schools,
businesses, and a variety of residences. The housing choices in River Hill included
HUD developments, student housing, tidy rows of bungalows, and historic
million dollar homes.
There were two “good” high schools in the city district and anyone in the
district could apply to them. One school received the state’s highest honors for
academic achievement, and River Hill received the second highest honors, with
strikingly high achievement rates compared with most other district high schools.
If students didn’t succeed at River Hill Academy, they were relegated to schools
that received the state’s lowest rating.
Fierce stone lions guarded the entrance of the historic River Hill Academy;
inside, the hallways crafted with beautiful wood wainscoting led to classrooms
with wood floors and built-in cabinetry. Many of the teachers at River Hill graduated from the school twenty or thirty years earlier, and teachers and students alike
expressed pride in their school.
While the community itself was racially and socioeconomically diverse, River
Hill Academy attracted 98% Black students and had a free and reduced lunch rate
of 60% (though the principal told me that if everyone filled out the forms, it
would be more like 75%).
The larger metropolitan area to which both communities belonged has been
the site of considerable racial tension over the past 30 years. The students at River
Hill spoke of the racial discrimination within the larger city and specifically within
the schools. In general, they saw that schools like Adams were more well-supplied
and well-funded than their own school. On the other hand, only two participants
at Adams thought that there was discrimination of any kind within the larger
metropolitan area. Students at River Hill were able to articulate the way that being
Black affected their experience of the world, including work, policing, housing,
and schooling inequities. An example from an interview I conducted with a student towards the end of the Holocaust unit demonstrates the way that racism
affected one boy’s life on a daily basis.
c7-55_Aug07RTE
17
7/18/07, 12:12 PM
18
Research in the Teaching of English
Volume 42
August 2007
LOGAN: [This town] is one of the most racist places on earth. It’s like Sighet
[where Elie Wiesel lived before he was deported to Auschwitz].
KAREN: The police?
LOGAN: If it’s not the police, then it is somebody stereotyping. If it isn’t somebody stereotyping, then it is a dirty look. If it isn’t a dirty look, then it is a
foul gesture.
KAREN: And these are all things you have personally experienced?
LOGAN: These are things I personally experience every day. I was racially profiled in front of my own house last year.
Instead of painting the students at River Hill and Adams with only broad strokes
of “Black” and “White,” I want these data to demonstrate that the labels stand in for
embodied experiences of race that seem critical in forming perspectives about self
and others. Trip and Howard demonstrate one perspective on racial discrimination (it doesn’t exist); Annabelle represents a different perspective (race and class
differences are a function of individual effort); and Logan’s perspective, one shared
by most male participants at River Hill, is that racial discrimination against Blacks
is the central motivating force in his experiences with Whites.
Participants
Adams
Mrs. Parker. Mrs. Parker, the Advanced English teacher at Adams who welcomed
me into her classroom in 2003 and 2004, was known throughout the community
as an excellent and demanding professional. At the time of the study, she had nine
years of teaching experience. I first read about her in a newspaper article describing
(and praising) the Holocaust unit she conducted with her 8th-grade students. We
met to discuss my study, and she agreed to open her classroom to me. So interested
was she in the summarized data I presented to her in 2003, she asked me to come
back to co-teach the unit with her in the following year.
Mrs. Parker was White, middle class, and Christian. While it may satisfy curiosity to know how to classify Mrs. Parker, the labels themselves simply can’t convey her embodied knowledge of the world and how it shaped her motivations for
teaching a unit of Holocaust literature, nor do I pretend to paint a full picture
here. Her story includes a Holocaust “awakening”—a particular point in time when
she became aware of the Holocaust, and it became a transformative learning experience for her. In my first interview with her in the fall of 2003, I asked what
drew her to this topic. She mentioned the young adult novel Number the Stars
(Lowry, 1989), which was her first encounter with the Holocaust.
I don’t even remember studying [the Holocaust] when I was in school. Not in high
school. Not in elementary school. I never. And then, once I read that book, I started
c7-55_Aug07RTE
18
7/18/07, 12:12 PM
SPECTOR
19
God on the Gallows
becoming more interested in the whole history of what happened, so I started just delving into it on my own. You know, reading different books and watching different videos
. . . That’s what made me want to teach it. (Mrs. Parker in 2003)
At the most basic level, then, Mrs. Parker chose to teach Holocaust literature
because through it she had moved from a state of not-knowing to a state of
knowing, and she wanted to replicate that experience for her students. In the same
interview I asked her what her goals were in teaching the Holocaust literature unit.
Increasing tolerance was one objective. Speaking of 8th graders in general, she
explained, “It’s just amazing to me that tolerance is something that they don’t seem
to have a whole lot of.” She contextualized this by saying,
I want them to maybe stand up for themselves and also stand up for other people who
are being persecuted for whatever reason. Um, I think that sometimes junior high can
be the cruelest age. They are so mean to each other. And even if they learn nothing else
than to say to someone, “Knock it off,” or you know. (Mrs. Parker in 2003)
Mrs. Parker, like many teachers of multicultural and Holocaust literature, expected
(hoped) tolerance would be an educational outcome. In the following year, when
I was sharing data with her about students’ religious responses to the Holocaust,
she added her theodicy.
I think what fascinates me is on a daily basis, sometimes things happen and you think,
“Oh, you know, why does God let that happen?” I can’t imagine. I often wonder if I had
gone through something like the Holocaust, would I still believe? Would I still have that
strong faith? It amazes me that some people are able to have experienced that. And I
think, “Would I be that strong? Could I be that strong?” I often wonder about that.
(Mrs. Parker in 2004)
Teaching Holocaust literature was not mandated by the state, so Mrs. Parker’s own
Holocaust awakening, her desire to make her students aware, the hope of
increasing tolerance, and a mixture of religious meditation appeared to be the
impulses behind engaging her students in the material.
MRS. PARKER’S STUDENTS. I invited all of Mrs. Parker’s students to participate in the
study, and most of them decided to do just that. In 2003, she taught three classes of
eighth-grade Accelerated English with a total of only 47 students. Of those
students, 46 (98%) agreed to participate in the study (see Table 2). In 2004, Mrs.
Parker taught two classes of eighth-grade Accelerated English with a total of 52
students; this time 45 students (87%) agreed to participate in the study (see Table
3). Of the 99 students in her classes over the two collection periods, 91 returned
assent and consent forms and agreed to participate. Of those 91, 47 were boys, 44
were girls, 1 was Black, 1 was Biracial, and 89 were White (see Table 4).
c7-55_Aug07RTE
19
7/18/07, 12:12 PM
20
Volume 42
Research in the Teaching of English
August 2007
TABLE 2. Class Members and Study Participants at Adams in 2003
Mrs. Parker’s Classes
Class 1
Class 2
Class 3
Totals
Class Members (#)
22
16
9
47
Participants
22
15
9
46
TABLE 3. Class Members and Study Participants at Adams in 2004
Mrs. Parker’s Classes
Class 1
Class 2
Totals
Class Members (#)
27
25
52
Participants (#)
21
24
45
TABLE 4. Adams Participants by Gender and Race
Adams 2003
Adams 2004
Totals
N
Site
46
45
91
Boys
28
19
47
Girls
18
26
44
Black
0
1
1
White
46
43
89
Biracial
0
1
1
River Hill
MS. FRANCE. I first learned of Ms. France, a 10th grade English teacher at River Hill
Academy, when I observed a student teacher that my university had placed at the
school. Ms. France was a highly regarded National Board certified teacher with
nine years of experience. As a middle class, White woman, she made the choice to
teach in a largely Black, high-poverty school because she wanted to make a
difference in the lives of city kids.
When we were discussing my research, she invited me to observe her class in
their upcoming Holocaust unit, the first time she would be teaching such a unit. I
was intrigued by the way that Ms. France explained her plan for parallel narratives: Civil Rights and the Holocaust. At the end of the unit, I asked her how she
thought things went:
KAREN: Looking back to when you were planning this unit, and we talked about,
well, actually you told me that you were thinking of doing a Civil RightsHolocaust thing. Did it turn out how you thought?
MS. FRANCE: I think that, um, my thought was to make it connect with the kids’
experiences and what they understand and know. And they know a lot
about the Civil Rights movement . . . so I wanted to make that leap to the
c7-55_Aug07RTE
20
7/18/07, 12:12 PM
SPECTOR
21
God on the Gallows
laws, um, dehumanizing Jews and, and I thought the string that attached
things was that White people in America and non-Jews in Germany let it
happen, let these atrocities go on.
Later in the interview she added, “I want them to recognize what their own
experience was like and see that in another person. And when you do that then
your tolerance of different groups increases.” It was Ms. France’s assumption that
her Black students shared a certain traumatic knowledge with Jews, particularly
dehumanization through the legal system, and that this linked the two historical
“events” and the peoples. Like Mrs. Parker, she hoped increased tolerance of others
would be the outcome of Holocaust study.
Religion also played a role in the way she read Night.
MS. FRANCE: When I first read this book was for my Paideia training. At the end
of the book and at the end of Flight of Arras [Saint-Exupery, 2000] too . . .
I just felt like the authors had just decided not to be religious. God is not
who you can depend on. You can depend on yourself to try to get through
things. I don’t read the books the same way. I sort of read it much more
spiritually now. I don’t know if I am more spiritual now or what.
KAREN: Can you explain that to me?
MS. FRANCE: Oh, oh, I because he does survive at the end and um, and I guess
because I know more about the author now that, that, ah, you know, his
religion is very important to him and just the peace-making things he’s
done. That tragedy has inspired him to greater things.
Ms. France acknowledged that the shift in the way she read Night was possibly
predicated on her increased spirituality, her knowledge of Wiesel’s spirituality, and
her belief that good ultimately came out of the Holocaust (“inspired him to greater
things”). Like Mrs. Parker, she clearly had a religious frame for viewing the
Holocaust along with a civic one.
Two other teachers at River Hill took part in the study, Mr. May and Mr.
Giacomo, but neither was a key participant. Mr. May taught history, and he and
Ms. France shared the same set of students. Mr. Giacomo, a resource teacher in the
school, took over Ms. France’s classes on one day when she was absent. Both teachers
were White men with over ten years of teaching experience. Neither man reported
his religious orientation.
MS. FRANCE’S STUDENTS. I invited all of Ms. France’s tenth-grade students to
participate in the study. Of the 70 students in her four English classes, 35 (50%)
ended up returning assent and consent forms and agreed to participate in the study
(see Table 5). Of the 35 students, 16 were boys, 19 were girls, and all were Black (see
Table 6).
c7-55_Aug07RTE
21
7/18/07, 12:12 PM
22
Volume 42
Research in the Teaching of English
August 2007
TABLE 5. Class Members and Study Participants at River Hill in 2004
Ms. France’s Classes
Class 1
Class 2
Class 3
Class 4
Totals
Class Members (#)
18
17
17
18
70
Participants (#)
7
4
8
16
35
TABLE 6. River Hill Participants by Gender and Race
Site
River Hill 2004
N
35
Boys
16
Girls
19
Black
35
White
0
Biracial
0
There were stark differences in the number of students who agreed to participate at Adams and River Hill. I attributed these differences in part to how I was
perceived by students within each setting. At Adams I was considered an insider,
but at River Hill I was perceived as an outsider. And I was an outsider. I lived in the
area surrounding Adams, not in the urban center where River Hill was situated.
Near the beginning of my study at River Hill, a student was reading an email to
the class that contained funny and slightly derogatory statements about Whites;
as he read, the class laughed but then turned en masse and looked at me. I suspected that they were trying to gauge my reaction, so I smiled to acknowledge that
I too thought the email was funny. This kind of dynamic, no doubt, had an impact
on the data that I was able to collect at that site, is a limitation of this study, and
should be taken into consideration when reading the findings.
Participants by Self-Reported Religious Preference
One hundred fourteen of the 126 student participants in both contexts selfreported a Christian religious orientation; of the other 12, five were agnostic/
atheistic (three at Adams in 2003, one at River Hill, and one at Adams in 2004), one
Muslim (at River Hill), one Jewish (at Adams in 2004) and the other five didn’t
reveal their religious preference (see Table 7). The Jewish student didn’t respond
through a religious narrative, so he is not represented in this paper. The Muslim
student responded once in a way that might be religious, but I wasn’t able to
interview this student to clarify her meaning. She is not represented in this data set
either. Table 7 does not include the teacher participants; two were Christian (Mrs.
Parker and Ms. France) and two didn’t reveal their religious orientation (Mr. May
and Mr. Giacomo).
c7-55_Aug07RTE
22
7/18/07, 12:12 PM
SPECTOR
23
God on the Gallows
TABLE 7. Student Participants by Self-Reported Religious Orientation
Adams 2003
River Hill 2004
Adams 2004
Totals
Agnostic
Site
2
0
0
2
Atheistic
1
1
1
3
Muslim
0
1
0
1
Jewish
0
0
1
1
Christian
39
33
42
*114
Unreported
4
0
1
5
Participants
46
35
45
126
*Many different Christian denominations are represented in this number.
Researcher
Like both Mrs. Parker and Ms. France, I am White, female, middle class, and
Christian. Also like them, religion played an important part in my understanding
of and response to Holocaust literature. I had read many historical accounts of the
Holocaust and watched many movies, beginning with the NBC miniseries
Holocaust (Chomsky, 1978). In the fall of 1999, I curled up in the big white chair in
my living room with a copy of Night and read it for the first time in one sitting. I
remained in the chair for hours afterwards, slumped over, intermittingly weeping,
trying to make sense of what I had just read. Wiesel’s words kept coming back,
“Where is God now?” This question became for me both a demand for a reckoning
of God’s historical whereabouts and a solemn entreaty that my view of an orderly
universe was still a possibility. Years later, I have no satisfactory answers, only more
questions and reflections, mostly about the human capacity for cruelty and how
we come to position others as unworthy and deserving of such cruelty. This
experience was with me when I began this study, throughout which I found myself
continually in the process of drawing near to and then holding at a distance the
familiar religious narratives I heard from my participants. As I observed, I watched
for the tears, the philosophical and theological questions, the extended reflections.
Curricula
Adams
Although Night is the focus text of this article, it was only one of several texts Mrs.
Parker’s students read (for a breakdown of all texts used at each site, see Table 8).
Mrs. Parker had her students read Night at home alone and respond in a journal
after every 30 pages. She collected these journals on the day that they began to
discuss the text as a class. She read over the journals to make sure they were done
and occasionally made comments about the form of the writing (“check your
spelling,” “this isn’t one page,” and “good use of quotations”). She commented on
c7-55_Aug07RTE
23
7/18/07, 12:13 PM
24
Volume 42
Research in the Teaching of English
August 2007
TABLE 8. Texts Used at Each Site
Text
Adams 2003
Diary of Anne Frank (Goodrich & Hackett, 1994)
X
River Hill
Adams 2004
X
Excerpts from The Definitive Edition (Frank, 2001)
X
Clips from Anne Frank (Dornheim, 2001)
X
Night (Wiesel, 1982)
X
Maus II (Spiegelman, 1991)
X
X
X
X
Sunflower (Wiesenthal, 1997)
X
Holocaust poetry (different at each site)
X
X
Local Holocaust museum
X
X
X
X
Holocaust survivor speaker (different at each site)
X
Contemporaneous Holocaust unit in history class
X
Swing Kids (Manulis et al., 1993)
X
Clips from Life is Beautiful (Benigni, 1997)
Clips from Schindler’s List (Spielberg, 1993)
X
X
Clips from Night and Fog (Renais, 1956)
X
X
the content by agreeing (“me too,” “I agree,” and “good point”), but only twice did
she respond with questions regarding the content of the journals, and both times
it was in response to students blaming Jews for remaining in harm’s way (“What
could they have done?” and “You seem to be blaming Elie. What could he have
done?”). Since these weren’t dialogue journals, students didn’t write back their
answers to these questions. They simply moved on to the next assignment.
In the classroom, she usually had students work in groups to answer questions based upon the text. The groups would report back to the class as a whole
and a discussion would ensue. These classroom activities were not graded. Students also researched a Holocaust topic from a limited set of choices and reported
their findings to the whole class. In addition to a written research report, students
also completed a creative project that extended their learning (see, for example,
Kylie’s picture, Figure 1).
River Hill
At River Hill, Night was the main Holocaust text for the unit, and it was the only
common text across all three data collection periods. Ms. France assigned one
chapter at a time of Night as homework, and she required her students to complete
a study guide for each chapter. Going over the study guide served as the basis for
classroom activity during the unit. She also asked students to respond to pictures
about the Holocaust and relate them to Night. Ms. France’s trajectory for the unit
was to show students that Civil Rights and the Holocaust were parallel narratives
c7-55_Aug07RTE
24
7/18/07, 12:13 PM
SPECTOR
25
God on the Gallows
FIGURE 1. Kylie’s (Adams Junior High in 2003) painting of a member of the
Einsatzgruppen killing a Jewish woman in the foreground, masses of huddled Jews in
the background, and a strong beam of sunshine in the middle ground.
and that studying the dehumanization of a “different” group would lead to
tolerance. In pursuit of this goal, she had students compare the Jim Crow Laws and
the Nuremberg Laws, and she had them write a letter to an official, using Night as
a reference point, in an effort to bring about change in some social injustice.
At the same time students were reading Night, they were also in the midst of a
unit on WWII in their history class. Their history teacher, Mr. May, lectured on
the Holocaust, showed them many historical pictures (including the ones students responded to in Ms. France’s class), and had them watch the four-part film
series Final Solution (Kuehl, 1993). At the end of the English unit, students engaged in a Socratic seminar in which they were encouraged to share their own
feelings, thoughts, and questions about the Holocaust. This was one of the few
times that students were able to direct their own discussion; other class discussions were determined by the study guide questions and led by the teacher.
Data Collection
Systematic Observation
While I observed the full length of the three Holocaust units during my 11 months
of fieldwork, only a portion of each unit focused on Night or activities that were
extensions of Night: At Adams in 2003, this consisted of 27 observational hours; at
River Hill, 140 hours; and at Adams in 2004, 24 hours.
c7-55_Aug07RTE
25
7/18/07, 12:13 PM
26
Research in the Teaching of English
Volume 42
August 2007
At Adams in 2003 and River Hill, I observed from the side of the classroom
during whole group activities and walked around the room visiting each table
during individual writing time or small group discussion time, stopping to listen,
ask questions, and write field notes. At Adams in 2004, I took a more central role,
fully participating in the classes and even teaching many classes.
Field notes consisted of descriptions of and reflections on the settings, participants, curricula, and events at each site. In addition to field notes, I audiotaped
many of the classroom activities. Across the three observation periods, I collected
44 decipherable large group discussions lasting from 10–60 minutes each and 34
decipherable small group activities/discussions lasting from 10–30 minutes each:
5 from Adams in 2003, 8 from River Hill, and 21 from Adams in 2004.
Field notes and transcriptions were typed up nightly when possible, but I
usually used weekends to catch up with this work. When I taught classes, I wrote
up my field notes by the end of the day, using my lesson plans and “in the midst”
notes as guides to my “after the fact” notes (Power & Hubbard, 1991, pp. 106-107).
Interviews
At the beginning and ending of each unit, I conducted an audio taped interview
with the English teacher. These one-hour interviews covered topics related to how
the teacher planned the unit, why she taught the Holocaust, what she hoped
students would learn from studying the Holocaust, as well as her critical reflections
on the unit once it was completed. I similarly interviewed Mr. May at the end, but
this was a secondary source of data only used to contextualize the primary data
collected from Ms. France’s classes.
For students, my interview strategy was adaptive. Across the three observation periods, I conducted 73 interviews with students: 14 at Adams in 2003, 36 at
River Hill (four students were interviewed twice: Logan, Jerome, Kate, and Keniya),
and 23 at Adams in 2004. Interviews generally lasted from 10–40 minutes and
included questions about students’ general impressions of the Holocaust unit,
particular texts they read (including Night), and comments they made in class or
in written artifacts. These questions were largely “opinion or values questions”
(Patton, 2002). Students were chosen for interviews based upon the following criteria: the need to clarify or member check data I had already collected, student
availability during non-instructional times, and an attempt to reach theoretical
saturation by accessing as many students as possible within the limited time of the
Holocaust unit. Additionally, I conducted many one- or two-question “spot” interviews to ask about some aspect of class that day (e.g., what a student meant
about a particular comment she made).
Artifact Collection
For Adams in 2003 and 2004, I collected all written work pertaining to Night. This
included four journal entries for each participant, literature webs, and group
c7-55_Aug07RTE
26
7/18/07, 12:13 PM
SPECTOR
27
God on the Gallows
posters based upon questions about the text. I also consider in this data set research
papers on a Holocaust topic and extension projects (e.g., clay models, paintings).
At River Hill, I collected study guide questions for each participant over each
of the nine chapters in Night, essays they wrote comparing the Jim Crow Laws and
the Nuremberg Laws, papers they prepared for their seminar discussion of the
Holocaust unit, and a final essay to a community leader. I also collected answers to
picture prompts from the United States Holocaust Memorial and Museum
(USHMM) website that Ms. France had the students write about.
Data Analysis
The purpose of this study was to understand how students constructed meaning
about the Holocaust in English class through cultural narratives that informed
their identities. Analysis began while I was in the field and continued as I typed up
the field notes, transcribed the audio tapes, and read over the written artifacts
multiple times. I used “open coding” (Strauss & Corbin, 1998) in my initial passes
through the data at Adams in 2003. These initial codes often led me back to the
classroom to engage students or teachers in interviews, confirming or contradicting my analyses, leading me to new or more nuanced insights in my reading of the
data. The broad theme “religious responses” became an area of exploration early in
my field work at Adams in 2003. Field work at River Hill confirmed that students
in different contexts responded to the Holocaust through their religious beliefs.
This same pattern held true at Adams in 2004.
Following the end of field work, I reread all the data, specifically looking for
all religious responses suggested initially by the use of words from religious registers (e.g., God, faith, belief, Bible, hell, Satan, Christ killer) and the narratives that
I already saw emerging from the data. I found scores of religious “stances” or beliefs that students expressed in the data (see Table 9). Working through various
ways to categorize the stances, I settled on labels suggestive of larger storylines to
which the beliefs belonged: 1) there is a supernatural struggle of good against evil;
2) there is a roadmap to redemption that people ignore at their peril; 3) God
redeems or condemns Jews through what happened at the cross. These narratives
were not mutually exclusive. Additionally, I coded “questioning the narrative of
redemption” when students struggled with how their already present religious
narratives failed to harmonize with what they read in Night (see Table 10).
In the third phase of analysis, I looked at the “language bits” (Gee, 1999) within
each of the narratives to explore how language reflected and constructed the narratives at the same time (see Bruner, 1990; Fairclough, 2004). I found that students used: pronouns (e.g., us, them) to signal religious identity commitments;
monolithic enfigurement of “the Jews” to place victims into a religious out-group
as opposed to a religious in-group; and, modals (e.g., should, would, could) to
indicate an appropriate pattern of behavior prescribed for or attributed to Elie.
I also looked at the way in which students carried on religious talk in school:
c7-55_Aug07RTE
27
7/18/07, 12:13 PM
28
Research in the Teaching of English
Volume 42
August 2007
TABLE 9. Students’ Religious Stances
God was in the midst of the suffering in the
Holocaust
God was in the little boy who was hanged in
Night
The little boy was a Christ figure
God saved the people at Auschwitz through
the little boy
God saved the Jewish people
Good wins out over evil in the end
Keeping faith is good
Elie was tested and passed the test
Being saved is good
God tests his children
God is good
Satan is evil
God saves
Satan destroys
Satan can inhabit people
Hitler is Satan
People can be good or evil
Nothing could cause me to lose faith
God is expected in the face of evil
Without God there is no hope
There is not much people can do to fight evil
God doesn’t seem to respond to evil in all
cases
Good wins out over evil in the end
“The Jews” are evil
Keeping faith is good, but Elie didn’t
Praying is good, but Elie stopped
Being saved is good
God tests his children; passing is good
The Bible is the proper roadmap for life
Focusing on God is good
Keeping hope is good
Hitler will be/is being punished by God
Losing faith leads to trouble
Jews didn’t have the proper beliefs
God abandons people if they lose faith
People abandon God when their faith is
tested
God tests his children; failing is bad
Elie did keep his faith
Questioning God is wrong
Satan is behind all the trouble in the world
Evil is inevitable
Jews killed Christ but it was God’s plan for
redemption
Jews killed Christ but God forgives them
Jews killed Christ and they deserve(d) to be
punished
Jews killed Christ and they deserve(d) to die
“They” believe Jews killed Christ
The Holocaust presents a religious paradox
hedges or hesitations (e.g., maybe, um, ah) that suggested the tentativeness of
using a religious “social language” (Bakhtin, 1981) in public school spaces and
firm declarations that suggested the confident use of language practices across
different contexts.
In the last phase of analysis I asked three questions of the data: 1) What examples best demonstrate the complexity of the narratives? 2) How do these examples of narratives-in-action construct meaning about Jews and the Holocaust?
3) Do these meanings support the goal of becoming more tolerant of diversity?
Based upon my analyses of the written and oral speech of religious responders to Night, in the next section I will explore the narratives used by self-reported
Christian students—from the “pew sitter” (as one student defined himself) to the
deeply committed believers who attended services several times a week and belonged to teen groups at their churches. Across the vast racial and socioeconomic
differences that separated the two schools, across the chasms that separate denominational ways of understanding Christianity, and across the facets that reflect idiosyncratic ways of words, I don’t mean to assert a continuity of beliefs
c7-55_Aug07RTE
28
7/18/07, 12:13 PM
SPECTOR
29
God on the Gallows
TABLE 10. Attributes of Narratives of Redemption
Supernatural
Struggle
Roadmap to
Redemption
Gallows Redeem
Cross Condemns
Questioning
Redemption
Main Actors
God, Satan, a
demonized Hitler
God, Elie, and Jews
God, the boy,
Christ, and Jews
God, Jews, the
students, others
Explanation
Variations
Satan caused the
Holocaust.
Elie failed to keep
his faith, which
caused his
suffering.
The boy on the
gallows was a
Christ figure who
could save the Jews.
Belief in a good
God and the events
of the Holocaust
present a paradox
for believers.
Satan possessed
Hitler, who caused
the Holocaust.
God let the
Holocaust happen
because Jews
questioned Him.
God doesn’t want
anyone to perish, so
he sent his son to
save the Jews.
God let the
Holocaust happen,
so God isn’t who I
thought he was.
God wants to
rescue and save
people.
Elie should have
focused on God’s
saving power.
Jews killed Christ,
but God forgives
them.
People saw the
Holocaust and let it
happen.
People are
powerless in this
fight.
God tests his
Jews killed Christ
people and some
or don’t have
people pass the test. proper beliefs, so
they deserved the
Holocaust.
Diffuses tough
questions about
human responsibility.
Allows students to
maintain their
beliefs in a saving
God despite the
horror of the
Holocaust.
Affordances for
Religious
Responders
Constraints for
the Diversity
Curriculum and
Civic Pluralism
The Holocaust can
be read
redemptively and
make sense.
Creates a space to
ask tough questions
about human
responsibility.
The horror of the
Holocaust is
explicable because
Jews killed God.
Potentially allows
students to use
“narrative frame” as
a tool.
Students and
teachers may not
know how to guide
students to new
narrative frames
without trouncing
values, religious
beliefs.
Doesn’t focus on
legal rights of
citizens or
responsibilities of
earthly governments.
By focusing mostly
on what Elie should
have done, this
explanation fails to
recognize 6 million
murdered human
beings.
The horror is
occluded by
focusing on
redemption.
Makes it seem
inevitable rather
than preventable.
Blames the victim.
Jews are characterized as Christ
killers.
Human perpetrators aren’t
implicated.
c7-55_Aug07RTE
29
7/18/07, 12:13 PM
30
Research in the Teaching of English
Volume 42
August 2007
beyond the very broad narratives suggested here, and it should be noted that while
I identify three narratives, I demonstrate that students take them up and appropriate them differently. I do mean to assert that these broad narratives, as instantiated in these contexts, largely undermined the project of learning to be tolerant
of diversity.
Findings
Students overwhelmingly used narratives of supernatural forces intervening in
human activity to impose order on the experiences of the Jews they read about (79
of the 114 Christian students or 69%). I found three major narratives, each
implicitly or explicitly invoking a redemptive telos: 1) there is a supernatural
struggle of good against evil; 2) there is a roadmap to redemption that people
ignore at their peril; 3) God redeems or condemns Jews through what happened at
the cross. The three narratives were not mutually exclusive but were interconnected for most students. For example, the belief in good-and-evil was often the
basis for the other storylines that students invoked. A fourth category includes
responses from students who struggled with their faith because of the new
information they were learning about the Holocaust. It should be noted that nearly
one third of the self-reported Christian students did not use narratives of
redemption to explain the Holocaust.
Supernatural Struggle of Good against Evil
Christian students—and only Christian students—read the Holocaust in ways
that set it up as a spiritual battle between forces of light and forces of darkness.
Although this isn’t only a Christian belief, it expressed itself as one in the data.
Without this underlying view of the world, implicit as it was for most students,
their other religious stances wouldn’t cohere. A limitation of this view is that it can
eclipse the call for human responsibility for the Holocaust by focusing upon the
supernatural actors: active Satan and active God. The purpose of teaching students
to be tolerant of diversity would be better served if human choices were not
concealed behind looming, otherworldly dispensations.
Active Satan
Students who believed in an active Satan thought that evil was unleashed on earth
through Satan himself or through a Satanic possession of a human being, usually
Hitler, who was frequently enfigured as the sole and demonic perpetrator of the
Holocaust. A simple example of this came from Ms. France’s class when Keniya
interjected the following during a discussion of Night: “Ain’t no reason nobody be
killing all them people except they possessed or something.” She was confident that
supernatural forces of evil were the impetus for human behavior. She indexed a
religious register through her use of the word “possessed,” and she did so in an
assertion that showed no signs of hesitation. While her assertion contained well-
c7-55_Aug07RTE
30
7/18/07, 12:13 PM
SPECTOR
31
God on the Gallows
founded outrage at mass murder, it tended to occlude other reasons for genocide
and distance the human perpetrators from their actions. When Keniya said this,
many students in the class nodded in agreement, a few called out “Amen” or “Uh
huh,” some laughed. Neither the teacher nor other students took up Keniya’s
statement for further discussion.
Another example from later in the unit demonstrated Satan’s jurisdiction over
the Holocaust. In response to a picture prompt that Ms. France gave her students
of Jews being marched to trains for deportation during the Warsaw Ghetto uprising (Figure 2), Shelaina wrote:
The Jews were being deported forced to take most valuable things with them and leave
everything else behind. My personal response is that at this point in time in the Holocaust is when the Jews were about to race into Hell, Hell with Satan himself standing
guard. This is the time that Hell was on earth and they didn’t even know it yet.
Despite the fact that the picture clearly showed flesh-and-blood men standing guard, Shelaina implicated only the supernatural Satan. She used the word
“Hell” (with an initial capital) three times in this short response. Using these words,
even if she were using them symbolically, demonstrated that she was calling upon
a religious frame to read and write about the Holocaust. Also notable, is Shelaina’s
choice of the monolithic “the Jews” to refer to the three female victims with inter-
FIGURE 2. Photograph taken between April 19, 1943–May 16, 1943 in Warsaw,
Poland. Credit: USHMM, courtesy of National Archives, public domain.
c7-55_Aug07RTE
31
7/18/07, 12:13 PM
32
Research in the Teaching of English
Volume 42
August 2007
locking arms at the head of the column, a move that collectivizes and distances
them. Like Keniya, she showed no tentativeness or hesitation in her response (a
response that could never be addressed by the teacher due to a family emergency
that kept her away from class for several days).
Mandie responded similarly to a different photograph that Ms. France asked
the students to explain. Figure 3 is a picture of two ovens in the crematorium at
Dachau. Mandie wrote:
This picture is the crematories where Jews got burned into ashes. In Night when Elie
first arrived in the camp they told that smoke came from crematories. The crematories
are the jaws of hell and are a symbol of the evil, Satan, and the demon Hitler.
Like the others, Mandie moved the actions that took place in and around
these ovens away from interpretation in human terms. Satan is the motivating
impulse and Hitler is his lackey “demon.” No other perpetrators are named; there
is no mention of the men who were busily herding Jews toward the trains (Figure
2) or the men who conceived of and built one of many crematoria (Figure 3).
FIGURE 3. Photograph of two ovens inside the crematorium at Dachau concentration camp
taken July 1, 1945. Credit: USHMM, courtesy of National Archives, public domain.
c7-55_Aug07RTE
32
7/18/07, 12:14 PM
SPECTOR
33
God on the Gallows
Instead, the students readily perceived Satan, possessing people like Hitler, to bring
about the events against “the Jews.”
I’ll finish this section with a more complex example of “Active Satan” expressed
by Lenore from Adams in 2003. Her faith partially shaped her view of Hitler as
demonic, but she also pushed against the narrative of Satan’s responsibility that
was authorized within her faith community. When I read her unit-ending research
paper, I saw the following (which went without comment from the teacher): “It
has been suggested that Satan killed all those thousands of Jews through Hitler.
Evil can’t penetrate things that are not evil, so I think Hitler had something to do
with it.” Lenore believed that “Satan” penetrated the body of Hitler because Hitler
already had a propensity for evil. She explained her thinking in a “member checking” interview with me later,
Well, a lot of people really can’t believe that somebody could do all this. Just one person
could control everything. And so a lot of people believe that Satan did it through Hitler,
but what I believe is that evil can’t penetrate where there is no evil. So Hitler was a
horrible person, and if Satan did do it with [Hitler], then [Hitler] was evil before and
Satan just made him more evil, like Satan just helped Hitler out. Like I don’t really
believe that [Hitler] didn’t do anything—that he was just a work of the devil.
Lenore’s thoughts about Hitler’s involvement were presented in opposition to a
storyline that placed blame for the Holocaust on Satan or someone possessed by
Satan (like the first three examples). Lenore was uncomfortable relegating blame
only to an otherworldly realm, so she placed blame squarely on Hitler’s shoulders.
She admitted that Satan could have helped Hitler, but she explained that Hitler had
to have been evil already (the other source of evil isn’t explained). I argue that both
stances—blaming Satan or blaming Hitler as the sole perpetrator tend to diffuse
human responsibility and culpability. A further discussion I had with Lenore
underscored this point. When I asked her what she would have done to stop the
suffering of Jews, she said that she probably wouldn’t have done anything because
if she had, she too would have been killed. “Is keeping silent in those conditions
letting in evil?” I asked her.
“No,” she said, “What good would you do if you were dead?” The evil that
Lenore attributed to Hitler has the appearance of insurmountability. Both in her
writing and in her taped interview with me, Lenore was more tentative about
what she thinks than Keniya, Shelaina, and Mandie seemed. Lenore cushioned her
claims in “I think,” “I believe,” and “I don’t really believe” statements (in examples
above), not in bold assertions as the other girls did.
Active God
In addition to having a view of evil that tended to place blame for the Holocaust on
a single, demonized perpetrator or upon Satan, students in the study also
expressed a belief that God was present or expected in the face of evil. For example,
c7-55_Aug07RTE
33
7/18/07, 12:14 PM
34
Research in the Teaching of English
Volume 42
August 2007
Kylie (Adams Junior High in 2003) painted a picture of a member of the
Einsatzgruppen who was about to murder a Jewish woman at close range (Figure
1). In the background are masses of other victims waiting to be murdered; in the
middle ground, Kylie drew thick clouds, slightly parting, to let a strong beam of
sunshine spray its saving light on the desperate situation. When I asked her about
the drawing, she told me that the yellow beam represented “rescue” and “how good
wins out over evil.” This view is an interesting foil to the image of night in Wiesel’s
memoir. Whereas Kylie anticipated the intervention of God, it could be argued that
Elie had come to learn that the God of history sometimes turns his face in a most
egregious manner.
As far as I know, I was the only one who asked Kylie about what the beam of
sunlight represented. When she presented her painting to the class, her peers and
the teacher told her that it was good. I interviewed her at the end of the unit, and
that’s when she told me about the symbolic meaning of the sunlight. When I debriefed Mrs. Parker at the end of the unit, she was “fascinated” by Kylie’s response
and said, “For people who don’t believe, it’s not a problem, like for Fish [an atheistic student], but for others, they have to figure it out.”
In the same vein, Molly (Adams Junior High in 2003) created a collage for her
research project on Auschwitz. Amid the horrible scenes of human destruction,
she had the following words superimposed: Hunger, Disease, Hatred, Death, Starvation, Exhaustion, and GOD. Molly explained to me in an interview that “GOD”—
in all capitals—belonged among the images of Auschwitz because “without God
there’d be no hope, no survival.” In others words, God was actively involved in the
redemption of people at Auschwitz.
According to Logan (River Hill) in an interview with me, it was God’s intention that all people on earth be redeemed. “Christ’s suffering brought about new
found freedom for people today. It is not His intention that anyone should perish,
but for every progression, there is something that catastrophic happens; that is
one way to explain the Holocaust.” Logan’s religious register is particularly marked
because his words echoed a verse from the New Testament (2 Peter 3:9, “not wishing for anyone to perish”). He demonstrated his belief in God’s righteous action
in the world by referring to Christ’s suffering, which brings about “new found
freedom.” Logan ingeniously posited a belief in an evil interregnum that is necessary for the ultimate progression toward redemption, an improvisation that reconciles the genocide he is learning about and his belief in God’s intention for no
one to perish. This is a twist not explicitly mentioned by Kylie or Molly, though it
is perhaps implied by their visual juxtaposition of good and evil. In an interview
with me, Mandie (River Hill) expressed a view similar to Logan’s:
KAREN: Okay. Um. Night talks about religion a whole heck of a lot. Does that
make you uncomfortable?
c7-55_Aug07RTE
34
7/18/07, 12:14 PM
SPECTOR
35
God on the Gallows
MANDIE: Everybody, I mean even if you don’t go to church, everybody know
God exist, and they know God help some people with some cases. And
Elie, he thought, I mean before the Holocaust he, his faith was strong, but
he had a little bit of questions about why he was living.
KAREN: What do you think?
MANDIE: I think like it was something that happened in history to go on, like
something is bound to occur, that has to happen, like.
KAREN: Inevitiable?
MANDIE: Yeah. Like you have to go through it once for it not to occur again.
Even though I initiated the topic of religion with “um” (a hesitation indicating my
own discomfort in bringing up the topic), Mandie quickly accessed her “Active
God” frame, and she boldly asserted and even generalized her belief that
“everybody . . . even if you don’t go to church, everybody know God exist.” Yet
Mandie also showed tentativeness in this excerpt as she attempted to make sense of
the Holocaust through the evil interregnum theory, as evidenced by the way she
repeated this idea in slightly different ways during her second turn to speak. Both
Logan and Mandie believed in an active God who was capable of intervening in
history, but they also acknowledged that the world erupts in fits of catastrophe and
that God doesn’t seem to intervene in all cases. A limitation of this way of thinking
is that the question left hanging in the air is about God’s inaction rather than
human kind’s. To some people, God’s inaction may be an indication that God
approves of the events of the Holocaust.
The narrative that these students believed highlighted a dynamic synergy between an active Satan and active God, and the Holocaust was explicable somewhere within the midst of it. To Lenore, the problem was too big for any one
person to make a difference. To Kylie and Molly, one simply waited for salvation.
To Logan and Mandie, the Holocaust was a blip that had to happen in order for
the overarching plan of salvation to progress. Narratives that lead to inaction,
waiting, and rationalization in the face of grave injustice do nothing to promote
the project of tolerance for diversity.
Roadmap to Redemption
The students in the roadmap category stressed the way Elie should have behaved
and emphasized God’s ability to save (if certain conditions were met). As in the
super-natural struggle category, God was seen as active in history, but unlike in the
other category, students saw a human actor fighting against God, not Satan or a
demonized Hitler. Students in the roadmap category enfigured Elie as a person
who could control his predicament by maintaining the proper stance toward God;
God was a celestial being who reacted to Elie by allowing him to suffer more or by
saving him. Because the narrative placed responsibility on Elie and exonerated
c7-55_Aug07RTE
35
7/18/07, 12:14 PM
36
Research in the Teaching of English
Volume 42
August 2007
God, poignant questions about God’s inaction are conveniently diffused and the
real human perpetrators and bystanders are likewise exculpated. The victim’s
responsibility is the only human action meriting reproof, thus this framing does
not harmonize with the goals of the teachers’ diversity curriculum.
In a vivid example of the roadmap to redemption, Stella (Adams Junior High
in 2004) and her group were discussing one of seven questions Mrs. Parker asked
the class to answer within small groups: “How, if at all, does Elie maintain his
morality and empathy?” I walked up to the group and began taping the conversation.
STELLA: Okay, [Elie] should’ve kept his faith in God, but he didn’t.
KAREN: Why should he have?
STELLA: Because then he would have somebody to believe in in the world instead of being all alone.
KAREN: So you think faith in God would have helped him?
STELLA: Well, he lost his faith and all these bad things happened to him, like his
father dying.
KAREN: Because he lost his faith, you think?
STELLA: Well, he like lost his faith, then his whole world fell apart.
In her first two turns, it almost seemed as though Stella believed that Elie could will
God into existence, puzzlingly, by keeping faith in Him (if he kept his faith, “he
would have someone to believe in”). On the other hand, she could have meant that
Elie’s abandonment of God (loss of faith) triggered God’s abandonment of Elie.
Either way, for Stella, the Holocaust shouldn’t have caused Elie to lose his faith, but
since it did, “his whole world fell apart.” Consciously or not, Stella’s stance placed
blame for Elie’s suffering squarely on his own shoulders, while giving God an
excuse for not intervening. The only one on the hook here was Elie. Stella’s choice
of the modal “should” inflected the verb with a sense of obligation: Elie’s duty was
to keep faith in God.
Harsher in tone, and more far-reaching, an example from Belinda (River Hill)
blamed victims of the Holocaust in general, not only Elie. When discussing the
hanging of the little boy, she said in class: “God . . . let it happen for a reason. He
was there the whole time, but since people were questioning Him and losing faith,
He wasn’t doing nothing about it.” To Belinda, God was present in the Holocaust
and was able to save, but the behavior of the victims caused God to become a
bystander. This is a tidy explanation of God’s inaction in history, and students
need such an explanation if belief in God’s saving power is a foundational religious narrative frame for them, though this version constructs God as a petulant
child who takes his redemption with him as he leaves the game and moves to the
sidelines.
c7-55_Aug07RTE
36
7/18/07, 12:14 PM
SPECTOR
37
God on the Gallows
In an inversion of Belinda’s stance that God refused to intervene, Annabelle
(Adams Junior High in 2004) emphasized that God had saved Elie, and Elie’s sin
was that he should have focused upon his own redemption:
The book was meaningful to me because it showed that he lost his faith just by seeing
others being put to death. It is very sad that he can’t believe anymore because of others
cruelty. He should have focused on how God saved his life instead.
Elie’s case provided a cautionary tale for all who might find themselves in difficult
situations. Believers shouldn’t lose their faith “just by seeing others being put to
death”; instead, such tragedy should be a time to focus on God’s saving power. The
cause for Annabelle’s sadness, then, was not the suffering that he endured, but Elie’s
loss of faith. The “others being put to death” were not saved by God, and the
question that remains is “Why?” Mrs. Parker did not comment on this journal
entry; the shear number of journal entries made it difficult for her to carefully read
and respond to each one.
The final example of responses in this category comes from a journal entry
Razzle wrote at Adams in 2004. It may appear that Razzle operated under a different narrative at first, but upon closer examination, the difference here was that
Razzle attributed to Elie the proper behavior which brought about God’s saving
power.
The text ends by Elie being freed. This makes me realize that Elie was right to have hope
and faith in God because all of this happened for them, just to be freed in the end. It was
a test, and he passed.
Even though Night unmistakably showed Elie’s hope and faith in God as wavering
and at times completely gone (e.g., “Never shall I forget those moments which
murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust”; p. 32), Razzle’s
narrative about proper behavior leading to redemption supplanted what Wiesel
chose to include in the text. She saw Elie being “freed in the end” when Elie himself
saw only his own corpse in the mirror (Wiesel, 1982, p.109). Razzle asserted that
the Holocaust happened “for them” (to benefit “the Jews”) as a test of faith. Elie
passed, but she didn’t mention the 6 million Jews who were destroyed, who
apparently didn’t pass the test. The 6 million, among them 1.5 million children, if
they rose into her consciousness at this moment, might have provided the basis for
a valuable counter narrative to her roadmap to redemption: Innocent people were
systematically murdered by Nazis and other collaborators who were bent on the
destruction of Jews. It is an ugly truth because it doesn’t dispose of 6 million bodies
by referring to a God who tests his people. This counter narrative has more
potential for the diversity curriculum than any narrative that displaces or
decomposes 6 million victims of genocide. When students read Night through the
c7-55_Aug07RTE
37
7/18/07, 12:14 PM
38
Research in the Teaching of English
Volume 42
August 2007
roadmap to redemption narrative, the human perpetrators and bystanders were
not implicated, only the human victims.
God Redeems or Condemns Jews through What Happened at the Cross
As in the roadmap category, the stances that comprised this narrative were
grounded, often implicitly, in the belief that there was a supernatural struggle of
good-and-evil and that there was a proper roadmap that leads to redemption.
Further, what all three categories commonly shared was the belief that God was
somehow in the midst of the suffering. Whereas Kylie (Adams in 2003) imagined
God in the field where Jews were being murdered (Figure 1), and Razzle (Adams in
2004) believed that God had indeed saved Elie, neither of these girls wielded the
narrative that redemption was possible through the cross. Within this section, I
explore a narrative of redemption that has at its focus the symbolic or historical
crucifixion of Christ. The cross as a symbol means redemption (forgiveness of sins
and immortal life after death) for many Christians, but at least since the First
Council of Nicea, convoked by Constantine, it has come to represent persecution
to Jews who were dispersed, expelled, and murdered under its weight (Carroll,
2001). Constantine wrote that Christians should break with Jews and celebrate
Easter rather than Passover since it was “an unworthy thing that in the celebration
of this most holy feast we should follow the practice of the Jews, who have
impiously defiled their hands with enormous sin, and are, therefore, deservedly
afflicted with blindness of soul” (Schaff & Wace, 1980). The “enormous sin” to
which Constantine referred was deicide. Jews were enfigured by Constantine as
Christ killers, an accusation that has not shown signs of vanishing even though it
is no longer a teaching of the Catholic Church, or any mainstream church.
Inflected with the meaning of those who have spoken the word “cross” throughout history, students came to populate it with their own meaning and make it
their own word (see Bakhtin, 1981). To some it meant redemption for all people
for all time; for others it meant redemption for them and condemnation to the
Jews, past and present, whom they constructed as Christ killers. The literary “God
on the gallows,” from the scene in Night that garnered so much interest from religious responders, and the historical and spiritual “God on the cross” became powerful images through which students constructed meaning about Jews and the
Holocaust. The two were conflated by some students, providing a redemptive reading of the Holocaust; but for others, regardless of how they interpreted the gallows scene, the cross was a weighty explanation for why Jews were suffering in the
first place. In either case, God was in the midst of Jewish suffering. God had His
hand in Auschwitz. There are several constraints of this narrative: 6 million innocent bodies are not acknowledged; the horror of the Holocaust is occluded by
overlaying it with redemption; conflict is once again viewed as a struggle between
Jews and God, and human perpetrators of the Holocaust are once again exculpated.
c7-55_Aug07RTE
38
7/18/07, 12:14 PM
SPECTOR
39
God on the Gallows
The Gallows
At Adams in 2003, only one group interpreted the hanging of the boy in Buna as
salvific. At River Hill, nine students thought that the young boy was a Christ figure
or that God was “in the boy” trying to redeem him. At Adams in 2004, another eight
students expressed that the boy’s hanging had redemptive attributes for Elie or
Jews in general. While seeing “God on the gallows” in this redemptive way did seem
to offer hope to the victims, it also tended to obfuscate the suffering of Jews and
fabricate a redemptive telos for Holocaust meaning in general.
Vance’s discussion group in Mrs. Parker’s class (Adams Junior High in 2003)
interpreted “God on the gallows” as Christ’s crucifixion. They discussed the scene
in their small group and then wrote the following on their group poster:
One of the themes in Night is innocence. This theme is best represented when the little
boy is hanged [on the gallows]. His sad, angel eyes represent his innocence. He didn’t
even struggle, he just bit his lip. He lived for a half an hour, as if he was supposed to live.
We think that Elie never totally lost faith in God. We think he began to believe, along
with the others that it was a test of faith. Then he regained more hope in His existence
with the hanging of the little boy.
They presented their position to the class, and Mrs. Parker said, “Interesting, I
never thought of that.” The group cast the gallows scene as a spiritual revival, of
sorts, in which Elie and the other prisoners came to the realization that the
Holocaust was a test of faith. I don’t know what was more surprising: that the
group considered one of the themes of Night to be innocence or that they thought
the hanging of the boy helped Elie “regain more hope in His existence.” I do know
that the cross, an icon of redemption for Christians, was invoked by the murder of
an innocent boy and had powerful explanatory force over what was happening in
Night, despite textual evidence to the contrary. I questioned Vance about the poster
to make sure I understood the group’s meaning:
KAREN: What did you mean by Elie finding his faith again during the hanging
of the little boy?
VANCE: Yeah, he saw God. That was comforting given all of the death. He found
God.
KAREN: He found God?
VANCE: The boy was like a Christ figure.
KAREN: How did the boy save the others?
VANCE: He helped them improve their faith.
Like Razzle, from the roadmap category, Vance and his group thought that the
Holocaust was God’s way of testing Jews—God against Jews. In this example, God
sent a Christ figure in the form of a little boy (an attempt to get Jews to see that
c7-55_Aug07RTE
39
7/18/07, 12:14 PM
40
Research in the Teaching of English
Volume 42
August 2007
Christ was the Messiah?). This image was so engulfing that all other explanations
of the boy’s murder were drowned out. The simplest alternative explanation to the
Christ figure image is that the SS used the boy’s death as an intimidation tactic to
keep order in the slave labor camp. For religious responders, this explanation
would raise ugly questions about God’s power in the face of evil. The Christ figure
interpretation provides an escape route for religious responders: God is present in
suffering, God wants to save, and people need to keep faith and pass a test in order
to earn God’s redemption. But this framing also has constraints for the diversity
curriculum: Once again, action is removed to a supernatural realm; the actions of
the human perpetrators are not explored; and, the horror of the Holocaust is
obscured if not rendered invisible by the presence of a savior.
This same pattern held true for River Hill, where Logan testified loudly to the
fact that the young boy in the gallows scene was a Christ figure. Even though some
students challenged his position with their own view that the scene meant that
God was dead, he did not back down. Ms. France said, “Oh, that’s one way of
looking at it,” and then she directed the students back to the study guide questions. Later, in an interview with me, he analyzed the hanging of the “sad-eyed
angel.” His depiction of the gallows scene showed how he constructed the memoir
through the narrative frame that redemption came via the crucifixion of Christ.
I thought it represent some symbolism. I remember the symbolism from the actual
Bible itself and the crucifying of Jesus Christ. That little boy was stood there and he was
hanged. He was hung. And he was sitting there and he was suffering, and I’m sure it was
an hour, but he wouldn’t die because his body weight was so low, and his neck wouldn’t
snap. And in the Bible, Jesus was crucified on the cross, and He had nails in His hands
and in His feet, and He had the crown on. They were similar, and they would represent
how in the Bible, Jesus did that supposedly for the love for all His children.
While finding a Christ-figure in literature might be considered “doing English,”
this excerpt from an interview with Logan showed that the death of the child
tapped deeply into Logan’s belief that Jesus Christ was there “for the love of all His
children.” Logan’s use of “actual” and the reflexive “itself ” served to intensify the
importance of the word they buttressed—Bible. The Bible was the instrument
through which he arrived at his interpretation of Night. Logan placed Jesus Christ
in the middle of the horror of Auschwitz. Failure to embrace Jesus Christ in
Auschwitz would be double rejection of the Messiah for Jews. The redemption of
mankind made possible through the cross was such a powerful narrative for
Christian responders that they were able to strain out evidence from the text that
would have enfeebled it (e.g., pp. 63, 64).
The Cross
The crucifix as a Christian icon was appropriated by students like Logan and Vance
to read a redemptive ending onto the Holocaust; however, in this category the
c7-55_Aug07RTE
40
7/18/07, 12:14 PM
SPECTOR
41
God on the Gallows
crucifixion was associated with the destruction of Jews in the Holocaust because
they killed Christ. While the death of Christ brought redemption to the faithful, it
has been read for millennia as bringing condemnation to all Jews for all time.
More openly prevalent at River Hill than at Adams, Jews as Christ killers were
mentioned out loud in discussion 18 times. Students raised the topic that, historically speaking, Jews have been blamed for the death of Jesus. These were not coded
as religious responses, since students were expressing someone else’s opinion, not
their own belief. Two important events influenced the prevalence of this talk at
River Hill, and the following interview excerpt with the history teacher, Mr. May,
helps to explain both:
We discussed [antisemitism] briefly in the 20th century, but [Christian antisemitism]
is more a, I think, from my point of view, is more a religious thing, and I didn’t necessarily want to get into all that. I did point out that a lot of people blame Jews for, ah, ah,
for the killing of Christ, and it just so happened The Passion of the Christ was out, and
um, but I did point out that technically the Jews did send him to his death, but the
Romans carried it out.
It is clear from Mr. May’s numerous hedges and hesitations that he is uncomfortable talking about this topic with me. What is significant to point out here is that
Mr. May did not discuss the history of Christian antisemitism (because it’s “a
religious thing”), but he did mention that “technically the Jews did send him to his
death.” Mr. May refers to Jewish people monolithically as “the Jews” when he
asserts that they sent Christ to his death. This monolithic attribution is essential for
the Christ killer myth to apply to all Jews for all time instead of to some Jews at a
particular time. As Lang (2005) argued, “a collective will is thus presupposed, and
so also, of course, a common responsibility” (p. 64). The second event was the
opening of the movie The Passion of the Christ (Gibson, 2004). Talk about Jews as
Christ killers was in the news, on the streets, and in the houses and churches of these
students. It is important that these data be read with those conditions in mind.
Only 12 students openly expressed belief that Jews killed God, but eight of
these students didn’t believe that this past sin had any explanatory power over the
Holocaust (one at Adams in 2003, one at Adams in 2004, and six at River Hill). For
example, in an interview with me, I asked Keniya (River Hill) whether or not she
heard her classmates say things like, “Jews killed God and that’s why the Holocaust
happened.” She nodded affirmatively and said,
Even though I am religious, I don’t think that [genocide] should happen to anybody.
God forgive the Jews, everybody, so there ain’t no reason them saying Jews deserve to
die in the Holocaust.
Keniya identified herself as a religious person, but she set herself apart from other
religious people by relegating them to an outgroup (“them”). She was different
c7-55_Aug07RTE
41
7/18/07, 12:14 PM
42
Research in the Teaching of English
Volume 42
August 2007
than other religious responders in the study because she chose to focus on the
forgiveness of God—even for deicide—rather than on the sinfulness of Jews. She
was certain that the deicide charge is in no way justification for the Holocaust. This
stance has a limitation for religious responders. God didn’t act against Jews, but
neither did he work for them. It can create more questions than answers.
To the other four students (one at Adams in 2004 and three at River Hill),
rejection of the Messiah was the reason for the Holocaust. On the first day of the
unit at Adams in 2004, Fiona offered her reason why the Holocaust happened:
“Oh, oh, it’s because, well, it’s probably because they killed God.” She started off
with eagerness to explain (“Oh, Oh”), and a strong assertion (“it’s because”), but
then she hesitated (“well”) and modified the strength of her statement (“it’s probably because”). She finished with “they killed God”—“they” being Jews, “killed”
showing active participation, and “God” being a more direct deicide charge than
using “Jesus” or “Christ.” When I asked her to explain what she said, she said, “No,
forget it,” and she looked away. I followed up with a weak response, “Um, we’re
going to read about, um, about many explanations used over the years to justify
discrimination against Jews. The myth that ‘the Jews’ killed Christ is one justification that has been used.” My hesitations (“um”) and repetitions (“about, um,
about”) signal my discomfort with confronting this pernicious myth in the classroom.
Students from River Hill also thought that the Holocaust punished Jews for
killing God. For example, in the unit-ending seminar, students were discussing
whether or not prejudice still existed. Various students contributed answers, and
eventually the discussion turned to Jews being blamed for killing God. Erica said,
“Jews deserved what they got because they didn’t worship God.” Her strong assertion was rapidly followed by one from Katrina: “I am not sure they deserved to die
like that, but they deserved some punishment though.” Erica and Katrina delivered back to back strong assertions about what Jews “deserved.” The statements
are shocking in their force, lack of empathy, and lack of direct response from the
class, the substitute, and me. The next person to speak seemed to ignore what they
said, and she began building a new theory that the Holocaust happened because
“somebody did something bad to Hitler as a child.”
In one last example—stark in its antithetical stance toward what Ms. France
wanted her students to learn (tolerance for diversity)—Ms. France asked the students to explain how reading Night had changed them. Delaila wrote, “It didn’t
change me. I wouldn’t want that for me, but they got to expect it, killing God.”
Erica and Delaila both blamed Jews—past and present—for bringing the Holocaust upon themselves.
Like the gallows scene in Night, the historical and spiritual cross had explanatory power over the Holocaust. For some, the spurious charge of deicide had historically been used to justify violence against Jews, including the Holocaust. Others believed that Jews had indeed killed Christ, but God forgave them, so it was no
c7-55_Aug07RTE
42
7/18/07, 12:15 PM
SPECTOR
43
God on the Gallows
justification for the Holocaust. The final group believed that Jews killed Christ or
didn’t have proper beliefs, which brought the wrath of the Holocaust down upon
the heads of Jewish people.
Redemption from “the gallows” and condemnation from “the cross” both
position Jews and the Holocaust in ways that do not conform to the project of
becoming more tolerant. Finding a Christ figure in Auschwitz renders the destruction less visible, removes the conflict to a supernatural realm, and sets Jews
up for a double rejection of Messiah. Finding Jews responsible for the Holocaust
because they are/were Christ killers, removes the conflict to a supernatural realm
(God against evil Jews) and places blame on the victim. The religious narratives of
redemption through which students read Night (and the Holocaust more generally) did not advance the diversity curriculum within these contexts.
Questioning the Narratives of Redemption
Some students saw the Holocaust as a microcosm of the worldwide fight of good
versus evil; others thought they held the correct roadmap for redemption or read
the Holocaust through the religious imagery of the gallows and the cross. Another
group of students had a more difficult time rectifying their already present belief
in God with the Holocaust. Some students questioned the ability of narratives of
redemption to explain the Holocaust. They realized that their old frames could not
account for the Holocaust.
Keniya (River Hill) explained her understanding of religion and the Holocaust to me in an interview: “It just don’t make sense. No sense at all. God is good.
I know that. The Holocaust horror, hell on earth, is bad. How both are true? But
they are. It’s a paradox.” Keniya came to the conclusion that the Holocaust called
into question the reality of a benevolent God. I asked her about how her own faith
was affected by the unit.
KAREN: Did this unit cause you to question your faith in God?
KENIYA: I thought: If there is really a God how could He just let something like
this happen? Or how could the world just see it, but try to deny it? Evidence is all there. So it did make me question my faith.
Keniya asked some tough questions that other religious responders bypassed by
simply applying a narrative frame that was already in their stockpile. Earlier in the
unit, Keniya described herself as religious, but in this interview with me, she
questioned if God really existed. She then moved the Holocaust to the realm of
human action by implicating human perpetrators, and not just Hitler (“how could
the world see it, but try to deny it?”). Once Keniya realized that the Holocaust
presented a paradox when read through a religious narrative, she looked for
another narrative that could help to explain it: Flesh and blood people conspired
to kill Jews and others.
c7-55_Aug07RTE
43
7/18/07, 12:15 PM
44
Research in the Teaching of English
Volume 42
August 2007
Much like Keniya, Sydney (Adams Junior High in 2004) asked the following
in a journal entry about Night:
Why isn’t God stopping the Nazis or, in our case, the terrorists? It makes me question
my faith. As I read this book some questions came to mind. How did God let the Holocaust happen? This book is so disturbing, I think that I am going to be ill. It’s just sick.
I know what Elie means about [God appearing to be weak].
Sydney didn’t try to mitigate the horror of the Holocaust. In fact, she experienced
it so fully that it made her “ill” and “sick.” Also like Keniya, the gravity of the
Holocaust summoned up the theological issue of God’s goodness in an obviously
evil world. Interestingly, Sydney likened God’s inaction in the Holocaust with
God’s inaction in the post-9/11 world—another reason it is important to
understand students’ religious responses to what they learn in school. Sydney
could not answer her own questions because the Holocaust did not fit into her
narratives of redemption.
Claire (Adams Junior High in 2004) questioned why God didn’t act specifically on behalf of Jews. She began this section of her journal entry with a quotation from Night, and then continued with her query:
“Oh God, Lord of the Universe, take pity upon us in Thy great mercy.” This quote is
meaningful to me because I am a BIG believer in God and when he doesn’t take any
pity upon Jews it makes me wonder.
Again, like Keniya and Sydney, Claire struggled with the quandary of God’s
goodness and inaction, in this case, in the face of fervent prayer. Her concern was
echoed by Evangeline (Adams, 2004), who wrote in her journal: “If you do believe
in God & that he will protect & save you, then how can He let 10,000 or more Jews
die (especially children)?” She at once acknowledged God’s ability to save and yet
his inaction in the face of dying children. Her narrative does not have explanatory
power over the Holocaust.
Many fewer boys than girls responded in ways that fit into this category, but
Myron (River Hill) and Jason (Adams Junior High 2004) are notable exceptions.
Myron wrote in his study guide, “Night cause me to question my faith a little
because why wouldn’t god help them like he did before?” Myron didn’t explicitly
mention “Jews,” but he did refer to “them” as those whom God had helped in the
past (presumably during biblical times). Jason mentioned Jews in particular, “How
could God let his Chosen People die like that? It makes me wonder if they aren’t
safe, who is?” The particularity of Jewish suffering caused Claire, Evangeline, Myron,
and Jason to question God’s goodness, to question the narratives of redemption.
Besides presenting examples of the narratives of redemption that cut across
sites, I have emphasized in the findings the elements of those narratives that blame
victims for their own suffering, remove action to a supernatural realm, and justify
c7-55_Aug07RTE
44
7/18/07, 12:15 PM
SPECTOR
45
God on the Gallows
the Holocaust based upon God’s action in the world. These narratives of redemption present certain affordances for religious responders and serious difficulties
for the project of teaching tolerance through Holocaust literature (see Table 10).
The last category, questioning the narrative of redemption, still focuses upon God,
but since it doesn’t implicate Jews or try to cover up the horror of the Holocaust,
it sends students on a search for a narrative that could explain how God’s goodness and the horror of the Holocaust can coexist; hence, it has the most potential
for the diversity curriculum. Considering human responsibility, as Keniya begins
to do, would put the Holocaust on a worldly plane of human action—the place
where diversity and tolerance education probably needs to begin in public schools
(if the Holocaust should be summoned for this goal at all).
Teachers’ Reactions
The teachers in this study did summon the Holocaust with the belief that it would
help students learn lessons of tolerance, but the religious responses did not
advance the teachers’ intended curriculum of civic pluralism. It should be noted
that the teachers did not interact much with these students’ religious responses
because comments were often made to me in interviews or were written in work
that the teachers didn’t carefully scrutinize. I had the time and the motive to look
carefully for religious responses, a luxury that classroom teachers just don’t have.
I doubt if Mrs. Parker, Ms. France, and I were even prepared to deal with religious
responses. For example, in an interview with me, Ms. France said, “I kind of tread
lightly with the religious things,” and “[Religion] is a place I don’t want to go.” In
my final interview with her, I explained my belief that ignoring cultural
perspectives that are religiously inspired may delimit chances to explore diversity
and tolerance. She went on to say, “The people in this school all come from some
kind of religious reference. You know, maybe there does need to be more weight to
the religious aspect, but it is scary, and it gets parents very upset.” Fear of talking
about religious topics in the school setting clearly comes through Ms. France’s
statements (“tread lightly,” “a place I don’t want to go,” and “it is scary”).
Mrs. Parker didn’t mention fear of discussing religion in school, but she never
took up a religious response initiated by students in relation to Night. When I
debriefed her after the 2003 data collection period and at several points during
the 2004 data collection period, she indicated that she was interested in religious
responses (e.g., “I wish we could figure out who believes what”), and she would
say that she wanted to “get back to” a religious topic that had been student-initiated in class discussion, but I could find no examples of “going back.”
At Adams in 2004, I sometimes tried to follow up on religion topics initiated
by students in class, but students were wary of these probes. For example, after
reading a short essay on the history of Christian antisemitism, Geoffrey said, “They
thought Jews killed Jesus so they started equating them with the devil.” I asked
Geoffrey to clarify what he meant by “they.”
c7-55_Aug07RTE
45
7/18/07, 12:15 PM
46
Research in the Teaching of English
Volume 42
August 2007
“Everyone else—the Christians,” Geoffrey offered.
Another student at his table, Nebula, piped up, “We aren’t allowed to talk
about this in public school. Shhhh!” When I explained that we could indeed talk
about it, both Geoffrey and Nebula began shushing me. They were clearly uncomfortable talking about this, and like Ms. France, I began to “tread lightly,” in fear
that I would get kicked out before I finished my study.
Discussion
Narratives of Redemption
The contexts of Adams and River Hill contrasted sharply. Despite differences in
race, socioeconomic class, views on race and discrimination, and instructional
patterns, participants expressed key similarities in their religious responses to
Night specifically and the Holocaust in general. At Adams Junior High and River
Hill Academy, students overwhelmingly responded to the memoir through
Christian narratives of redemption that implicitly or explicitly condemned Elie in
particular and Jews in general. Included in these storylines were the following plot
elements that students narrated in response to the Holocaust. a) Both God and
Satan are actively involved in history in a struggle of good versus evil. This
employment led to the enfiguring of Hitler as Satan or as an agent of Satan, thus
wrenching Hitler away from the category “human.” Within this view, it was
because of evil that the world needed redemption in the first place. God’s
intervention was imminent. b) There are particular ways that people should
behave in order to remain in God’s good graces. Divergence from these expectations for behavior and belief can have dire consequences for the individual and the
world ( “[Elie] lost his faith and all these bad things happened to him”). c) Jesus
saved the world through the cross, so He is either in the midst of the suffering at
Auschwitz or His “murder” has eternally condemned all Jews for all time (“The
dying child was a symbol of God’s innocence, love, and good conduct toward Elie”
or “I wouldn’t want that for me, but [Jews] got to expect it, killing God”).
Additionally, the events of the Holocaust caused some students to struggle with
their existing belief in God’s redemption in the face of God’s inaction in history
(“It just don’t make sense. No sense at all. God is good. I know that. The Holocaust
horror, hell on earth, is bad. How both are true? But they are. It’s a paradox”).
For two-thirds of the Christian students, the reasons for God’s apparent inaction in history had to be attended to. With no other narrative readily available,
students used religious frames they had access to. Rubenstein and Roth (2003)
argued that the “principle function of theology” in relation to responding to the
Holocaust “is to foster dissonance reduction where significant items of information are perceived to be inconsistent with established beliefs, values, and collectively sanctioned modes of behavior” (p. 329; italics in the original). Students’
responses to the Holocaust through redemption frames reduced dissonance by
c7-55_Aug07RTE
46
7/18/07, 12:15 PM
SPECTOR
47
God on the Gallows
providing ready explanations for the Holocaust. Students who thought that there
was a roadmap to redemption recognized that Elie’s waning faith presented a problem for him in the Kingdom of God. Because they empathized with him, they
wanted him to do the right thing, thus saving his eternal soul. To them, Elie’s
struggle did not present a special problem that their existing frame couldn’t handle.
Students who believed that Jesus was “God on the gallows” ignored Elie’s tremendous suffering and faith struggles in order to maintain their belief that God
would intervene in history. In this case, students’ frames didn’t change; the material in the book changed to fit their frames. This practice of overlaying the text
with their own narratives demonstrates that students are able to question a text,
or at least ignore it. Students who ignored elements of the text aren’t necessarily
poor comprehenders; rather the “text” they consider includes more than the classroom text.
Students who believed that Jews brought the Holocaust upon themselves operated within the narrative of sin and redemption: Jews are eternally sinful and
are not worthy of redemption. Some students went so far as to think that “the
Jews” deserved the Holocaust because they killed Christ. Students at River Hill
seemed to have ready access to this myth, while only one student at Adams spoke
about it before I introduced readings on the history of antisemitism.
These narratives of redemption had the affordance of explaining the ways of
God to man. Most of the students didn’t learn about the role of Christian
antisemitism over the ages, depriving them of an important insight about religious triumphalism (which their readings of the Holocaust were perpetuating).
“Narratives of redemption” for two-thirds of my Christian participants often signaled “narratives of condemnation” of Elie and “the Jews.”
For those who ended up questioning the narratives of redemption, the events
of the Holocaust posed a threat to their existing religious faith. As they tried to
rectify the new information with their present beliefs in God, they realized that
either their views of God had to change or their views of the situation had to
change. Some questioners, like Keniya, were left with a paradox. Others were simply left with their questions unanswered, with any luck causing extended reflection.
I think here of the differences between schooling for social control and education that equips people to transform society (McLaren, 2007, p. 193). “Schooling” is about finding the right answers — the one in the teacher’s head or the one
on the proficiency test. “Education,” on the other hand, is not about consummating or concluding thought; it is about drawing it out, engaging it, and leaving it
open for additional reflection. It is painful and jarring to contemplate the Holocaust without finalizing it. On the last page of Night, Elie sees himself alive but
dead—a paradox, as Keniya would say. And we, the readers, find ourselves ethically answerable (Bakhtin, 1993) to what we’ve just witnessed: systematic geno-
c7-55_Aug07RTE
47
7/18/07, 12:15 PM
48
Research in the Teaching of English
Volume 42
August 2007
cide in the heart of Western culture. What can we say or do that does not cathartically settle and comfort us? Can study guide questions and journal entries cultivate the alienation required to remain in the concentration camp universe for any
period of time? Is this even a place we want to take our students?
Holocaust Literature Pedagogy and Religious Narratives
It is a place we must go in part because survivors are dying and deniers are
proliferating. Baum (1996) argues that “‘Holocaust Education’ is most perverse in
contradiction. ‘Holocaust’ and ‘education’ seem to pull in different directions, one
pointing to the utter devastation of human values, the other insisting on their
possibility” (p. 1; page number from the html text). It is this very tension that sends
some students in search of religious narratives that disperse the alienation and
provide succor.
The data show Ms. France and Mr. May made explicit statements indicating
that they didn’t want to discuss “religious things” in the classroom because religion was too controversial. Opportunities to discuss religious topics in relation to
Night were not part of the study guide questions that structured the unit, and
strongly expressed religious interpretations (“Ain’t no reason nobody be killing
all them people except they possessed or something” or “Jews deserved what they
got because they didn’t worship God”) were tacitly accepted because they were
not actively taken up by teachers (though they were sometimes taken up by students with a word or two of disagreement). Students came to learn that they could
utter them without having to explain them; therefore, the underlying assumptions were never interrogated. I argue that in this way, for example, “Christ killers”
became a school authorized enfigurement of “the Jews” at River Hill.
Mrs. Parker never said that she was afraid to talk about religious topics in
school, but the way she handled religious responses in class discussions and in
writing showed that, like Ms. France, she was not interested in taking them up.
When religious responses surfaced in small group discussions, students like
Hawthorne would vocally shoot down them down (“It means God is dead, stupid
idiot!”). In this way, students learned that their religious narratives were “alternative” ways of seeing, but the students were never authorized to weigh the differences in perspectives and underlying assumptions.
Students’ religious responses most frequently came up in my one-on-one interviews with them, and usually when I brought up the topic based upon something that was said in class or that I read in their written work. This suggests to me
that many more than the 79 students I categorized as having religious responses
could have actually had them. I could only interview so many students, and I only
asked students about religious responses when they had already expressed them
or had just heard people using slurs. The tentative nature of most religious responses suggests that students themselves were unsure of interacting in this way
c7-55_Aug07RTE
48
7/18/07, 12:15 PM
SPECTOR
49
God on the Gallows
in school or were unsure of how their beliefs related to the Holocaust. Religious
responders needed guidance.
Implications
Teaching about Religion and Pluralism in Schools
Because U.S. citizens, in all of their diversity, tend to be more religious than people
in other developed countries (Bishop, 1999; Haynes, 2001) and because Night
(Wiesel, 1982) is a memoir that summons readers to respond to a world with a
seemingly absent God, many students who read the memoir in school were pushed
by culture and the text to view the Holocaust as a theological event. The choice of
using Night is obviously a mistake if teachers are not prepared to meet students on
this issue and help them excavate the narratives that cause them to frame Jews in
harmful ways. Teachers who hear defamatory statements and don’t react to them
have entered into a complicity of silence. I, too, was guilty of this complicity.
Because of the pernicious and abiding nature of the Christ killer accusation, the
whole class should stop when it is uttered and the slur should be minutely
deconstructed. Not on the next day, but at the moment of its emergence. It is too
easy for the class discussion to turn to a new topic before antisemitic statements are
fully addressed.
Since Christian students like the ones in my study are likely to think religiously about the Holocaust, then they need to have a background in the history
of Christian antisemitism, something that has been a guideline of the United States
Holocaust Memorial and Museum (2005) since 1993. This will at least enable teachers to discuss on a historical plane slurs like “Jews deserve to die because they
killed Christ.” Teachers can ask why all Jews for all time would be responsible if
some Jews at a specific time wanted Jesus to be out of the picture. It would also be
an occasion to look at the 1965 Vatican declaration, Nostra Aetate, renouncing the
Christ killer slur (available on the USHMM website). Teachers need to be aware
that blaming Jews is functional because it allows students who respond through
narratives of redemption to extricate themselves from a religious quandary; they
also need to know that not all Christian students will respond in this way, while
some non-Christian students may. English teachers can talk about religion in the
classroom as long as they remain neutral (Black, 2003). In fact, Haynes (2001)
argues that instructors have a responsibility to teach students about how religious
perspectives have influenced our culture and cultures of the past.
Teachers need to completely abandon the idea that the Holocaust teaches
anything in particular. The lessons are not self-evident, as Schweber (2004) argued. Meaning is constructed through the narratives and “language bits” that are
available to students and are authorized in and out of the classroom. Some balance should probably be struck between letting students read on their own (as
c7-55_Aug07RTE
49
7/18/07, 12:15 PM
50
Research in the Teaching of English
Volume 42
August 2007
was done at Adams) and minutely structuring student reading (as was done at
River Hill). Reading Night aloud in a few periods might produce the powerful
“pedagogical emotions” Baum (1996) suggests are necessary to “make judgements
[sic] about ourselves, others, and the culture around us” (p. 2; page number from
the html text.)
Finding something in the text is indeed an important skill for students to
learn in our information-driven society, but not at the expense of other skills, like
questioning the text or questioning the extra-textual information we bring to bear
on a particular reading of a text. A dynamic tension should be struck between
comprehending what is in the text, the ideologies that fuel it, and the reader’s own
narrative identity. These are skills that citizens in a democracy need to have. I
suggest that the ways of interacting in the English classroom always include an
emphasis on a frame of reflective pluralism. Wuthrow (2005) suggests the following attributes of reflective, pluralist thinkers that we can try to cultivate within
ourselves and our students:
1. They don’t try to rise above differences, but try to engage them.
2. They “consciously adopt a stance of inquiry . . . before they arrive at
satisfactory positions on deep questions of belief and value” (p. 291).
3. “They carefully consider what it means to have a ‘view’” (p. 291).
4. “They consciously seek ways to neutralize objections to pluralism”
(p. 291).
5. “They emphasize respect” (p. 291).
6. “They exhibit a principled willingness to compromise” (p. 292).
Imagine if these ways of thinking were part of the pedagogy at River Hill when
Shelaina wrote, “Jews were about to race into Hell, Hell with Satan himself
standing guard.” Now look once again at the photograph of Nazis and Jews in the
Warsaw Ghetto (Figure 2). Below are a set of questions based upon the picture and
corresponding to the attributes of pluralistic thinkers.
1. Who would you be in this photograph? Would you even be in the
picture? Would you have been more likely to be a victim, perpetrator, or
bystander? Why?
2. What is actually going on in this picture? Who is standing guard? What is
their responsibility for what is happening?
3. How does religion inform your reading of this picture?
4. What would you say to convince the Nazis in the picture that they are
wrong to treat innocent people in this way?
5. Are the Nazis (people in power) treating the Jews (people with no
power) with the respect and dignity that all humans deserve?
c7-55_Aug07RTE
50
7/18/07, 12:15 PM
SPECTOR
51
God on the Gallows
6. You say that this is a picture of Hell with Satan standing guard. How
would you look at this picture differently if you looked at it from a civil
rights perspective instead of a supernatural perspective? Which perspective gives more respect to the victims?
Instead of open-ended journal entries or closed-ended study guide questions, this
same set of attributes can be used to guide students’ thinking about Night and the
Holocaust more generally (and help to excavate frames that are already being
used). When Vance said that the image of the young boy being hanged “was
comforting given all of the death,” the pluralistic thinker/teacher could lead him to
unpack the assumptions about salvation and how those forced to watch the
hanging would have a different view. Maybe this kind of questioning won’t
frequently lead to experiences that I thought I would see when I initially began the
study—tearful encounters with BIG questions like the meaning of life and human
kind’s propensity for cruelty, but it may provide the guidance that the religious
responders need to consider alternative narrative frames that don’t dispose of six
million bodies.
Conclusion
It is not a simple thing to enlist historical and political texts, or any text for that
matter, into the project of building tolerance for diversity. The studies I examined
in my literature review have shown messy roadblocks that interfere with
constructing meaning about concrete others (Benhabib, 1987) in ways that are
equitable and just. These roadblocks emanate from narratives that inform
students’ stances on class, gender, and race. The present study adds to that body of
research by exploring how students’ religious narratives create problems for the
diversity curriculum while simultaneously affording students powerful explanations of historical events. Why do people take up particular narratives in particular
situations? And how can we build dialogicality (Bakhtin, 1981) within classrooms
to begin using multiple and competing frames? Narrative theory may be able to
move us in profitable directions as far as these questions are concerned. Ricoeur
(1998) theorized a circle of three-fold mimesis through which people prefigure,
configure, and then refigure their narrative identity. This theory is hopeful in that
the space between “configure” and “refigure” is pregnant with possibilities for
learning, for re-representing by rectifying one narrative to another. It is in this
space that shifts in narrative framing can occur. We may try to pry up the
floorboard narratives that have the most explanatory power for students, if we
dare, and then we may practice reading through “estranged conceptual prisms”
(Felman & Laub, 1992) and alternative frames so students have the opportunity to
wrangle with the words and ideas that simultaneously reflect and construct
foundational narratives.
c7-55_Aug07RTE
51
7/18/07, 12:15 PM
52
Research in the Teaching of English
Volume 42
August 2007
AUTHOR’S NOTE
I would like to thank Melanie Sperling and Anne DiPardo for their insightful and generous feedback on this manuscript over the course of several drafts. I am fortunate to have had the opportunity to publish under their editorship. I would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers who
read earlier versions and provided advice. Any shortcomings are my own responsibility.
REFERENCES
ALVERMANN, D.E., COMMEYRAS, M., YOUNG, J.
P., RANDALL, S., & HINSON, D. (1997).
Interrupting gendered discursive practices in
classroom talk about texts: Easy to think
about, difficult to do. Journal of Literacy
Research, 29(1), 73-104.
BAKHTIN, M. M. (1981). The dialogic
imagination: Four essays. M. Holquist (Ed.).
C. Emerson & M. Holquist (Trans.). Austin:
University of Texas Press.
BAKHTIN, M. M. (1993). Toward a philosophy
of the act. V. Liapunov & M. Holquist (Eds.).
V. Liapunov (Trans.). Austin: University of
Texas Press.
BARDIGE, B. L. (1983). Reflective thinking and
prosocial awareness: Adolescents face the
Holocaust and themselves. Unpublished
doctoral dissertation, Harvard University.
BARDIGE, B. L. (1988). Things so finely
human: Moral sensibilities at risk in
adolescence. In C. Gilligan, J. V. Ward, J. M.
Taylor, & B. L. Bardige (Eds.), Mapping the
moral domain: A contribution of women’s
thinking to psychological theory and education
(pp. 87-110). Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
BARTON, K. C., & LEVSTIK, L. S. (2004).
Teaching history for the common good.
Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
BAUER, Y. (2001). Rethinking the Holocaust.
New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
T. Rogers & A. O. Soter (Eds.), Reading across
cultures: Teaching literature in diverse society
(pp. 69-94). New York: Teachers College
Press and NCTE.
BEACH, R., PARKS, D., THEIN, A., & LENSMIRE, T.
(2004, April). Working class high school
students’ discussions of affirmative action
related to responses to multicultural literature.
Paper presented at the annual conference of
the American Educational Researchers
Association, San Diego.
BENHABIB, S. (1987). The generalized and
concrete other: The Kohlberg-Gilligan
controversy and feminist theory. In S.
Benhabib & D. Cornell (Eds.), Feminism as
critique (pp. 7-95). Minneapolis, MN: The
University of Minnesota Press.
BENIGNI, R. (DIRECTOR). (1997). Life is
beautiful [Motion picture]. US: Miramax.
BISHOP, G. (1999). What Americans really
believe: And why faith isn’t as universal as
they think. Free Inquiry 19(3), 38-42.
BLACK, S. (2003). Teaching about religion.
American School Board Journal, 190(4), 50.
Retrieved November 20, 2005, from http://
www.asbj.com/2003/04/0403research.html
BRABECK, M., KENNY, M., STRYKER, S.,
TOLLEFSON, T., & STERN-STROM, M. (1994).
Human rights education through the
“Facing History and Ourselves” Programme.
Journal of Moral Education, 23(3), 333-347.
BAUM, R. (1996). “What I have learned to feel”:
The pedagogical emotions of Holocaust education. College Literature, 23(3), 44-58. Retrieved September 23, 2003 from EBSCO.
BRUNER, J. S. (1990). Acts of meaning.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
BEACH, R. (1997). Students’ resistance to
engagement with multicultural literature. In
BURRIN, P. (1994). Hitler and the Jews: The genesis of the Holocaust. London: Edward Arnold.
c7-55_Aug07RTE
52
BRUNER, J. S. (1991). The narrative construction of reality. Critical Inquiry 18, 1-21.
7/18/07, 12:16 PM
SPECTOR
53
God on the Gallows
CARROLL, J. (2001). Constantine’s sword: The
church and the Jews. London: Houghton
Mifflin.
GEE, J. P. (1999). An introduction to discourse
analysis: Theory and method. New York:
Routledge.
CHOMSKY, M. J. (DIRECTOR). (1978). Holocaust
[NBC Miniseries airing April 16-19].
GEERTZ, C. (1979). Religion as a cultural
system. In W. Lessa and E. Vogt (Eds.),
Reader in comparative religion (pp. 78-89).
New York: HarperCollins.
COLBY, S., & LYON, A. (2004). Heightening
awareness about the importance of using
multicultural literature. Multicultural
Education, 11(3), 24–28.
DAWIDOWICZ, L. S. (1975). The war against the
Jews: 1933-1945. New York: Bantam Books.
DORNHEIM, R. (DIRECTOR). (2001). Anne
Frank: The whole story ABC Miniseries
[Videorecording]. New York: ABC.
DUTRO, E. (2001/2002). “But that’s a girl’s
book!” Exploring gender boundaries in
children’s reading practices. The Reading
Teacher, 55, 376-384.
DUTRO, E. (2006, April). Beyond girls and
boys: Prospects for gender as a category of
analysis in research on children’s literature.
Paper presented at the annual conference of
the American Educational Researchers
Association, San Francisco.
ENCISO, P. E. (1997). Negotiating the meaning
of difference. In T. Rogers & A. O. Soter
(Eds.), Reading across cultures: Teaching
literature in a diverse society (pp. 13-41). New
York: Teachers College Press and NCTE.
GIBSON, M. (DIRECTOR). (2004). The Passion of
the Christ [Motion picture]. Paramount
Pictures.
GLAZIER, J., & SEO, J-A. (2005). Multicultural
literature and discussion as mirror and
window? Journal of Adolescent & Adult
Literacy, 48(8), 686-700.
GOLDHAGEN, D. J. (1996). Hitler’s willing
executioners: Ordinary Germans and the
Holocaust. New York: Vintage Books.
GOODRICH, F., & HACKETT, A. (1994). The
diary of Anne Frank. In A. N. Applebee, A. B.
Bermudez, S. Hynds, J. A. Langer, J. Marshall,
& D. E. Norton (Consultants), McDougal,
Littell literature and language, green level (pp.
495-568). Evanston, IL: McDougal, Littell.
HALFORD, J. M. (1998/1999). Longing for the
sacred: A conversation with Nel Noddings.
Educational Leadership, 57(4), 28-32.
HALL, D. E., KOENIG, H. G. & MEADOR, K. G.
(2004). Conceptualizing religion. Perspectives
in Biology and Medicine, 47(3), 386-401.
ENCISO, P. E. (2003). Reading discrimination.
In S. Greene & D. Abt-Perkins (Eds.), Making
race visible (pp. 149-177). New York:
Teachers College Press.
HAYNES, C. C. (2001). Religious liberty and
the public schools. Fastback: Phi Delta
Kappa. Bloomington, IN: Phi Delta Kappa
International.
FACING HISTORY AND OURSELVES. (1993). Project
submission to the program effectiveness panel,
US Department of Education, January.
HAYNES, C. C., & THOMAS, O. (2001). Finding
common ground: A guide to religious liberty in
public schools. Nashville, TN: First Amendment Center.
FAIRCLOUGH, N. (1995). Critical discourse
analysis: The critical study of language. New
York: Longman.
HELLIG, J. (2003). A short history: The Holocaust
and antisemitism. Oxford: One World.
FELMAN, S., & LAUB, D. (1992). Testimony:
Crises of witnessing in literature, psychoanalysis, and history. New York: Routledge.
HICKS, D. (2002). Reading lives: Working-class
children and literacy learning. New York:
Teachers College Press.
FRANK, A. (2001). The diary of a young girl:
The definitive edition. New York: Doubleday.
HILBERG, R. (2003). The destruction of the
European Jews. New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press.
c7-55_Aug07RTE
53
7/18/07, 12:16 PM
54
Research in the Teaching of English
Volume 42
August 2007
HOLLAND, D., LACHICOTTE, W., SKINNER, D., &
CAIN, C. (1998). Identity and agency in
cultural worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
MCLAREN, P. (2007). Life in schools: An
introduction to critical pedagogy in the
foundations of education. Boston: Allyn and
Bacon.
HUBBARD, R. S., & POWER, B. M. (1999). Living
the questions: A guide for teacher-researchers.
Portland, ME: Stenhouse Publishers.
MERRIAM, S. B. (1998). Qualitative research
and case study applications in education. San
Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers.
JONES, S. (2006a). Girls, social class, and
literacy: What teachers can do to make a
difference. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
MORRISON, T. (1992). Playing in the dark:
Whiteness and the literary imagination.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
JONES, S. (2006b). Lessons from Dorothy
Allison: Teacher education, social class, and
critical literacy. Changing English 13, 293305.
NORD, W. A. (1995). Religion and American
education: Rethinking a national dilemma.
Chapel Hill, NC: University of North
Carolina Press.
KATZ, S. (1983). Post-Holocaust dialogues.
New York: New York University Press.
NOVICK, P. (1999). The Holocaust in American
life. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
KUEHL, J. (PRODUCER) & DARLOW, M. (DIREC(1993). The Final Solution
[Videorecording]. New York: HBO Video.
PENSLAR, D.J. (2005). Introduction. In D.J.
Penslar, M.R. Marrus, & J.G. Stein (Eds.),
Contemporary antisemitism (pp. 3-11).
Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
TOR).
LANG, B. (2005). Post-Holocaust interpretation, misinterpretation, and claims of history.
Bloomington: University of Indiana Press.
LANZMANN, C. (DIRECTOR). (1985a). Shoah.
[Videorecording]. Hollywood, CA: Paramount Home Video.
LANZMANN, C. (1985b). Shoah: The complete
text from the acclaimed Holocaust film. New
York: Pantheon Books.
LEWIS, C., KETTER, J., & FABOS, B. (2001).
Reading race in a rural context. Qualitative
Studies in Education, 14(3), 317-350.
LIEBERMAN, M. (1981). Facing history and
ourselves: A project evaluation. Moral
Education Forum, 6(2), 36-41.
LIEBERMAN, M. (1986). Evaluation report
78680D to the joint dissemination review
panel, available from Facing History and
Ourselves Resource Center, Brookline, MA.
LITTELL, F. H. (1975). The crucifixion of the
Jews. New York: Harper & Row.
LOWRY, L. (1989). Number the stars. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin.
MANULIS, J. B. & GORDON, M. (PRODUCER), &
CARTER, T. (DIRECTOR). (1993). Swing kids
[Motion picture]. US: Hollywood Pictures.
c7-55_Aug07RTE
54
PETERSON, G. R. (2001). Religion as orienting
worldview. Zygon 36(1), 5-19.
RENAIS, A. (1956/2003). Night and fog
[Documentary]. US: Criterion Collection.
RICOEUR, P. (1988). Time and narrative, vol.
III. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
ROOF, W. C. (1999). Spiritual marketplace:
Baby boomers and the remaking of American
religions. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press.
RUBENSTEIN, R. L. (1996). Religion and
uniqueness of the Holocaust. In A.S.
Rosenbaum (Ed.), Is the Holocaust unique?
Perspectives on comparative genocide (pp. 1118). Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
RUBENSTEIN, R. L., & ROTH, J. K. (2003).
Approaches to Auschwitz: The Holocaust and
its legacy. Louisville: Westminster John Knox.
RUETHER, R. (1979). Faith and fratricide: The
theological roots of anti-Semitism. New York:
Seabury Press.
SAINT-EXUPERY, A. DE. (2000). Flight to Arras.
Trans. M. Rees. London: Penguin Classics.
SCHAFF, P., & WACE, H. (EDS.). (1980). Nicene
and post-Nicene fathers, series 2, vol. 1.
7/18/07, 12:16 PM
SPECTOR
55
God on the Gallows
Accessed online from K. Knight (Ed.), Life of
Constantine, Book III by Eusebias on June 12,
2006 from http://www.newadvent.org/
fathers/25023.htm
STRAUSS, A. L., & CORBIN, J. (1998). Basics of
qualitative research: Techniques and procedures for developing grounded theory.
Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.
SCHLEUNES, K. (1970). The twisted road to
Auschwitz: Nazi policy toward German Jews
1933-1939. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois
Press.
TEN BOOM, C. (1984). The hiding place. New
York: Bantam Books.
SCHULTZ, L. H., BARR, D. J., & SELMAN, R. L.
(2001). The value of a developmental
approach to evaluating character development programmes: An outcome study of
Facing History and Ourselves. Journal of
Moral Education, 30, 3-27.
SCHWEBER, S. A. (2004). Making sense of the
Holocaust: Lessons from classroom practice.
New York: Teachers College Press.
SCHWEBER, S., & IRWIN, R. (2003). “Especially
special”: Learning about Jews in a fundamentalist Christian school. Teachers College
Record, 105(9), 1693-1719.
SEIDMAN, N. (1996). Elie Wiesel and the
scandal of Jewish rage. Jewish Social Studies,
3, 1-19.
SEIXAS, P. (2000). Schwiegen! Die kinder! Or
does postmodern history have a place in the
school? In P.N. Sterns, P. Seixas, & S.
Wineburg (Eds.), Knowing, teaching, and
learning history: National and international
perspectives (pp. 20-37). New York: New York
University Press.
SINGER, J. Y., & SMITH, S. A. (2003). The
potential of multicultural literature:
Changing understanding of self and others.
Multicultural Perspectives, 5(2), 17-23.
UNITED STATES HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL AND
MUSEUM. (2005). Guidelines for teaching
about the Holocaust. Retrieved January 1,
2005 from http://www.ushmm.org/
education/foreducators/guidelines/
index.utp?content=guide2.htm
WEISS, L., & FINE, M. (2000). Construction
sites: Excavating race, class, and gender among
urban youth. New York: Teachers College
Press.
WEISS, L., & FINE, M. (2005). Beyond silenced
voices: Class, race, and gender in United
States schools. Albany: State University of
New York Press.
WERTSCH, J. V. (1998). Mind as action. New
York: Oxford University Press.
WERTSCH, J. V. (2002). Voices of collective
remembering. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
WIESEL, E. (1982). Night. New York: Bantam.
WIESENTHAL, S. (1997). The sunflower: On the
possibilities and limits of forgiveness. New
York: Schocken.
WILLIAMS, P. W. (2002). America’s religions:
From their origins to the twenty-first century.
Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.
WISTRICH, R. S. (1996). Anti-Semitism: The
longest hatred. London: Thames Methuen.
SOULEN, K. R. (1996). The God of Israel and
Christian theology. Minneapolis, MN:
Fortress Press.
WUTHROW, R. (2005). America and the
challenges of religious diversity. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press.
SPIEGELMAN, A. (1991). Maus II: A survivor’s
tale: And here my troubles began. New York:
Pantheon Books.
WYATT, E. (2006, January 17). Next book for
Oprah Is ‘Night’ by Wiesel. The New York
Times, p. E1.
SPIELBERG, S. (DIRECTOR). (1993). Schindler’s
List [Motion picture]. US: Universal Studios.
c7-55_Aug07RTE
55
7/18/07, 12:16 PM