A.L.:

I’m enjoying the give and take, and thanks for the opportunity to air so important a debate in our newspaper. A question: What’s your empirical evidence for the assertion that “Jewish education has been skewed toward too much Shoah education, and that unaffiliated teens see the Shoah—and not the Exodus or Sinai or the Torah– as the most enduring lesson of their Hebrew school experience”? Has the research been done on this?

A second question: What is meant by “enduring lesson”? Because if that lesson is that the most important thing about being a Jew is knowing about the Holocaust, or that the ways they tried to kill us trump the ways we affirm life, then I agree with you. But I can imagine another enduring lesson from the Holocuast: Am Yisroel Chai. When I walk into our federation building, the Holocaust memorial chapel is indeed front and center. But so is the Jewish preschool. And just to the right is a 40,000-volume Jewish library, and next to that a historical society that has put together exhibits on Yiddish theater, Jewish greengrocers, and Newark’s famed Jewish hospital. Down one hall is the office of the NJ Jewish News; down the other a thriving JCC. And upstairs is the federation itself, which raises $24 million a year for Jewish education, care for the elderly, Israeli infrastructure, etc. I don’t think anybody can enter this building and feel the Jews are being “defined by crimes against us.” I can’t think of another Jewish institution in my orbit that does not similarly place its Holocaust commemoration in a living, thriving, even defiant context. That’s why I’d like to hear the evidence that kids are hearing a much different message.

[The message I fear most kids are getting in formal Jewish education is “It’s all boring — holidays AND Holocaust.” But that’s a different debate.]

P.S. The quote marks around “put the Shoa behind usâ€? bother me too, and they shouldn’t be there. In an earlier draft I was trying to incorporate a New Yorker essay by Malcolm Gladwell titled “Getting Over It: The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit put the war behind him. Why can’t we?” about how societies overcome trauma. In the end, the paragraph disappeared but the reference to the subtitle remained. My bad. It’s interesting reading, by the way, and more fodder for this diiscussion: http://www.gladwell.com/2004/2004_11_08_a_trauma.html

Dear Sir,
Thank you for your clarification about the quotation; I understand editing under deadline pressures.
Your question: Many studies confirm the primacy of the Shoah for Jewish teen identity, including most recently from a service you no doubt subscribe to, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, below.
Eight thousand teens today are on the March of the Living in Poland. Imagine if we took all that money and worked to bring as many teens as possible to the March on Washington for Darfour; that would be a Jewish educational and moral victory.

FOCUS ON ISSUES
In study, youth see Holocaust and
Jewish culture as keys to identities
By Sue Fishkoff
March 26, 2006

OAKLAND, Calif., March 26 (JTA) — Some of the more interesting findings of the newly released Reboot study of young U.S. Jews focus on how Generation Y Jews understand what it means to be Jewish.
Respondents — Jews aged 18 to 25 — were presented with 12 possible factors and asked how much each “matters� to being Jewish. Top on the list was “remembering the Holocaust,� which 73 percent of respondents said matters “a lot.�

RELATED ARTICLES
Study: Holocaust memory important to young Jews
Next were two universal

I’ve seen the studies (including a new one by the American Jewish Committee that, according to the JTA, shows “The Holocaust is proving more important than Israel in positively affecting Jewish identity among many young Jews”). One thing you need to account for are false positive responses — what pollsters call “social pressure.” As Jeffrey M. Jones, managing editor of the Gallup Poll, told the Wall Street Journal: “The [polling] interview is a social experience. As would be the case in a cocktail party or at a job interview, you want to give a good impression of yourself. Even though you can’t see the other person, and may never talk to them again, you want them to think well of you.”

What teen is going to tell a Jewish adult (whoelse does polling?) he doesn’t care “a lot” about the Holocaust?

And you still haven’t addressed the CONTENT of the Holocaust education experience. You assume that learning about the Holocaust leads to — what? Despair? Pessimism? A joyless encounter with Judaism? I’m arguing that it could lead to something like — well, social action. How many of those Jewish kids who piled onto buses for the Darfur rally went BECAUSE of the lessons they learned about the Holocaust? I would count that as a moral victory.

“The Holocaust continues to be profoundly important to a broad spectrum of young Jews, yet Israel appears to be much less important in positively affecting Jewish identity,� the study said.

The fact that for the majority of unaffiliated jewish teens the Shoah is the most important point of identification serves as testimony to the educational bankrupcy of the key messages for most youth. Yes, many young people may gravitate toward greater commitment and activism. But most do not.
It should come as no surprise that if one tracks the disaffiliation rates of Jews and overlay a chart of the increase in Shoah education that there is a possible correlation. Why would anyone want to marry Jewish and raise Jewish children if the most enduring and memorable lesson they learned in Hebrew school is that the world is not a safe place for Jews?