The full show transcript is available on our website. https://history.wisc.edu/ask-a-historian/

Recent studies conducted by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany have produced concerning statistics on deficits in Holocaust knowledge among American millennials and Gen Z-ers. Why do many young people lack basic knowledge about the Holocaust, and how do we fix this?

Professor Dan Stolz interviews Professor Brandon Bloch about the historical development of Holocaust education, how recent literature reframes our understanding of the Holocaust as part of American history, and why it's necessary to rethink the goals of Holocaust education within a multicultural United States.

For Brandon, Holocaust education today can be “a vehicle for thinking about the genocidal power of racism and racial thinking in ways that are not at all distant from our own national past and present in the United States.” He argues that doing a better job of teaching the Holocaust requires strengthening and deepening historical education more broadly.

Episode Links:

Brandon Bloch is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he teaches the history of modern Germany and Europe and the history of human rights. https://history.wisc.edu/people/bloch-brandon/

Dan Stolz is the Kemal H. Karpat Assistant Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he teaches Ottoman and modern Middle East history. https://history.wisc.edu/people/stolz-daniel/

“New study by Claims Conference finds significant lack of Holocaust knowledge in the United States,” Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany (2018) http://www.claimscon.org/study/

“First-ever 50-state survey on Holocaust knowledge of American millennials and Gen Z reveals shocking results,” Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany (2020) http://www.claimscon.org/millennial-study/

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum https://www.ushmm.org/

USC Shoah Foundation – The Institute of Visual History and Education https://sfi.usc.edu/

Facing History and Ourselves https://www.facinghistory.org/

Our music is “Pamgaea” by Kevin MacLeod. Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/4193-pamgaea CC BY 4.0 license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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