Following a co-hosted symposium on the Weimar Republic, the Guthrie generously invited the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies to attend a performance of Cabaret. We went last weekend, and it was simply exceptional. If you stop reading here, or take nothing else away from this post, see the show!
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Act I. The play opens. “Wilkommen.” Soft chugging of a train as Cliff arrives in Berlin.
Act I of Cabaret is everything a real cabaret should be: decadent, sultry, and dazzlingly hedonistic. It is a modernized—and more carnal—version of Lautrec’s famed portraits of gaudy nightlife, but recontextualized through the sort of Brechtian self-awareness made possible by good directing. However, this illusion of the perfect cabaret splinters at the end of the act, when the Emcee recoils in horror as their gramophone begins playing an eerie and increasingly disconcerting “Tomorrow Belongs to Me.” As an audience, we sense a change; we just don’t know what it is yet.
Sounds of a train, growing louder, intermingle with the ghoulish lilt of the gramophone.
Director Joseph Haj reinforces the thematic division between Acts I and II by moving the intermission from its usual placement* amid the darker part of the show forward, to follow immediately after “Tomorrow Belongs to Me.” This change punctuated the final moment of Act I and intensified the descent into darkness that defines the rest of the show.
Before this moment, the audience is given no hint of what is to come. As Cliff states at the very end of the show, “It was the end of the world, and I was dancing with Sally Bowles, and we were both asleep.” So too is the audience: asleep. Blissfully, and deliberately unaware of what lies ahead. In this asleep-ness, the audience becomes complicit in the events that follow. It is Haj’s intentional and unflinching focus on this complicity that makes his production of Cabaret such a powerful portrayal of the years preceding World War II and the Holocaust.
Act II. The train whistle grows louder. All eeriness from the end of Act I is gone, replaced by an almost mechanical normality.
Guests gather for Fraulein Schneider’s (gentile) and Herr Schultz’s (Jewish) engagement party. One of the guests removes his coat to reveal a swastika armband (at this point, there was an audible collective gasp from the audience; in theater, as in “real” life, we can lull ourselves into believing that somehow the story ends differently this time). As the party guests grow uneasy, he begins to leave, but a woman persuades him to stay and begins singing a passionate rendition of a nationalist folk song (“Tomorrow Belongs to Me” (reprise)). The other guests join in, one by one, leaving the hosts, along with Cliff and Sally, stunned to discover what their neighbors believe–or, at least, the individuals and ideologies they follow without question.
A new scene. The train is careening toward us now. The Emcee, dressed in leather and buckles, dons two glittering swastika armbands. The Kit Kat Klub dancers join and form a kick line– a grotesque spectacle that mocks the absurdity of Hitler and the Nazi party. (Unlike The Producers, I find Cabaret to be uniquely equipped to grapple with something deeper: the true tragedy and human cost of fascist ideology and hate.)
The ability to relay this ridiculousness without making light of the subject depends on a capacity to convey tragedy, making it essential that the production communicate the true devastation of the Holocaust. The final scene did so brutally, beautifully, and without compromise.
The Emcee’s role in Cabaret’s messaging is immense. In the original 1966 Broadway production, Joel Grey’s Emcee “represented the city of Berlin itself, their malevolence most obvious in the dark conclusion” (Blum 2024). However, the 1993 London and 1998 Broadway revivals shifted away from portraying the Emcee as a perpetrator.** While there have been many interpretations of the Emcee since, this production returned to portraying the Emcee as a victim. Part of the production’s emotional power lies in Haj’s decision to reclaim this version of the Emcee– one that underscores the tragedy and loss at the heart of the story.
In the final scene, the Emcee drops their train conductor’s coat and removes a wig to reveal cropped hair and a striped prisoner’s uniform—the kind worn in concentration camps. They bear a striking resemblance to the famous photographs of Czesława Kwoka, a fourteen-year-old Polish girl murdered at Auschwitz. Still performing a cabaret song, the Emcee grows more frenzied by the minute. The lights go dark. When they come up, everything else has vanished: the performers, the band, the props– even the lights themselves. The dim, sparkling glow of the cabaret has been replaced by a stark white light. It is cold and clinical. The illusion has lifted, replaced by the brutal clarity of reality. Was any of it real? Or was the entire performance imagined– an invention of the Emcee’s mind as they performed for fellow prisoners in the camp? Maybe it doesn’t matter.
Part of the set transforms into train cars. The cast returns, clutching small suitcases, and silently takes their places inside. The doors slam shut with a terrible finality. Blinding white lights shine through the cars and flood the audience. Lights out. The train leaves the station.
The lights come back up for bows, and the accompanying jaunty cabaret music is grating. It is harsh after the vulnerability and violence of the previous scene. The message is loud and clear. As Joseph Haj stated in one interview: “Cabaret reflects a society that is determined to dance as fast as it can, to keep the lights twirling as long as possible, to turn the volume up as loud as possible, to keep from seeing the train that is thundering toward them.”
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*For theatre nerds, this was between “Tomorrow Belongs to Me (Reprise)” and “Kick Line.”
**As many people know, the lines between perpetrator/victim/bystander are often blurry, and at times, nonexistent– but this is not the focus of Cabaret.
Sources:
Gillian Blum, “Cabaret 2024 Musical Ending Explained”, The Direct, June 29, 2024.
Kyra Layman is a recent graduate of Macalester College and is excited to be working with CHGS this summer. She believes that Holocaust and genocide education is more important now than ever and is honored to be assisting the Center in supporting educators and developing genocide education curriculum. Her areas of academic study primarily center on individual and collective resistance in mass atrocities, altruism amidst genocide, and the use of collective memory in transitional justice efforts. In addition to her academic work, she is active in the theatre world and weaves her interests together wherever possible.
Last week, the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies had the honor of hosting a two-day workshop with 25 educators in partnership with Yahad–In Unum, an organization internationally recognized for its work uncovering forgotten sites of mass violence and amplifying survivor voices.
We were thrilled to see so many educators sign up, eager to learn and engage with challenging, timely material. The energy in the room was palpable, from the very beginning, participants asked thoughtful questions, shared insights, and leaned into the difficult but vital work of studying genocide and mass atrocity.
It was especially meaningful to learn from Yahad–In Unum’s educators, whose field investigations and oral history work continue to expand our understanding of the Holocaust and of genocide more broadly. Yahad’s research began with documenting the Holocaust by bullets in Eastern Europe, and they are now applying these same investigative methods to other contexts, including crimes committed against the Maya people in Guatemala, the Yazidi in Iraq, and Ukrainians during the ongoing Russian invasion.
These cross-regional connections help deepen our understanding of patterns of violence, silence, and resistance. Yahad is also playing a leading role in developing educational materials based on these oral testimonies—resources that make it possible to bring these stories directly into our classrooms.
Workshops like this are essential not only for building knowledge, but for building community. They offer educators a chance to come together, reflect, and prepare to pass on these lessons in meaningful, thoughtful ways. We are incredibly grateful to Yahad–In Unum for sharing their expertise and for the powerful work they continue to do around the world.
We look forward to future collaborations—and to bringing these stories and tools to the next generation of learners.
Ottomania and the Armenian Genocide in World History Curriculum
June 2025
“Do high school students in the United States learn about the Armenian Genocide?”
This is a surprisingly difficult question to answer. K-12 education in the United States is highly decentralized and localized, with decisions about what is taught and learned made by districts, schools, or, most often, individual teachers at the classroom level. Some state-level surveys of genocide education have been conducted, but the variability of curricula among schools and the high rate of teacher turnover make it challenging to draw meaningful conclusions. While Holocaust education has become a mainstay of American curricula for decades, education about so-called “other genocides,” including the Armenian Genocide, is still much less common.
A colleague reminded me that high school teachers cannot reasonably be expected to know everything. “It’s not that I’m purposefully not teaching it. I was never taught about the Armenian Genocide, and so I don’t include it in my class,” he said. A 2015 survey of American adults revealed that only 35 percent had any knowledge of the Armenian Genocide. However, compounding this lack of knowledge are two trends that have come to shape academic research and social awareness of the Armenian Genocide in the US: (a) Distortion and denial of the genocide and (b) Neo-Ottomanism and Ottoman nostalgia. These trends shape what American high school students learn in World History classes, especially Advanced Placement World History.
Denial and Distortion
The Turkish and Azerbaijani governments, primary deniers and distorters of the Armenian Genocide, have long attempted to shape narratives of violence perpetrated against Armenians. While there are instances of outright denial of the genocide, narratives that distort or minimize the violence are more common, especially those that minimize the number of Armenians murdered in the genocide. The Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs wrote: “Turkey does not deny the suffering of Armenians, including the loss of many innocent lives, during the First World War. However, greater numbers of Turks died or were killed in the years leading to and during the War. Without belittling the tragic consequences for any group, Turkey objects to the one-sided presentation of this tragedy as a genocide by one group against another.”
Another subtler tactic is the representation of the Ottoman Empire as one of tolerance and ethnic and religious diversity. The Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs wrote against narratives of violence and genocide, stating: “As a consequence, eight centuries of Turkish-Armenian relationship, which was predominantly about friendship, tolerance and peaceful coexistence, is forgotten.” This focus on tolerance and diversity, often minimizing or omitting any mention of ethnic or religious conflict or violence within the Ottoman Empire, is a form of Neo-Ottomanism and has been termed Ottoman Nostalgia.
Ottoman Nostalgia
Neo-Ottomanism is a political ideology that seeks to promote Turkish political and economic influence over the former lands of the Ottoman Empire. Neo-Ottomanism often relies on Ottoman nostalgia, which promotes a narrative of the Ottoman Empire as diverse and tolerant of the various ethnic, religious, and cultural groups that once lived under its rule. While true to a degree – for example, the Ottoman Millet system granted non-Muslim Abrahamic religious communities, including Armenians, a degree of autonomy and self-rule – this narrative, especially when shared uncritically, minimized the ethnic and religious violence in the Ottoman Empire. These two trends – distortion and, especially, Ottoman nostalgia – can be clearly identified in US high school world history curricula.
World History Curricula
Roger Back et al.’s World History Patterns of Interaction (first published in 1998) is one of the most popular high school-level world history textbooks in the United States. In fact, if you took a world history course in the US in the last 30 years, there is a good chance you encountered this text. The current (2010) edition only mentions the Armenian Genocide (referring to it as the “Armenian Massacre” in a call-out box in the margins of the chapter on World War I. The three-sentence-long text box also states that “more than 600,000 died of starvation or were killed,” when many academics put the number of deaths between 1 and 1.5 million.
Roger Beck et al.’s World History: Pattern of Interaction Textbook
While texts like Beck et al.’s minimize the Armenian Genocide, Ottoman Nostalgia can be clearly seen in the formal and informal Advanced Placement World History curricula.
Advanced Placement World History
While there is no national curriculum in the United States, there are curricula that are used across the country, such as Advanced Placement (AP) courses. AP courses, created by the College Board, a division of the Educational Testing Service, are meant to be college-level courses taught by high school teachers. Students may earn college credit based on their score on a comprehensive end-of-course exam. In 2024, 11 percent of all American high school students took the AP World History: Modern exam. As much as 10 percent more may have enrolled in APWH courses but did not sit for the exam. Additionally, in many schools, APWH curriculum influences non-AP world history classes.
Formal and informal APWH’s curriculum includes: (a) the “Course and Exam Description” (CED), which lists the skills and content that must be covered in the course; (b) AP-recommended textbooks and exam preparation guides, and (c) teacher-created resources.
The CED includes teaching and learning about “Genocide, ethnic violence, or attempted destruction of specific populations,” including “Armenians in the Ottoman Empire during and after World War I,” as one of several illustrative examples. In contrast, the Ottoman Empire is mentioned 32 times in the document, and highlighted for its diversity and inclusiveness: “Many states, such as the Mughal and Ottoman empires, adopted practices to accommodate the ethnic and religious diversity of their subjects or utilize the economic, political, and military contributions of different ethnic or religious groups.”
Textbooks
Jerry Bentley et al.’s Traditions & Encounters: A Global Perspective on the Past, a textbook recommended for APWH students, includes “Armenian Massacres” in the glossary, while in the text, it offers credence to Turkish distortion and denialism, writing: “The Turkish government in particular rejects the label of genocide and claims the Armenian deaths resulted not from a state-sponsored plan of mass extermination but from communal warfare perpetrated by Christians and Muslims, disease, and famine.”
Jerry Bentley et al.’s Traditions & Encounters: A Global Perspective on the Past passage on the Armenian genocide [sic] and glossary entry
Teacher-Created Materials and Professional Development
Perhaps most telling is a Facebook Group, “AP World History Teachers,” with nearly 9,000 members, in which educators share resources, professional development opportunities, and discuss topics related to the course. In a post, a teacher reflected: “I did a 3 week NEH seminar on the Ottomans in Turkey back in 2013. They really ARE all that.”
Many posts within the group highlight Ottoman nostalgia. One particular post for an upcoming teacher-facilitated professional development workshop stated: “Just a reminder that TONIGHT I’m offering another free workshop! It’s at 7PM ET/ 4PM PT, I’ll discuss how we teach an empire that started as a small medieval state around 1300 and lasted until 1922. I’ll focus on how we can help students understand the Ottoman Empire as a dynamic state that continually evolved and was an ethnically and religiously diverse state.”
APWH Facebook Group Post
A teacher-created presentation on the Ottoman Empire included a focus on Pax Ottomana, or a “More positive view of Ottoman rule/expansion,” as well as a slide on the “M&M’s” of the Ottoman Empire, including the millet system. While using a lighthearted shorthand for students is an effective tool, it reduces history to a few keywords and scrubs it clean of any nuance.
APWH Teacher-Created Presentation Slide
Teacher-created materials reflect a wide range of influences, including personal reading and professional development. However, given the teach-to-the-test nature of APWH, many materials follow the narrative of the CED and minimize the Armenian Genocide while highlighting Ottoman nostalgia.
Conclusion
Highlighting narratives of diversity and tolerance while minimizing violent pasts is certainly not isolated to Turkish/Ottoman history. Indeed, such narratives would be very familiar to many American teachers who were often educated within a system that promoted similar narratives about the United States. Reducing history into a nice narrative or a marketable product ultimately does the students learning about it a disservice. Likewise, Ottoman nostalgia is part of a larger liberal discourse of multiculturalism that subsumes and minimizes ethnic, religious, or racial violence by the state.
However, Ottoman nostalgia may be more difficult for American educators, even critically-minded ones, to discern and challenge in their classrooms. In the post-9/11 era, many critical social studies educators sought to provide students with knowledge about Islam and narratives of Islamic states that countered those that framed all Muslims as terrorists. For many social studies educators, simply teaching about the Ottoman Empire, something they likely learned little about in their own education, is a critical stance. While highlighting for students the tolerance and religious and ethnic diversity of the Ottoman Empire does seemingly little harm, such framing is often part of a larger narrative that also minimizes or denies the Armenian Genocide.
George Dalbo is an Assistant Professor of Education and Youth Studies at Beloit College and a Research Fellow with the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Minnesota. Previously, George was a middle and high school social studies teacher. Kipper Bromia is a student at Beloit College majoring in sociology with an interest in how social systems affect individual people and relationships that they have with each other. Kipper also has an interest in animal behavior and welfare, and the relationships that animals and ecosystems have with humans.
“They Really ARE All That”
Ottomania and the Armenian Genocide in World History Curriculum
By George Dalbo and Kipper Bromia
June 2025
“Do high school students in the United States learn about the Armenian Genocide?”
This is a surprisingly difficult question to answer. K-12 education in the United States is highly decentralized and localized, with decisions about what is taught and learned made by districts, schools, or, most often, individual teachers at the classroom level. Some state-level surveys of genocide education have been conducted, but the variability of curricula among schools and the high rate of teacher turnover make it challenging to draw meaningful conclusions. While Holocaust education has become a mainstay of American curricula for decades, education about so-called “other genocides,” including the Armenian Genocide, is still much less common.
A colleague reminded me that high school teachers cannot reasonably be expected to know everything. “It’s not that I’m purposefully not teaching it. I was never taught about the Armenian Genocide, and so I don’t include it in my class,” he said. A 2015 survey of American adults revealed that only 35 percent had any knowledge of the Armenian Genocide. However, compounding this lack of knowledge are two trends that have come to shape academic research and social awareness of the Armenian Genocide in the US: (a) Distortion and denial of the genocide and (b) Neo-Ottomanism and Ottoman nostalgia. These trends shape what American high school students learn in World History classes, especially Advanced Placement World History.
Denial and Distortion
The Turkish and Azerbaijani governments, primary deniers and distorters of the Armenian Genocide, have long attempted to shape narratives of violence perpetrated against Armenians. While there are instances of outright denial of the genocide, narratives that distort or minimize the violence are more common, especially those that minimize the number of Armenians murdered in the genocide. The Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs wrote: “Turkey does not deny the suffering of Armenians, including the loss of many innocent lives, during the First World War. However, greater numbers of Turks died or were killed in the years leading to and during the War. Without belittling the tragic consequences for any group, Turkey objects to the one-sided presentation of this tragedy as a genocide by one group against another.”
Another subtler tactic is the representation of the Ottoman Empire as one of tolerance and ethnic and religious diversity. The Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs wrote against narratives of violence and genocide, stating: “As a consequence, eight centuries of Turkish-Armenian relationship, which was predominantly about friendship, tolerance and peaceful coexistence, is forgotten.” This focus on tolerance and diversity, often minimizing or omitting any mention of ethnic or religious conflict or violence within the Ottoman Empire, is a form of Neo-Ottomanism and has been termed Ottoman Nostalgia.
Ottoman Nostalgia
Neo-Ottomanism is a political ideology that seeks to promote Turkish political and economic influence over the former lands of the Ottoman Empire. Neo-Ottomanism often relies on Ottoman nostalgia, which promotes a narrative of the Ottoman Empire as diverse and tolerant of the various ethnic, religious, and cultural groups that once lived under its rule. While true to a degree – for example, the Ottoman Millet system granted non-Muslim Abrahamic religious communities, including Armenians, a degree of autonomy and self-rule – this narrative, especially when shared uncritically, minimized the ethnic and religious violence in the Ottoman Empire. These two trends – distortion and, especially, Ottoman nostalgia – can be clearly identified in US high school world history curricula.
World History Curricula
Roger Back et al.’s World History Patterns of Interaction (first published in 1998) is one of the most popular high school-level world history textbooks in the United States. In fact, if you took a world history course in the US in the last 30 years, there is a good chance you encountered this text. The current (2010) edition only mentions the Armenian Genocide (referring to it as the “Armenian Massacre” in a call-out box in the margins of the chapter on World War I. The three-sentence-long text box also states that “more than 600,000 died of starvation or were killed,” when many academics put the number of deaths between 1 and 1.5 million.
Roger Beck et al.’s World History: Pattern of Interaction Textbook
While texts like Beck et al.’s minimize the Armenian Genocide, Ottoman Nostalgia can be clearly seen in the formal and informal Advanced Placement World History curricula.
Advanced Placement World History
While there is no national curriculum in the United States, there are curricula that are used across the country, such as Advanced Placement (AP) courses. AP courses, created by the College Board, a division of the Educational Testing Service, are meant to be college-level courses taught by high school teachers. Students may earn college credit based on their score on a comprehensive end-of-course exam. In 2024, 11 percent of all American high school students took the AP World History: Modern exam. As much as 10 percent more may have enrolled in APWH courses but did not sit for the exam. Additionally, in many schools, APWH curriculum influences non-AP world history classes.
Formal and informal APWH’s curriculum includes: (a) the “Course and Exam Description” (CED), which lists the skills and content that must be covered in the course; (b) AP-recommended textbooks and exam preparation guides, and (c) teacher-created resources.
The CED includes teaching and learning about “Genocide, ethnic violence, or attempted destruction of specific populations,” including “Armenians in the Ottoman Empire during and after World War I,” as one of several illustrative examples. In contrast, the Ottoman Empire is mentioned 32 times in the document, and highlighted for its diversity and inclusiveness: “Many states, such as the Mughal and Ottoman empires, adopted practices to accommodate the ethnic and religious diversity of their subjects or utilize the economic, political, and military contributions of different ethnic or religious groups.”
Textbooks
Jerry Bentley et al.’s Traditions & Encounters: A Global Perspective on the Past, a textbook recommended for APWH students, includes “Armenian Massacres” in the glossary, while in the text, it offers credence to Turkish distortion and denialism, writing: “The Turkish government in particular rejects the label of genocide and claims the Armenian deaths resulted not from a state-sponsored plan of mass extermination but from communal warfare perpetrated by Christians and Muslims, disease, and famine.”
Jerry Bentley et al.’s Traditions & Encounters: A Global Perspective on the Past passage on the Armenian genocide [sic] and glossary entry
Teacher-Created Materials and Professional Development
Perhaps most telling is a Facebook Group, “AP World History Teachers,” with nearly 9,000 members, in which educators share resources, professional development opportunities, and discuss topics related to the course. In a post, a teacher reflected: “I did a 3 week NEH seminar on the Ottomans in Turkey back in 2013. They really ARE all that.”
Many posts within the group highlight Ottoman nostalgia. One particular post for an upcoming teacher-facilitated professional development workshop stated: “Just a reminder that TONIGHT I’m offering another free workshop! It’s at 7PM ET/ 4PM PT, I’ll discuss how we teach an empire that started as a small medieval state around 1300 and lasted until 1922. I’ll focus on how we can help students understand the Ottoman Empire as a dynamic state that continually evolved and was an ethnically and religiously diverse state.”
APWH Facebook Group Post
A teacher-created presentation on the Ottoman Empire included a focus on Pax Ottomana, or a “More positive view of Ottoman rule/expansion,” as well as a slide on the “M&M’s” of the Ottoman Empire, including the millet system. While using a lighthearted shorthand for students is an effective tool, it reduces history to a few keywords and scrubs it clean of any nuance.
APWH Teacher-Created Presentation Slide
Teacher-created materials reflect a wide range of influences, including personal reading and professional development. However, given the teach-to-the-test nature of APWH, many materials follow the narrative of the CED and minimize the Armenian Genocide while highlighting Ottoman nostalgia.
Conclusion
Highlighting narratives of diversity and tolerance while minimizing violent pasts is certainly not isolated to Turkish/Ottoman history. Indeed, such narratives would be very familiar to many American teachers who were often educated within a system that promoted similar narratives about the United States. Reducing history into a nice narrative or a marketable product ultimately does the students learning about it a disservice. Likewise, Ottoman nostalgia is part of a larger liberal discourse of multiculturalism that subsumes and minimizes ethnic, religious, or racial violence by the state.
However, Ottoman nostalgia may be more difficult for American educators, even critically-minded ones, to discern and challenge in their classrooms. In the post-9/11 era, many critical social studies educators sought to provide students with knowledge about Islam and narratives of Islamic states that countered those that framed all Muslims as terrorists. For many social studies educators, simply teaching about the Ottoman Empire, something they likely learned little about in their own education, is a critical stance. While highlighting for students the tolerance and religious and ethnic diversity of the Ottoman Empire does seemingly little harm, such framing is often part of a larger narrative that also minimizes or denies the Armenian Genocide.
George Dalbo is an Assistant Professor of Education and Youth Studies at Beloit College and a Research Fellow with the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Minnesota. Previously, George was a middle and high school social studies teacher. Kipper Bromia is a student at Beloit College majoring in sociology with an interest in how social systems affect individual people and relationships that they have with each other. Kipper also has an interest in animal behavior and welfare, and the relationships that animals and ecosystems have with humans.
As academic interest in settler colonialism has increased, so have innovative studies. In her most recent book, Settler Garrison: Debt Imperialism, Militarism, and Transpacific Imaginaries, Jodi Kim (Professor in the Department of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth) takes on the topics of military and transpacific history, imperial conquest and neoimperialism, and how US outposts paradoxically reproduce liberation and domination. Although this, at first glance, seems a lot to consider in one work, Kim’s brilliant study deftly interrogates the development of U.S. military imperialism in the transpacific as inextricable from debt imperialism and the neoliberal world order.
Cover of Jodi Kim’s Settler Garrison. Debt, Imperialism, Militarism, and Transpacific Imaginaries
(Duke University Press, 2022)
Kim’s book opens with a wonderful analysis of the Oscar-winning South Korean movie Parasite as paralleling her work’s central concerns. Though the film is often understood by American audiences as simply a black comedy concerning South Korea’s class dynamics, Kim promotes a deeper understanding of the film’s symbolism as a critique of U.S. debt imperialism in one transpacific nation, in which Seoul is revealed as “the capital city of what is effectively a militarized US neocolony” (p. 2). Subsequent chapters of Settler Garrison analyze transpacific spacial and temporal exemptions in which US occupation denies a county’s full sovereignty without offering US federal jurisdiction and statehood, with US presence in a territory creating a dominating metapolitical authority supplanting local autonomy and subjugating indigenous peoples.
In territories across the pacific, the US is both liberator and coercer, as Kim observes in chapters concerning spacial and temporal exemptions such as the military base/camptown, the POW camp, and Guam. Importantly, these exemptions involve both spacial and temporal structures and processes. The abstract social institutions and concrete sites all connect through land seizure and subsequent US metapolitical authority across the pacific, territory that US policy has conceptualized as an “American lake.” In such areas, Kim finds that the US creates rules for others that it, conveniently, does not apply to itself. The current world order is based on strategic holdings, which must be reproduced through both military and extra-military dominance.
Ongoing military occupation, legal domination, and debt assignment, though, require continual shoring up. Neocolonialism requires obfuscating the fancy footwork required to normalize it, and Kim goes on to carefully analyze cultural productions that “defamiliarize and estrange this naturalization by linking the land seizures of US settler colonialism to those of military empire” (p. 21). Subsequent chapters in Kim’s book analyze a wealth of creative, indigenously-rooted cultural texts that expose and critique such domination so as to imagine different, better futures. The range of Kim’s cultural studies of creative works includes documentaries, short stories, novels, poetry, and stage productions. In them, she finds critical assessments of the various forms that neocolonial domination takes, including forms such as sexual exploitation, psychological warfare, and forced migration. Her analysis of such texts and their interconnected affinities allows Kim to find hope beyond current conditions.
For those uninitiated in the academic jargon of settler colonialism, Settler Garrison is dense. Though only 188 pages of text (not including notes), the writing, especially in the Introduction, can require considerable unpacking. Regularly referencing a rich and diverse range of scholarship, Kim aims for an academic audience. Lay readers should keep Google handy for the at times dizzying array of concepts. For those willing to commit, though, Settler Garrison provides a deep and interconnected understanding of the mechanisms underlying US hegemony in the transpacific.
A few months ago, I rode to church with an older woman from my congregation. We hardly knew each other, so I told her about the college courses I was taking, and she took an interest in “Sociology of Mass Violence.” After I explained the course and my current project on video games, she sat in silence for a moment. “How do video games relate to genocide?” she asked, expressing her belief that the rising popularity of shooter games makes players more violent. I tell her that violence within video games is more a product of humanity’s cruelty, instead of the other way around. Even the games I play—classified as “cozy games” by the community—display forms of violence that mirror those seen in my Sociology of Mass Violence course. Minecraft specifically utilizes a game mechanic to acquire resources, which has been exploited by the player base. The lack of responsibility for one’s actions against and treatment of the mobs in the game, in tandem with justifications players make for their behaviors, echoes back to concepts James Waller discusses regarding perpetrators.
Minecraftis a sandbox game that lets players do nearly anything they can imagine. The open world facilitates adventuring and exploring. The massive catalog of blocks enables creative and artistic builds. The “redstone” mechanics function as a miniature version of electricity and technology with which players experiment. The multi-player compatibility is the icing on the cake: you can partake in all of the above with friends and family. Minecraft’s popularity is obvious, from the (once) small indie game being purchased by Microsoft, its explosion into media and culture, to the latest blockbuster film. Minecraft is a household name—and for good reason.
The game generates places called “villages.” These villages differ based on the environment you find them and the randomized code of the game itself. Villages have at least five structures. In these structures lie “workstations,” beds, and chests filled with loot. Workstations, structures, and beds all show players that villagers have a flourishing society. In these structures live the inhabitants, known as “villagers.” These villagers allow for trading with the player. Villagers hold different jobs: farmers, for example, trade potatoes for an emerald. The more you trade with these villagers, the more trades you unlock—until the villager hits the rank of “master.” Trading with villagers can be an arduous task, requiring patience, persistence, and access to resources.
Based on this description alone, one can think of a few ways that players can utilize the mechanics to their advantage. The game expects players to steal from the villages. The game encourages players to take the resources from them. Players feel no reservations about stealing since the game provides no consequences. The current world my friends and I play on is a prime example: most of our beds come from a village which we pillaged. We justify our thievery by saying that the villagers don’t need them. In the game, if a certain percentage of players sleep through the night, the night is skipped. The villagers, then, do not need a bed. The code of Minecraft ties villagers to a certain bed. In order for villagers to have children, extra beds must be available. The lack of beds means the villagers no longer have that tie to the village and cannot repopulate the village. The village right by my friend’s house now lies abandoned.
You may be asking: “What need have they for repopulating?” In Minecraft, hostile mobs will attack both players and villagers. Hostile mobs—such as zombies and skeletons—spawn in (if night is not skipped). My insistence on sleeping comes from a desire not to be harmed by these hostile mobs, since they can kill players. If one dies to a hostile mob, the player respawns, seeks out their items, and fends off the mobs. Villagers have only one life. When they die, they remain dead. Repopulation is necessary for the continued existence of the villagers. The empty village near my friend’s house serves as a reminder that people lived there before we arrived, before we colonized the surrounding areas. It haunts me.
As mentioned above, villagers trade loot to players based on their jobs and experience. When I play the game, I tend to lock villagers in their homes for two reasons: (a) They cannot be harmed by hostile mobs if my fellow players do not sleep through the night, and (b) I have constant access to the villagers. I trade with them every day until I get what I want. I tend to “make up” for my offenses by providing extra beds to the village as a sort of quid pro quo “treaty”: if you give me good trades, your population will expand. Here’s another mechanic: if a zombified villager is cured of their zombification, the player receives a discount for all trades with that villager.
The worst example of exploitation of these villagers I have seen requires its own section. Two years ago, one of my roommates made a world with our friends. We logged on a week later to find that one of our friends had built a villager farm. This farm holds two villagers captive in a small space. They stand atop beds and receive food from machines. The villagers, detecting an extra bed nearby, have a child. A minecart picks this child up and holds them until they grow up. The cart takes the villagers past a zombie, infecting and “zombifying” them. The cart shuttles the zombified villager to a curing chamber. Out of the chamber comes a cured villager. The cart escorts the villager to their final resting place: a cage with a workstation. My other roommate said, “I feel like you learn a lot about a person based on how they treat villagers.” After that experience, I wholeheartedly agreed.
My interest in the treatment of villagers grows each time I play the game. If people are inherently good, would every player want to treat these villagers with respect and compassion? Or, if people are inherently bad, would every player want to exploit these villagers to maximize efficiency and utility? Most people I know lie somewhere in the middle. The language surrounding villagers, however, largely remains derogatory. I hear a constant slew of insults thrown at the villagers for not “behaving”. Players assume themselves to be more developed, creative, and powerful than the simple villagers.
Perpetrators of extraordinary evil are themselves ordinary people. James Waller wrote, “While the evil of genocide is not ordinary, the perpetrators most certainly are”. What could be more ordinary than playing a video game? This game, meant for relaxation, for entertainment, for friendship-building, itself holds the potential for players to commit acts of violence. I do not believe the game developers intended this potential whilst coding the game and its various updates. The question “How can ordinary people commit acts of extraordinary evil?” seemed to me an odd one to ask. Everything I witnessed in this pixelated sandbox game illustrates exactly how ordinary people can commit evil acts. The general culture of cruelty explains the treatment of villagers by players. A culture of cruelty “helps [perpetrators] initiate, sustain, and cope with their extraordinary evil” by simultaneously rewarding and normalizing said evil. Rationalization, group beliefs, and moral disengagement allow players to commit the acts they do while reducing their level of responsibility. Even in my writing, I constantly referred to the villagers with the impersonal “it” pronoun instead of “they” as I tend to do with other video game characters. I understand that connecting people playing video games to perpetrators of mass violence seems odd, but I feel this connection bears significance. If people commit acts of violence in games with no prompt or order, is it so hard to believe that people could commit acts of violence in real life under group prompts and orders?
When you grow up in Poland, you know when you know. Poland, a country that has endured centuries of Russian aggression — cultural, military and political. We were partitioned, occupied, Russified, and silenced. Our intellectuals were often imprisoned or executed, our histories rewritten. My family, like many others, lived under the oppressive, dishonest Soviet propaganda.
To be Polish is to know intimately and painfully that Russian power is often built on the systematic denial of human rights. And today as I watch what is happening in Ukraine, I am reminded that what we are witnessing is not a new story. It is a continuation of an old one.
Russia’s 2014 occupation of Crimea should have been a turning point. Instead, it became just another example of Western rhetoric without resolve. President Barack Obama spoke forcefully about international law and sanctity of borders — but meaningful consequences never followed. No serious deterrent was established. Russia took note.
Now, in 2024, we are watching history repeat, only worse. The current administration quietly negotiates with Putin behind closed doors — deals with the devil made in the name of “realism” or “de-escalation.” The problem is that appeasement by any name is still appeasement. And any honest Eastern European knows where this road leads.
A Legacy of State Violence
Russia’s atrocities are not historical accidents — they are patterns of statecraft. In the Soviet Union, the gulag system imprisoned millions for “counter-revolutionary” thought, including entire ethnic groups — Chechens, Crimean Tatars, Volga Germans, and Ethnic Poles, totalling over 3,000,000 people. It is also where over 20,000 Polish officers and intelligentsia were executed by the NKVD (a Soviet secret police, a forerunner of the KGB). This is just one example of how the Soviet state dealt with perceived threats: with murder, denial, and impunity.
After World War II, Poland was again carved up, this time not by Nazi Germany, but by a victorious Soviet Union that imposed new borders and a communist regime without consent. Half of Poland was handed over to Stalin. The other half became a Soviet satellite in everything but name. We lost territory, and decades of democracy and freedom.
Today, I watch with deep unease as the same playbook unfolds in Ukraine. Russia has illegally annexed Crimea and large parts of Donbas. It speaks openly of “reintegrating” historically Russian lands. The goal is not just military victory — it is partition. A fractured Ukraine that can never become fully sovereign again. Just like Poland after 1945.
The Price of Strategic Amnesia
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the West rushed to welcome Russia into international order. Trade deals, G8 summits, UN security council! All these gestures were made in the name of stability. But stability built on forgetting is not peace. It is denial.
There was no truth commission for Soviet crimes. No international tribunal. No real reckoning. Instead of justice we offered investment. Instead of accountability, we accepted ambiguity. And Russia has learned the lessons well: violence would be met with statements, not sanctions; atrocity with analysis, not action.
The West’s failure to respond meaningfully to earlier aggressions — Chechnya in the 1990s, Georgia in 2008, Crimea in 2014 — has emboldened the Kremlin. The invasion of Ukraine in 2022 is not an anomaly. It is a result.
A Policy Shift is Long Overdue
If the international community wants to stop this cycle, it needs to stop treating Russian atrocities as isolated crises and start addressing them as symptoms of sustained, state-driven assault on human rights.
This means a shift in policy away from reaction and towards long-term strategy.
War crimes must be prosecuted with urgency and rigor. The International Criminal Court must aggressively analyze and not be afraid to broadcast the misdeeds committed by Russia.
The days of treating Putin as a misunderstood partner must end. Russia is not a flawed democracy; it is a totalitarian state that weaponizes repression at home and abroad. Any diplomatic engagement that ignores this reality is not pragmatism — it is complicity.
The lack of reckoning after the Cold War was a mistake. We need institutions that preserve memory, document abuses, and educate future generations about the true costs of authoritarianism. This includes supporting historical archives, transitional justice initiatives, and survivor testimony.
Memory alone is not enough; we also need structural change. The United Nations, which was founded to prevent future atrocities, now finds itself paralyzed and corrupted by the very powers it was meant to constrain. How can an institution claim to uphold human rights while allowing Russia, a country actively engaged in war crimes, to sit on the Security Council with veto power? This is not diplomacy. It is a theater. The UN needs urgent reform. At the very least, the world’s worst violators of international law should not be allowed to block accountability for their crimes.
Our own government should be ashamed for legitimizing regimes like these through backdoor deals and empty statements. Making compromises with authoritarian states while preaching values at home is not just hypocritical, it is dangerous. It teaches future tyrants that power matters more than principle, and that democratic governments will choose convenience over conviction every time.
The Personal is Political
For me, this isn’t abstract. It is my history. I carry the stories of those who lived under occupation, who endured censorship, who learned to live with fear. And I carry the obligation to speak out — especially now. History only repeats when we refuse to interrupt it. The time to interrupt is now.
Tomorrow, June 12, marks what would have been Anne Frank’s birthday, making this interview and the recent planting of the Anne Frank tree all the more meaningful and poignant.
In the photo, Interim Director Joe Eggers of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Minnesotastands with Natalie Flaherty and Aga Fine, a student assistant at the Center, beside the newly planted Anne Frank tree—a powerful symbol of remembrance and hope.
Interview conducted Monday, June 3, 2025
Two weeks ago, a living tribute to history and resilience was planted in Fairmont, Minnesota: an Anne Frank Tree. Behind this remarkable project is Natalie Flaherty, an 11-year-old student whose compassion and initiative have already left a lasting mark on her community.
Earlier this week, we had the honor of sitting down with Natalie to hear more about the inspiration behind her work, the story of how the tree came to be, and the lessons she hopes others will take from it.
Getting to Know Natalie
Q: Can you tell us a little about yourself?
Natalie: My name’s Natalie and I’m going into seventh grade. I’m 11 right now and I’ll be 12 in two months. I have a bracelet mission—my bracelets say “Put a Stop to Hate.” I really like to read and write in my journal.
The Spark Behind the Project
Q: How did the idea of planting an Anne Frank Tree come to you?
We saw that Nebraska was planting one, so we traveled down there. I got to be the keynote speaker at their event. As soon as we got back, we applied right away. We filled out the forms and now we have one here—and I’m so happy that we do.
Q: How did you end up being the keynote speaker?
Because of my bracelet project. We asked if I could help plant the tree, and they said, “No, we want you to speak.”
A Connection Across Time
Q: Was there a moment when you first learned about Anne Frank that really stuck with you?
Yes. When I was seven, I went downstairs and saw my mom watching a documentary about her. As soon as I saw Anne on the screen, I felt an instant connection. Her hope, everything—I just felt it deeply, and it’s stayed with me ever since.
Q: Why Anne Frank, out of so many historical figures?
Because she was a victim of hate, and she was a modern girl—just like me. I felt such a deep connection to her.
Q: What does she mean to you?
She was just a regular girl, and I could feel her pain. I’ve had my own experiences like that. I could really relate.
Why the Tree Matters
Q: Why did you want to bring Anne Frank’s story and this tree to Fairmont?
So that history doesn’t repeat itself. And to show people that even one person—even someone young—can make a difference.
Q: What can people today learn from Anne Frank’s story?
That hate and discrimination still exist. If we don’t learn from the past, we might repeat it. We need to honor people like Anne and keep their stories alive.
Community Support and Impact
Q: Who helped you with this project?
My mom helped a lot. And I had support from teachers, friends, our principal, and even the superintendent. A lot of people stood behind the idea.
Q: What do you hope people feel when they see the tree?
I hope they feel a connection to Anne. I hope it inspires them to be kind to everyone.
Q: What would you like kids your age to take from this?
To be upstanders, not bystanders. And to know that they can make a difference, too—even if they’re only seven.
Q: Do you think the project has changed your school or community?
Yes. I’ve seen less bullying and more kindness and inclusion.
Q: Do people still talk about it?
Yes! It’s on the school website and the Visit Fairmont site, too.
Looking Ahead
Q: Do you think you’ll take on more projects like this?
Yes. I want to keep doing projects about kindness—anything that brings people together.
Q: What advice would you give to other kids who want to make a difference?
It might be hard at first, but you can do it. Even one small act can change the world.
A Voice That Will Not Be Forgotten
Q: If you could say something to someone whose family was affected by the Holocaust, what would it be?
That we support you in every way possible—and that we see you.
Q: If you could say one thing to Anne Frank, what would it be?
I would tell her that her voice and her story live on in so many hearts—and that I will not let her story disappear.
The Legacy Grows
Natalie’s efforts have already reached beyond her school and town. Her “Put a Stop to Hate” bracelet campaign has distributed nearly 90,000 bracelets across all 50 states and 49 countries. She also had the opportunity to meet Holocaust survivor Trudy Stroo in Los Angeles, who gave Natalie a rare Dutch doll from the 1940s.
This August, Natalie will travel to Amsterdam and visit the Anne Frank House—another chapter in her incredible journey.
The Anne Frank Tree planted in Fairmont is more than just a symbol of remembrance. It’s a living testament to how one young person’s empathy, courage, and action can ripple out into the world.
Fairmont now has an Anne Frank Tree because of Natalie Flaherty. And thanks to her, the message Anne carried so bravely continues to grow—branch by branch, heart by heart.
On March 27th, Doğukan Günaydin, a master’s student at the Carlson School of Business, was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). While Doğukan’s detention is the result of a vague tightening of immigration enforcement, where his immigration status will ultimately be determined, the Fort Snelling Immigration Court, has been the epicenter of contentious deportations in Minnesota for more than a century and a half.
Much of Doğukan’s arrest by ICE has been shrouded in secrecy; his name and even the rationale behind his arrest weren’t released until several days into his detainment. On April 8th, Doğukan finally appeared before a judge, appearing from the Sherbourne County Jail, one of five Minnesota counties to sign new agreements with ICE to perform certain functions related to immigration enforcement. Media outlets have suggested that Doğukan will appear before an immigration court on Friday, April 11th.
This means Doğukan’s hearing will be at the Fort Snelling Immigration Court. The court is one of sixty such courts spread throughout the United States that fall under the Executive Office for Immigration Review, a Department of Justice body. This body is responsible for the process of removal of immigrants, the enforcement of these decisions, and any subsequent appeals. In Minnesota, Fort Snelling is forever connected with the detainment of nearly 1,600 Dakota, almost all of whom were women, children, or elderly, through the winter of 1862-63 before their ultimate forced deportation west from Minnesota to reservations in Dakota Territory (and continued separation from Dakota men). The detainment of Dakota, along with the mass execution of Dakota men in the aftermath of the 1862 war, has been described by many as genocide, including the Minneapolis and St. Paul city councils.
The Fort Snelling Immigration Court is in the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building. Bishop Whipple was an Episcopal Bishop in Minnesota during the 1862 US-Dakota War. In response to the forced removal and the condemnation of 303 Dakota men to death, Bishop Whipple made appeals for clemency to President Lincoln. While Lincoln was ultimately persuaded to pardon all but 38 Dakota men (plus an additional two who were executed at Fort Snelling in 1863), Whipple’s attempts to save the Dakota in Minnesota ultimately came to nothing when Congress abrogated its treaties with the Dakota, and banned Dakota settlement in the state.
The events unfolding today have connections to events in the past that need to be understood. There’s no shortage of irony that a hearing to decide the immigration status of a University of Minnesota student will be determined in a court named for a site that was instrumental in deporting hundreds of innocent people.
Joe Eggers is the Interim Director of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies.
Dr. Gellman: Misrepresentation continues to allow certain kinds of stories to be told about groups of people in ways that maintain and perpetuate dominant social hierarchies. For example, when we misrepresent White violence towards Black, Indigenous, and people of color groups, it encodes narratives of White supremacy that teach children in the K-12 system, who are encountering these narratives, that White groups are superior, that they are dominant, that they are victorious, that they should be identified with. So, it becomes an assimilation facilitator, and it demeans and undercuts the experiences and sometimes the resistances of BIPOC groups that may have worked against those actions of White supremacy. So, misrepresentation writ large has the ability to perpetuate the encoding of White supremacy in our society in ways that have many repercussions for structural justice, racial justice, and gender justice.
The other thing it does is create false justification for patterns of domination that, again, reinforce erroneous beliefs about who has what kinds of rights. So, when we misrepresent, Indigenous people, for example, as conquered, it sends a message that those people don’t count in the contemporary story. They have been conquered; therefore, they are not contemporarily relevant. Many Indigenous movements in the United States use the claim of “we are still here to assert contemporary native visibility.” Because, as I document in the book, so much misrepresentation only portrays Indigenous people in what is now the United States in the past tense as people that were here, that were dominated and have essentially disappeared.
In my book, Indigenous Language Politics in the Schoolroom, I include an ethnographic content from interviews and focus groups with students. In other publications I document this as well, where White students in California talk about how they didn’t know that there were contemporary Native people in their home area, even though they live in a place that is the confluence of numerous different tribes that are active today, that have ongoing membership and tribal governance structures.
And so, when we misrepresent, we miseducate the next generation in understanding who their neighbors are in contemporary society as well as the perception of the past, that some groups were dominant and superior over others, and therefore we should perpetuate that same social hierarchy today.
What does “good” representation look like? How should textbook authors and educators balance strength (for example: emphasizing groups’ contributions) vs. deficit (for example: emphasizing violence against groups) approaches?
One thing that a Yurok interviewee said to me several years ago, when I was asking; how do we teach about the violent past in the contemporary classroom, they said to me: White people are insulated from the reality of the genocide of Native Americans. Native American children do not have that luxury. They grow up knowing that their extended ancestors were slaughtered, or that their grandparents or great grandparents were forcibly interned in boarding schools, or that their parents or grandparents chose to assimilate into a boarding school because they didn’t feel like they had any other options for upward mobility. So, when we ask: how do we represent the violent past, we need to remember who we are protecting when we say we can’t do it, or that it’s too confronting to do. BIPOC communities know their histories within oral tradition, within families, but those can be eroded or undermined by a public-school curriculum that doesn’t validate those stories. So good representation to me looks like historically accurate representation that is based not only on the White victors’ perspectives but on a plurality of voices that accurately depict what took place and also brings, particularly BIPOC, communities into the present day.
One of the main points of critique I found in my analysis of U.S. history textbooks was the constant representation of Native people in the United States only in the past tense. Good representation looks like reminding us that they are still here, that they are a vibrant community. So, next to the picture of someone collecting acorns in a loincloth, we also need the picture of the contemporary tribal meeting house and the tribal council that is managing governance for the community that is active next door to us. The emphasis on contemporary representation is really important.
The deficit approach is something that I’ve really had to think about in my own work with Native American communities in California, as well as Indigenous people in Mexico. It’s important to talk about the things that are broken. It’s important to talk about violence and how we address it. But that can’t be the only thing we talk about. We have to talk about the impressive ways that these communities are also working together to confront issues and be resilient, demonstrating survivance in these spaces. The Lakota curriculum that Darlene Saint Clair has created is an excellent example of how this can be done well, as are the ethnic studies curricula in California. We can talk about the things that are hard, but we can focus on positive examples that demonstrate meaningful, contemporary, dignified, Indigenous lives.
You’veargued that identity politics during the first Trump administration allowed for more hostility towards BIPOC people, but you also demonstrated how schools can be sites of resistance. Specifically, you point to Yurok and Spanish language courses. How can educators in other disciplines practice resistance in their classrooms?
They can mainstream Indigenous knowledge into a variety of classes. Of course, the Indigenous language classes are the starting point for that, but bringing traditional ecological knowledge into science classes, or bringing Indigenous literature into an English language arts curriculum are ways where we can think about mainstreaming Indigenous knowledge into the contemporary curriculum.
Resistance is hard. It is easier to acquiesce to the kind of mandates that we are facing both in higher education and in the K-12 system right now in the United States. It is safer and easier for teachers to say, “I’m not going to talk about diversity, equity, and inclusion. I’m not going to teach this novel that talks about different ways of performing gender, or anything having to do with race and ethnicity.”
I understand why some teachers feel like they have to make that choice. But the education system in the United States is the primary site of state contact with its residents. It is a place where we’re forming young people. So, teachers, staff, and administrators who are willing to stand up and say, “In this school, everybody is valued” goes a long way – particularly in this political moment, toward resisting in small ways. So that might look like bringing in a book that is on the banned list and having the school district administrator or having your principal support you. It’s saying, “here’s why it matters to me –because I have students that resonate with this story.”
One example that I’ll give, and I discuss this in a chapter of my upcoming book,Learning to Survive: Yurok Well-being in School, which will come out in November 2025 – focuses on an interview with Theyallen Gensaw, who graduated from Del Norte High School a few years ago. He talks about the Del Norte County School Board. After receiving complaints from parents trying to get rid of The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexi, he said, “I live in two worlds all the time. I live as a Yurok man, and I live my colonized life. That book is the only thing I read in high school, besides Yurok language class, where I felt seen, where I saw myself in the curriculum.” So, we shouldn’t underestimate the power of an English language arts teacher, or a science teacher, to bring in something that resonates.
In the science curriculum, we can talk about traditional burning practices when we live in a country that is on fire –from Los Angeles to the Canadian fires to the Oregon fires—this country is burning. Let’s figure out how to incorporate traditional ecological knowledge around fire burning practices into our science curriculum. Let’s at least introduce it as an idea. So, it doesn’t have to only be the Indigenous language classes, which, of course, are vital places to start. But let’s figure out how to mainstream Indigenous knowledge into other spaces, and say, this is important because it’s contemporary knowledge that honors other communities that are part of this school system, this residential area, whatever it is. In doing so, we’re sending a message to young people that White knowledge is not the only kind of knowledge that is valuable.
And another example that I’ll give, because I run a college in prison program, and we work a lot with different kinds of Englishes, is recognizing that Standard English—White academic English— is the lingua franca of the education system. It is an important tool in upward mobility. But it’s not the only way of expression, so we can work with Black Englishes and validate that those are meaningful ways of expression –while again, not working from a deficit perspective –while also talking about Standard English methods of syntax and grammar, so that students are equipped with a broad toolkit of ways to express. And they can make decisions about when they code switch in between those languages. But we’re not denigrating one in order to uplift the other.
Related to that, I think there’s a lot of space to think about how our English Language Learner curriculum operates as well, and the kinds of messages that we send about why learning English is important. It’s one language repertoire that is useful for people. But it is not the only valid language repertoire. There’s just tremendous space within the K-12 system for schools to be sites of resistance in ways that can be quite subtle. Teachers can make decisions about how public or private they want to be with these micro practices of resistance. But they really are vital in helping students see themselves and feel like they can be welcomed with their whole self.
We know education is important, and typically in the aftermath of violence, much onus is placed on the education system to promote peace and quell violence — despite the fact education and schools have historically been places of violence. What do you make of this dissonance? Can education repair these harms?
As an educator, I want to believe that education can be a site of peace, but it absolutely has not always been that. One example that has been meaningful for me to think about is the Hoopa Valley High School, a public high school that sits on the Hoopa Indian Reservation in far Northern California. The school sits where the previous Hoopa Indian Boarding School used to be. So, there are Native students from multiple tribal backgrounds who attend this public school today, whose grandparents, great grandparents, or related family members were interned in the boarding school in previous generations.
Today, those students have dreams of charting their own career paths. They’re playing school sports. They’re making their own lives. Some are studying the Hupa or Yurok language. But they’re walking in the footsteps of people that did not have that choice and that were subject to state violence through the forced assimilation process of the boarding school. So, that dissonance is something that those students and the educators there live with every day, acutely. In many other contexts, it’s much more subtle. But the same sort of dynamics play out for the formal education system, which is often a site of educational trauma.
Many of the students in the college-in-prison program I run talk about some of their earliest memories in school being made fun of for their names. So, they had different names, or they had names that made sense in the context of their own ethnic lineage but didn’t translate easily into White society. So, some of their earliest educational memories were being shamed or teased, ridiculed for their names, a form of educational trauma –when educational spaces become spaces of trauma that then push people away from meaningful engagement in school.
The promise of education to use self-actualization and knowledge to rebuild the world in a way that recognizes the dignity of everyone is an important goal. But historically, and up through the present day, there is so much educational trauma that is inflicted, particularly on BIPOC young people, as they make their way through that system. I think doing trauma-informed teaching is one way of recognizing that that is their reality. And supporting teachers and staff to be trauma-informed in how they manage both their classrooms and the curricula is important.
Yesterday, I was teaching my human rights class. We were discussing how so many of the folks who end up in U.S. prison systems are themselves products of cradle to prison pipelines, and with many of them going from the K-12 system into prison in their teens. And they’re saying, “Oh, well, how do we fix what’s broken in the system?” And I said, “What if the system is operating exactly as it was designed to? What if the education system is operating perfectly to maintain a White supremacist social hierarchy that we live in today? What do we do differently when we recognize that the education system is set up to maintain the system of social privilege that diminishes BIPOC power and lifts up White superiority?”
How do we grapple with the education system when we recognize that maybe it’s producing the outcomes exactly as intended. And then, we have to ask different kinds of questions. How do we fix the system if it’s not broken for some? We have to change what the output is as a society that we want from that system and work backwards to address the deep flaws, the baked-in inequality within the system itself.
Prof. dr. Sarah Cramsey is the Special Chair for Central European Studies at Leiden University, an Assistant Professor of Judaism & Diaspora Studies and Director of the Austria Centre Leiden. From 2025-2030, she will be the Principal Investigator of “A Century of Care: Invisible Work and Early Childcare in central and eastern Europe, 1905-2004” or CARECENTURY, a project funded by a European Research Council Starting Grant.
On January 27th, 2025, on the occasion of the commemoration of the 80th Anniversary of the Holocaust Remembrance Day, the Center for Austrian Studies and the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Minnesota invited Dr. Sarah Cramsey to give a lecture, titled: “The Other Holocaust: Care, Children and the Jewish Catastrophe”.
In your recent talk on January 27th, you presented the study of caretaking through three distinct case studies. Does your forthcoming book adopt a similar structure?
Yes, in my book there are three chapters that correspond to each of those three case studies – the Warsaw Ghetto, Auschwitz-Birkenau and the Soviet Union during the Second World War –, and that is the heart of the book.
I have a personal and an academic answer to this question. The personal answer is that during the time that I was pregnant with my two kids, one of them during the pandemic, I began to realize that the way that my life had shifted, and the horizon of my consciousness wasn’t necessarily reflected in a lot of the histories that I had read, particularly in the region that I am interested in – the land between Salzburg, Sarajevo and St. Petersburg.
As a historian, whenever you are thrown into a situation, you like to go see what people have written about this situation in past circumstances. And, of course, there is work about the history of childhood, but I was very interested in the conceptual idea of care: how we care for the very young, and I became interested in how this invisible work sustains human life at a very young age.
When you have a child, you confront so many assumptions that people have about how you should be caring for that child: whether or not you should be breastfeeding that child, using the cry-it-out method, sleep training, etc. And this is something that happens differently in different societies, and beyond the care of the baby: governing women’s bodies, what constitutes a good home for the child, what role is the mother supposed to have… And, in a more fundamental level, in terms of the transmission of caretaking knowledge: relying on the knowledge of your relatives and older people as to what to do with the baby. Here you also see a lot of contradictions and assumptions. I became really interested in the contradictions, in the tensions, because it was something that I was living through as I became aware of the historical tensions spiraling out from my own experiences.
And the academic answer?
The other side of my answer, a more academic one, stems from my first book, “Uprooting the Diaspora”. In that book I look at changing ideas of Jewish belonging and conceptions of Jewish citizenships in Europe. I looked at an organization that was very important for this narrative, the World Jewish Congress (WJC), and there was a really moving document, a transcript of a meeting from June 8th, 1944. Members of the executive committee had learned that there were systematic trains leaving the occupied (now) Hungary, and towards Auschwitz-Birkenau. They began to realize that not even Hungarian Jews would be safe from the Shoah unfolding in Europe. In this meeting, members gave their honest opinion on the question of whether they should support the return of Jews to Germany after the war. A.L. Kubowitzki, secretary of the WJC and representing Belgian Jewry, gave a speech in response to this question, and he said that his opinion had changed from the last time they talked about this. In his speech, he references his son, he says “I need an answer to bring to my son”.
After I finished the book, I was reading through it and I thought to myself “I wonder what happened to that son, I wonder if I can find him”. I found him, Michael Kubovy, now a retired professor emeritus in psychology at the university of Virginia in Charlottesville. I reached out to him, and he was very receptive, so I planned a visit. And it was then that I realized how much I was missing about A.L. Kubowitzki’s life, about the day to day of this very important diplomat. I knew nothing about the family behind him. His wife, for instance: Michael’s mother, who had been supporting the family during those important years I had researched. So, I started wondering what I knew and did not know about this family that had a very interesting life. Michael knew so many important things about his father and his life, and talking to him let me to see more of the invisibility of the history that I had written. Talking to him answered very different questions than the ones I had initially asked, ones that really highlighted the nuts and bolts of life, which led me to become interested in this taboo subject of early childhood caretaking, which is often invisible to the written record.
What do you mean when you say caretaking is universal, yet invisible to the eye and to the written record?
I see this as a timeless historical question, and these are the best historical questions to write a book about. A question that can relate to any time period or any group of people. Anyone who has ever spent more than a minute with a baby knows that, at some point, you look at that baby and you think: “What do I do to keep you alive? How do I get you to be happy and stop crying?” That is a very universal human question dating back to Neanderthals, and even in the animal world. So, this question of care is universal, beyond human existence, but also historically contingent. And I thought about this puzzle, this question of “How do you tell the history of something that appears timeless but also constantly changing”.
The overall invisibility of caretaking in the written record became to me an important methodological question: how do you write a history of the first two years of being alive, when you often have no direct documents from the people involved in that relationship? Thinking about this dirty, constant, relentless work from the end of the time in the womb and the early years of a child brought me to realize how much I didn’t know about it, and how sparse the available documentation seems to be. That spanned me in a different direction to try to figure out how can I find documents to make this invisible work visible.
This goes back to what you mentioned earlier, about how asking new questions about the importance of this invisible work leads us to uncover very different histories. Other than exploring this question in your upcoming book about early childhood caretaking during the Holocaust, you are also leading a broader project funded by the European Research Council, “A Century of Care.Invisible Work and Early Childcare in central and eastern Europe, 1905-2004”. Can you talk more about this project, and about what sources will you be examining to make this invisible work visible?
This project will allow me to have a very long chronology and a very large geographic space – I will be looking at the farthest extent of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the states that have been called its successor states: Austria, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Hungary, Yugoslavia and Poland. This is already a huge undertaking, to look at a hundred years of childcare, across such a vast territory. The way that I try to make this work visible is by using unique voices, spaces, and things. In the presentation I gave, for instance, I talked about the French Polish Jewish artist David Olère, who after the war, starts sketching about his work in the Sonderkommando working in the gas chambers. If you look through his paintings, you see many depictions of children with their mothers. This made me wonder if I could examine other Sonderkommando testimonies to see if they were also noticing the presence of young children, pregnant women, and what care looked like in those situations.
Because of these paintings we are also able to conceptualize certain spaces where care continued to happen and allows us to look at the materiality of care because we see things that people had brought along on these long journeys when thinking about providing for their children. For instance, photographs of the arrival of people at a concentration camp is also a valuable source to examine caretaking relationships because we can see if there are people holding a baby, if they hand them off to other people, what are they carrying with them, are the children crying, what are they wearing, etc. By looking at these documents you realize that care and care networks become an important part of how the final solution became possible, because so many women -not necessarily only mothers, but often mothers- would not leave their children. By having young children with them, they would often be considered unfit to work. Care becomes an important weapon to exterminate young mothers, which is something important to think about, because it also helps us think more deeply about the role of the Jewish child in Nazi ideology, which is the focus of another chapter in my book.
Another space I look at are playgrounds. For instance, in the city of Budapest, in 1907, there was one playground. Of course, children play in many other places, but there was one official playground. By the 1970’s, there’s 1,400. This is a complete revolution in the way that children play and the way that a new parent experiences the city. We can ask so many fascinating questions: Who is designing this playground? How did they pick the slide? It allows us to ask interesting questions about the different spaces where caretaking takes place.
On the other hand, I will be exploring the materiality of early childcare: baby formula, infant bottles, infant clothes, objects that people used to help infants get certain skills. I am interested in the materiality of care, and it is one way that I can make things more visible.
These are some of the ways that I hope to use voices, spaces and things to identify this invisible work.
Tibisay Navarro-Mana is a PhD Candidate in the History Department and Research Assistant at the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. Her research focuses on the politics of historical memory in Spain after the Spanish Civil War and the Francoist Regime, looking particularly at the intersections between memory, media and propaganda by analyzing public media representations of the Francoist Regime’s welfare system.
About Center for Holocaust & Genocide Studies
The Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities promotes academic research, education and public awareness on the Holocaust, other genocides and current forms of mass violence. It was established in 1997 by Dr. Stephen Feinstein as an interdisciplinary research center. Read more…
