From the course: Understanding and Supporting Jewish Colleagues at Work

The Holocaust

From the course: Understanding and Supporting Jewish Colleagues at Work

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The Holocaust

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- The Holocaust is never an easy thing to discuss, and its echos still reverberate for many people to this day. In this video, let's explore the Holocaust and its aftermath. A key moment in Jewish history, the Holocaust serves as a reminder and a warning. The Holocaust was a case of systemic racialized violence against the Jewish people. This is a case of racialized violence, even though the majority of Jewish victims and their perpetrators had the same skin color. Jews were victimized because they were seen as not German, as not Aryan, as having different physical characteristics and deeply rooted in biological differences from other Europeans. In fact, the word antisemitism itself, a race-based word, embraced by the Nazis to differentiate Jews as an allegedly inferior racial group. The Holocaust is one example of a broader pattern of violence against Jews. In the decades before the Holocaust, Jews held positions in governments, militaries, universities, and other areas of social leadership across Europe, Germany included. When Nazi leaders took power and used antisemitism to rally the German public, they began by encouraging the exclusion and demonization of Jews. In a few short years, this led to the violence of the Holocaust and the industrial murder of 6 million innocent Jewish people. There have often been times in history when Jews have had relative safety in a society, only for that safety to be rapidly undermined by state and mob violence. This is a fear that many Jews live with today. The lessons of the Holocaust are both unique to Jews and applicable to all of humanity. Many Jews carry the Holocaust with them. Jewish memory of the Holocaust serves as a traumatic reminder of our history of oppression, as a warning that Jews have rarely, if ever, been safe as an unprotected minority and as a sign of resilience as a people. The universal lesson that ordinary human beings are capable of doing horrific things to each other, remains present in our world today. Jews were not the only ones deemed inferior and victimized by the Holocaust. Other victims include members of the LGBTQ community, other minorities, political dissidents, and more. Holocaust memorials in different countries tell these stories in different ways, but all of them encourage us to remember this crucial experience from our history. Jewish safety has changed rapidly throughout history. The Holocaust is the most infamous example of this pattern for many of us, but it's far from the only example. Think about this. The Jewish population in the world today is still smaller than the Jewish population in the world before the Holocaust. Learning lessons of the Holocaust ensures that we're able to work together in service of a broader humanity.

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