Profs teach Holocaust relevance
By Ruth Friedberg, Odessa American
Odessa American, TX
Jan 4 2004
Making the Holocaust relevant to Hispanic students is the main reason
two Permian Basin college professors will attend a week-long seminar,
starting Monday, at the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington,
D.C.
Roland Spickermann, assistant professor of history at the University
of Texas of the Permian Basin, and Wayne Sheehan, a history professor
at Sul Ross State University in Alpine, will attend the course.
The Jack and Anita Hess seminar is designed for faculty working at
colleges and universities that serve a large Hispanic population.
Nineteen professors, mainly from Texas and California, were selected
to participate.
Both Sheehan and Spickermann teach courses on Hitler, Nazism and the
Holocaust. Sheehan even took classes to the Holocaust museum in 1993
and 1996. "When this opportunity came around (to attend the seminar
in Washington) I was really excited about it," Sheehan said.
Sheehan said his field is 18th-century Britain, but since the Sul
Ross curriculum was revised in the mid-1980s, he has taught "Hitler,
Nazism and the Holocaust."
"We decided this was a course we needed to have taught," Sheehan said,
adding that he had taken a couple of graduate school courses in the
subject that dealt peripherally with the Holocaust and was always
interested in it.
"I just think it's going to be exciting to sit down and talk to that
many people and see how they deal with it and exchange ideas," Sheehan
said. He added that he thinks his course will change "quite a bit"
as a result of participating in the seminar.
The seminar will feature lectures and discussions on Holocaust
history in conjunction with music and literature as "transmitters"
of heritage, according to a press release from the museum. It will
also include social and political strategies adopted by people and
communities in the midst of ethnic violence, victimization and exile,
the release said.
Spickermann teaches a variety of topics, including Chinese history,
at UTPB, but his specialty is modern Germany. "Part of German history
is the history of the Third Reich," he said. "It's always something
you can learn more about."
"This area has had very little direct exposure to the Holocaust. Part
of my application was that many of my students probably have never
met anybody Jewish," Spickermann said.
Yet there is always high demand for courses on World War II and the
Holocaust. "But at the same time what I found with the students was how
much they didn't know," Spickermann said. "The Holocaust is really a
very dark mirror. You look in it and you see just about every aspect of
humanity in there. I want to teach them (his students) that this is a
human problem. Anyone can be a perpetrator and anyone can be a victim."
Spickermann said the seminar will give him a "much more thorough
acquaintance" with the literature and music of the time. He said it
would also cover Latin American massacres.
Robert Ehrenreich, director of University Programs at the Center for
Advanced Holocaust Studies, said the seminar was named for the parents
of Edward and David Hess, who fled Germany for the U.S. in 1937.
This is the first year the seminar has been named after the Hesses,
but it has been held in January and June for 10 or 11 years,
Ehrenreich said.
Ehrenreich said the committee chooses seminar participants who may
have limited resources to teach Holocaust courses or may be the only
ones teaching that course.
"Reaching audiences who traditionally have had little exposure
to Holocaust history is a primary goal of the museum," said Paul
Shapiro, director of the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies. "We
hope participants will gain new insight about the significance and
relevance of this history for Hispanic audiences, especially Hispanic
college students."
Ehrenreich said there is overlap between Latinos and Jews. Sephardic
Jews lived in Spain until 1492 when they were expelled for religious
reasons.
Sephardic Jews wound up in Greece, Armenia and other locales. There
is also the language known as Ladino, which is a Spanish-Hebrew
combination, he said.
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