A class on the Holocaust taught jointly at Loyola Marymount University and Cal State Northridge this spring will take students to Poland to experience the landscape and the specific locations where some of the events of the Holocaust took place.
The class was the brainchild of Holli Levitsky, an associate professor, who heads LMU’s Jewish Studies program. Levitsky, who completed Fulbright fellowship in Poland in the 2001-02 academic year, felt that trying to teach Holocaust studies without leaving the classroom was limiting. She shared this concern with Dorothy Clark, a professor at CSUN.
“We were just comparing notes about how we felt in our own teaching that taking students to witness the landscape of Poland and the role that the landscape and the people had in the Holocaust would be the next step in Holocaust study,” Levitsky said. “We felt stalled, each in our own work, so we decided to develop this course together.”
The result is a two-semester course that will be taught simultaneously at both campuses. In the spring, students will study the literature and history of the Holocaust, which includes interviews with members of The “1939” Club, a Los Angeles-area group of Holocaust survivors. The students will hear survivors’ memories of pre-war Poland and how life changed after the invasion by Nazi Germany in 1939.
Then, in June, students in both classes will go to Poland for a trip that includes stops at the Jewish Historical Institute, the Warsaw Ghetto, the concentration camp at Auschwitz and a reform synagogue in the city of Lodz.
The entire trip will be videotaped, and students will reflect on their assignments by writing online journals and blogs. “We’re very interested in how new media can help construct students’ experiences in a new way,” Levitsky said. “We want to archive those experiences for a new generation of students and teachers.”