Dr. Efraim Zuroff (www.operationlastchance.org) is the chief Nazi-hunter of the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the founder and director of its Israel office. His most recent publication is Operation Last Chance; One Man’s Quest to Bring Nazi Criminals to Justice (New York: Macmillan, 2009).

Growing up in Brooklyn in the 50’s and 60’s, I was barely exposed to the history of the Shoah. As the child of American-born parents, there were no Holocaust stories told in our home and the subject was not taught in the day school, Jewish high school and summer camps I attended, which were considered among the best educational institutions of their kind outside Israel. And what was true among highly-committed Jews in New York, was certainly the case in the world at large, where there was little if any interest at that time in the fate of European Jewry under the Nazis.

During the past few decades, however, this situation has changed dramatically, both within and outside of the Jewish world. There has been a veritable explosion of books, films, plays and public discussion and interest about the Holocaust, which has increasingly become a central pillar of contemporary Jewish identity and, at the same time, a veritable brand name throughout the entire world for man’s inhumanity to his fellow man and a symbol of genocide, the most horrific crime.

The enormous interest and growing sensitivity throughout the world to the crimes of the Shoah obviously make it a subject and one that is ostensibly much more “attractive” and “marketable” to students. From a Jewish perspective, the centrality of the Holocaust in modern Jewish identity and the fact that it is probably the most unifying factor in the Jewish world today also increase its importance, regardless of the students’ personal history and whether they are second or third generation. Additionally, the dramatic dimension of the subject matter, which relates not only to nations but also to individuals, is a factor which clearly increases its potential to be of interest. In that respect, the recent tendency to focus on the fate of individuals as a means of transmitting the history of the Shoah has produced many new highly-effective tools for teaching the subject.

This new reality, however, also poses important challenges. Ultimately, the proverbial bottom line in Holocaust education, as in all education, is the inculcation of values, and that brings us to the first dilemma which those who teach the subject must face. What is the ultimate goal of teaching the history of the Shoa? It is obviously not only to transmit historical facts and information, but also to convey important messages regarding values. And this is precisely the place where there are competing approaches which tell an ostensibly similar narrative but with different emphases that significantly alter the message.

In my mind, the most significant debate in Holocaust education, especially in the Jewish world, is between the particularist and universalist approaches to the subject, which find expression in such issues as the definition of the word Holocaust and the fate of the Nazis’ non-Jewish victims. While the universalists will emphasize that the Nazis also persecuted and murdered Roma, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses and the mentally ill and handicapped, the particularists will stress the unique fate of the Jews in the Third Reich and the fact that they were singled out for total annihilation with no possibility for escape or reprieve. While the universalists usually apply the term “Holocaust” to the murder of all the Nazis’ civilian victims, the particularists use that term only in reference to the implementation of the Final Solution, the Nazis’ plan for the annihilation of the Jewish people.

These differences are far from cosmetic and reflect essential issues of ideology and world view. On a prosaic level, universalists might present a story about a female Righteous Gentile who saved a Jew and then married him without converting to Judaism as a story with a happy ending, symbolizing a triumph of tolerance over anti-Semitism and prejudice, whereas a more particularistic approach would appreciate the nobility of the rescuer but bemoan the loss of Jewish continuity for the rescued Jew, and choose a less problematic case to illustrate the altruism of Righteous Gentiles. While universalists would seek to include other cases of genocide and ethnic cleansing in their Holocaust curriculum, particularists would invariably prefer to deal exclusively with the fate of European Jewry during World War II. These differences deserve serious pedagogical attention because they determine the ideological direction of such courses and the lessons transmitted to the students.

In other words, teaching the Holocaust offers a variety of alternative narratives and the choice of different lessons which, in some cases, are dramatically opposed to each other. The task of Jewish educators, as I see it, is to teach the Holocaust in a way which will strengthen the values which are the raison d’etre of the Jewish education which they are providing. And while there obviously are strong differences of opinion regarding the nature of these values, there should be a consensus on the importance of strengthening the students’ understanding and appreciation of Jewish peoplehood, the importance of Jewish continuity and the concept of a Jewish mission to the rest of the world, all of which can find expression and reinforcement in a Holocaust curriculum.