William Tyler
Reflections on the Continuing Shadow of the Holocaust in Germany and Beyond
William Tyler in Conversation with Trudy Gold - Reflections on the Continuing Shadow of the Holocaust in Germany and Beyond
- So, good evening everyone, and as we are in the days of awe, and as many of our people on lockdown are Jewish, we thought this was a time where we really need to think about events. And because anti-Semitism is up 20 notches, as are conspiracy theories, and in fact, even the director general of the UN said that our society, also that the world, is becoming unhinged. A couple of things happened that made William and I want to talk about this, and I’m going to recount something that actually happened to me today, before I hand over to William. I had a phone call from a girlfriend of mine who lives in Berlin. She is the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, and she works in Germany, and she was very alarmed and was talking about a couple of events that had happened recently. Now, many of you who have visited Berlin or know Grunwald, Grunwald is that beautiful leafy station between Wannsee and Berlin. It’s one of those stations, I suppose I would equate it to something like Hampstead. It’s a very lovely town. But tragically, it was from platform 17 that 50,000 German Jews were deported, and it’s been handled very respectfully by the Germans. There are plaques now, 17 plaques, giving the dates of the transports and the number of people who died. In Germany, they have this kind of tradition known as the Booker Boxes, where old telephone boxes become sort of mobile libraries. And an enterprise in German had erected near the platform, a Booker Box which was full of information and books on the Holocaust, encouraging people to actually read about it. Now, it was set on fire, the telephone booth was set on fire, and that same day, a monument in Berlin, to homosexuals, to other people who suffered as a result of Nazi persecution, was also set on fire. And that coincided with something that William said to me, which really started this whole talk, so may I now hand it over to you, please, William?
- Thank you, Trudy. Well, the story of how this talk and discussion emerged between the two of us, was I was telling Trudy about my summer holiday. My wife and I went on a cruise on the River Rhine, and part of the cruise was visiting the great Roman city of Trier, somewhere I’d wanted to visit since I was a schoolboy because I’d seen pictures of this tremendous arch and gateway into Trier. So I was really looking forward to this visit. And the day came round and we were taken to Trier, and we had a guide who was British but living there, and she began to walk us, having looked at the gate, to the great Roman basilica, which was converted after the days of Rome, into a Christian Church. We are walking down the main street and we’re looking at where Marx was born, which incidentally now is a takeaway chicken shop. But as we go down, she suddenly went off of the main street. She branched off into what clearly was a very old part of the city of Trier, and we went under an arch into what is best described as a lane. And I’m always interested as a historian, to look at names of streets. It tells you a great deal of history. And I look at this street name and it says Jakobstrasse. So I knew we were walking into what had been in the Middle Ages and later, the Jewish quarter of the city of Trier. And then she told us that, and then she said, “Quite recently, the city council here had decided to turn the whole street into a living museum about the history of the Jews of Trier.”
Now, some people think that there were Jews there in Roman times, but the first reference is somewhere like midway through the 13th century. But it was a very big Jewish community in Trier. Today, there’s only about… Well, there’s just over 500 Jews living in Trier. So she told us this and I stood there listening and I think, “Well, that sounds, on the face of it, quite a good thing to do.” Then she said, “But unfortunately, we can’t do it, and we can’t do it because we fear antisemitic graffiti and worse. And instead, the city council are going to put up a blue plaque telling you what this street was.” Now, the tourist party I was with from the boat, were all British. They listened respectfully and simply turned around and continued to walk. But for me, it was a lightning bolt. And I thought, “This I’m seeing head on, in reality, the growth of the far-right in Germany, in the 21st century, and the continuance and indeed rise of anti-Semitism in Germany.” And I thought, “How?” I mean, I knew all about it, but when it came as a precise example like that, I kept saying to myself, or thinking to myself, “How can this happen in Germany where the Holocaust happened and where there has been Holocaust education since the end of the Second World War?
How can we live in a Europe, in a Germany in the heart of Europe, where anti-Semitism is so rife that a city council is frightened of creating an open-air Jewish museum?” It sort of coloured it. And after that, I began to observe other things. In another town we saw what was a synagogue, and it was told to us it was synagogue, but it was pretty obviously a synagogue if you looked at the architecture and the designs and so on, which was now a dentist studio. And you kept coming across Jewish street names. Well, they’ve put them back, but did it mean anything when people are still in Germany, indulging in anti-Semitic actions, not just thoughts? So much so that a city council like Trier cannot risk a Jewish open-air museum. And this is West Germany. East Germany, as I hope Trudy and I will talk about later, East Germany is a quite different case. Now, we’re going to try today, to look at why there is anti-Semitism after the Holocaust, not just in Germany but throughout the western world and throughout western Europe, which concerns us most in Britain. And the more difficult question of why? Why? And what can be done about it? Now, neither Trudy or I pretend to have easy answers, that would be ridiculous. All we’re trying to do is raise questions.
Some questions may have answers, some questions may possibly have answers, and some questions may have no answers, and you will have to decide for yourselves which questions you can answer and which you can’t. And then can I suggest that as most of us here are, if I delicately put it, most of us on this Zoom tonight, it’s tonight in Britain, most of us on this Zoom are probably in our third or fourth age. So, how, how can we create a better future with hope not only for our children, but our grandchildren and our great grandchildren, whether Jew or Gentile? And Trudy and I on a personal level, are often comparing stories about our own grandchildren and their experiences. And I, as you all know, am not Jewish, and this isn’t an antisemitic event, it was an anti-Black event. He’s 11, he’s just moved, but he’s been a fortnight in his high school, and a friend of his who has a white father and a Black mother was racially abused. And he and his three friends were horrified, absolutely horrified. But fortunately, the little boy’s white father worked in the school and they urged him to go and see his dad and tell him what had happened. And the little boy did go and tell his dad. And I think, well, I know, if it had been a Jewish boy, they would’ve done the same thing. But they perhaps are not the norm, and that’s the worry. Now, Trudy, would you like me to go on and tell this story from the New York Times?
I would, but before that, I just want to give an indication of how bad it is in Germany. According to the statistics of the German government, an organisation that works for the German government, there were 2,480 anti-Semitic attacks in Germany last year. It works out about seven attacks a day. And I just wanted to say, having been involved with IRA, the ITF, from the beginning, when we first got involved in Holocaust education Europe-wide, many of the educators in Germany, for example, at the Wannsee House, which had once been that horrific place where they wrote down the final solution, and at the topography of terror museum, was so very, very good. And we really did think, particularly with the kind of different government in West Germany, that things were getting better. And I think that for me, has been one of the darkest things, because one thing that William and I both share, I think we both hanker for the enlightenment. So when these kind of things happen, as educators, we find it deeply offensive. But William, please personalise it now, if you don’t mind.
I’m going to read one sentence before I go onto this story because it follows from exactly what you’ve just said, Trudy. And this was in AP News, and it said this, this is talking about Germany, “Every fifth antisemitic instance has a conspiracy background. A right wing extremist background was involved in 30%, while 53% of the instance could not be clearly linked to a specific political background.” And that is what’s frightening, because that means the 53%, it’s deep in the DNA.
There is another angle to this, which I think, well, let’s bring it to the fore. Angela Merkel, who was so conscious of Germany’s past, had a very liberal asylum policy to her credit. But there’d been some surveys done actually, in Bavaria, attitudes amongst Afghan, Iraqi, and Syrian kids. And the level of anti-Semitism amongst these kids is much higher than amongst the German population. And I think unfortunately, this is an issue that is so sensitive that it’s being fudged a bit in Germany. They do admit that some of the nastier incidents are coming straight out of Iran. But this is another issue, it’s the extreme right. It’s also people who believe in conspiracy theories, because whenever you believe in a conspiracy theory, it’s got to involve the Jews. And then of course, you have this issue with militant Islam. Let me be very careful here, I’m not talking about the bulk of the Muslim population, I’m talking about the militants. Plus of course, the old canna, what we’re witnessing throughout Europe and America is economic, social, and political instability, and whenever that happens, we need the scapegoat. And unfortunately, and I think one of the things that really alarms me about the Jewish situation, people are so ignorant about what the word Jew means, Israel comes into the argument now. There are definitely spikes in attacks. When at the time of Gaza, the numbers of attacks in Germany was up threefold. So the confusion about Jews and Israelis, there was a survey done by the Anti-Defamation League, something like 49% of Germans interviewed, believed Jews were more loyal to Israel than to their native country.
So you put all this cocktail together, a kind of almost mystical notion of the Jew, not knowing what Jews really are, plus of course, good old fashioned guilt about the Holocaust. I think this is something that you and I have talked about. I mean, it was said as early as 1968 by German journalists, enough already, basically. We’ve had our noses pushed into the grindstone by the Jews, we don’t want it anymore. Get over it. But I think that is now unfortunately, part of the equation. Anyway, that’s my views. You go on now, William.
- I had something to add into that, but I won’t, because what I want to do, or what we’ve decided would be a helpful way to extend the discussion and understand it, I often think that an individual personal story tells you a lot more than all the statistics we can quote and all the, you know, the great and the good have said about it. And this was a story published in the New York Times in May, 2019, written by James Angelos. Now, obviously, I’m not going to read the whole article, but I’ve selected sort of two or three pieces from the article, which I think are very important, and I make no apologies for reading it. And Angelos writes this, “One of his family’s early recollections of growing up in southern Germany in the 1970s was his father Frans, giving him some advice. ‘Don’t tell anyone that you are Jewish.’ Frans and his mother and his little brother had survived the Holocaust by travelling across sways of eastern and central Europe to hide from the Gestapo. And after the war, his experiences back in Germany suggested that though the Nazis had been defeated, the anti-Semitism that was intrinsic to their ideology had not.” Wow. “This became clear to Frans when his teachers in Berlin cast stealthily malicious glances at him when Jewish characters, such as Shylock in the ‘Merchant Venice’, came up in literature. ‘Ey,’ they said to him, ‘this exactly pertains to you.’ And that, he recalls, was what one teacher actually told him through a clenched smile. Many years later, when he worked as an animal feed trader in Hamburg, he didn’t tell friends that he was Jewish and held his tongue when he heard them make antisemitic comments. And so Frans told his son, Vensel, that things would go easier for him if he remained quiet about being Jewish. The moment you say it, things will become very different. Recently, their youngest son, the third generation of the family to learn that telling people to be Jewish could cause problems.
This boy had attended a Jewish primary school in Berlin, but he didn’t want to stay in such a homogeneous school for long. So just before he transferred at the age of 14, he transferred to a public school that was representative of Germany’s new diversity, a place as his mother described it, ‘Where he could have friends with names like Hassan and Ahmed.’ The first few days there seemed to go without a problem. He was an affable kid with an easy smile, bonded with one classmate over their common affection for rap music. The classmate introduced him to a German Turkish rapper who would rap about Ella and stuff. In return, he introduced his classmate to American and British rap. He had a feeling they would end up being best friends. On the fourth day when he was in ethics class, the teachers asked the students what houses of worship they had been to. One student mentioned a mosque, another mentioned a church. He raised his hand and said he’d been to a synagogue. There was a strange silence. One teacher asked how he had encountered a synagogue. ‘I’m a Jew,’ he said. Everyone was shocked, especially the teachers. He later told me about this moment. After class, a teacher told him that he was very brave. He was perplexed. As his mother explained, he didn’t know that you are not meant to tell anyone. The following day, he brought brownies to school for his birthday. He was giving them out during lunch. His best friend, the Muslim that he had met, he hoped would be his best friend, then informed him that there were a lot of Muslim students at the school who used the word Jew as an insult. He wondered whether his friend included him in this category, and so after school he asked for clarification. The boy put his arm around his shoulders and told him that though he was a real baba, Kurdish slang for boss, they couldn’t be friends because Jews and Muslims could never be friends. The classmate then rattled off a series of antisemitic comments according to him, that Jews were murderers, only interested in money.” And we’re talking about the 21st century. We’re talking about a Western European country. Talking about a 14-year-old boy. There’s a number of things that strike you from the story, but as an educator, what strikes me is that the teachers didn’t deal with it properly, and that speaks a million, million words. So that was the story I wanted to tell, Trudy, before we move on.
- But that is true of so many schools in so many areas. I think people are frightened. And also from a Jewish point of view, other minorities that we once marched proudly with for human rights, now see us as outside of that. They see us as, if you like, as oppressors. So there’s such a complication for Jews today, and I think more and more alienation and isolation. You know, the fact that in England, 70% of Jewish families are sending their children to Jewish schools, what’s that saying to you? Yes, I know about the economic reasons, etc, but what I’ve noticed amongst my friends and acquaintances, the majority of them feel safer now, in a Jewish environment. So it’s coming out of… So we are talking about Germany, and I think it was important to talk about Germany because after all, that was the country of the perpetrators and it did start well in West Germany. I was there, I saw the great strides being taken in education. For example, at the Wannsee House, Wolfgang Kaiser, who was the educational director and one of the most brilliant educators I’ve ever met, he didn’t just deal with school groups and university groups. He brought groups of doctors in to show them what happened when their profession was perverted. The same with teachers, the same with lawyers. And there was so many efforts going on in Germany, and somehow, it does seem that when society is relatively even, there’s room for tolerance. That’s what worries me most of all, William.
And because you and I have given much of our working lives to education, and I think you’ve got such an extraordinary track record, the other thing that worries me is that all the Holocaust memorials in the world, and there are over 300 of them, haven’t made the slightest bit of difference as far as I’m concerned. I listen to survivor testimony, as you know, both you and I have friends who are survivors. And although people do listen with great respect, and I think it makes an imprint, it’s not making enough of an imprint. And the majority of survivors tell their stories because they don’t want it to happen to anybody else. So let’s say we’re at a bit of a hiatus in terms of holocaust education, I really think people know very little about who the Jews are, which I think is a problem. Plus, we’re up against the current of the internet now, and the dark web, and conspiracy theories. So we are both educators, we have to put our faith in education, but what do we mean? Is there any kind of education in your view, that can somehow make people more civilised? Because it’s wider than the Jews, except the Jews are always at the edge of it. I’m not going to say they’re the canaries in the mind because we know what happens to the canaries in the mind. But if Jews are feeling uncomfortable, to quote Shakespeare, “There’s something rotten in the state of Denmark.” And the point is, Jews in Germany are feeling uncomfortable, and Jews in Britain… Okay, the Corbyn thing didn’t come to anything, but I remember what happened during the period of Corbyn when my very rational friends were actually talking about getting out of England. And there seems to be a polarisation, so as an educator, can we put any hope in a new kind of education?
Well, there are two comments to make. The first is, as a non-Jew, it was years back now, I was invited to speak to a ladies group of a synagogue on an afternoon, but I don’t… I was talking about… I don’t know what, it doesn’t matter. Not religious, of course. And it was a nice meeting. I’d done meetings for Methodists, I’d done meetings for Anglicans, I’ve done meetings for youth here. It’s that sort of meeting, people come, have a nice chat, somebody gives a nice talk, they have a cup of tea and a biscuit and go home. And I was going to this group, which I had not been to before, and I get a phone call a week before, “William, can you give us your car number plate?” And I said, “Well, yeah, of course.” I said, “Why do you need it?” And they said, “Well, you don’t understand, we have a locked gate, and your car will approach it, it will be photographed, and if it is your car with your number plate, the gate will open, just drive in and park.” And the reason being was they feared anti-Semitic attacks on the synagogue. And that happened to me more than once after that, and that opened my eyes. And one of the problems, Trudy, to me, is that the wider population in Britain have no idea. I’ve told that story many times since, to non-Jewish groups who look at me as though I’m mad. “Not in Britain,” they say. Yes, in Britain.
Every Jewish school.
Sorry?
Not just synagogues, every Jewish school. Have you any idea how offensive it was to me when my grandchildren were in kindergarten, to go and pick them up from a Jewish kindergarten and having to go through these gates with guards? It offends me. It offends me as a grandmother, and it offends me as a human being, that we should have to take these kind of… And this is not Jewish paranoia, this is the advice of-
No, no, no, this is unacceptable in a democratic country like Britain, that we should have citizens of Britain living under that sort of threat and fear. It is totally unacceptable. Have you ever heard a British politician talk about this? ‘Cause I haven’t. Now, Trudy, to go back to your other issue about what do we do about education, it’s because of that story I read from Germany that I’m not sure we aren’t starting in the wrong place. I think we have to educate the teachers first before they can educate the children. So we need to look at one of the bug bears of my life, which I strongly disapprove in Britain, of the way that we do teacher training. But we have to look at teacher training and we have, therefore, to educate the educators before they can educate the children. And it may be not simply about anti-Semitism, it may well be about anti-racism or whatever else, but what we’re trying to do, I think, is to create a democratic free society, and we are dependent upon teachers. Now there’s a problem, there’s a problem with teacher education, that’s clear. But there’s also a problem with the… How do I carefully put it? There is a problem with individual teachers’ own political beliefs. Let me give you an example from Nazi Germany. No longer with us, but my predecessor as principal in the College of Adult Education in Manchester, a Scot called Ronald Wilson, was a German specialist. And in the… It must have been about 1934/‘35, he went as a student from Scotland, and he went to Hamburg in order to study German in Hamburg. And there’s just two stories, one, he was there when Hitler visited Hamburg, and Hamburg was very anti-Nazi. And he said the crowd were silent as Hitler drove through, which made him think there might be hope in Germany.
But it isn’t hope, because he told another story from Hamburg. In adult education, which was of an enormous size in pre-Nazi Germany, as it was indeed, in imperial Austria, Hungary. It was the best adult education in the world. And in Germany, they first got an order that they could not employ German tutors, whether full-time or part-time, they had to be sacked. Now, given that Germany was one of the most enlightened of European countries, and its adult education was superb, you might expect some kickback. There was not a single kickback. All the principals sacked the Jewish staff, except in Hamburg. And I naively asked Ronald, “What happened to the adult education principal in Hamburg?” The answer, which you all know, he was arrested and never seen again. So we’ve got to start with teachers. We’ve got to have teachers defending what we believe are civilised norms of society, civilised norms of a democratic society. And where they might be ignorant, and those of you who are Jewish have to accept that many of us who are not Jewish do not necessarily have Jewish friends, do not necessarily understand the things that I’ve come to understood over the last 20 odd years working with Jewish communities, both as a principal in Manchester, in London, and subsequently with Trudy. Now, we have to think how we get at the teachers, how we remodel our school curriculum. And then the second thing, when we do that… I’m sorry, you must stop me in a minute.
No, you’re right. Go on.
And Trudy, the second point is, look, I can teach you democracy, of course I can, I could go into a sixth form or whatever and teach democracy. It’s meaningless unless you practise it. And by practising it, I mean like my little grandson, because his headmaster in his primary school was so excellent, he is prepared with his three little friends to stand up for their fourth friend who met this racist attack. He’s prepared to stand and say something. I think we should operate democracy in schools with more powers, more rights to the children, to the children of all ages. We mamby-pamby children, we treat them, and I’m going to come to this at the end, many of you know the great Jewish Polish educator, Korczak, and we’re going to come to him at the end, but I think we need to practise what we preach. It’s no good teaching them about anti-Semitism and for them to go into the playground and insult, or worse, a Jewish child.
But we all know the syllabus is overburdened, we all know that teachers are filled… Their time is filled with administration. What we are really proposing is a rethinking of education, aren’t we? There’s that wonderful quote of Einstein’s at the end of the First World War, where he says he blames it on those German teachers who for 50 years, gloried in nationalism. Though one of the problems I’ve always had with Germany is because it is such an enlightened… It was such a country of the enlightenment of ideas, of great music, it was difficult, it’s always been difficult for me to reconcile those two sides of Germany. So it’s not about an excellent academic education, we all know that, we just have to look at the . It can’t just be about teaching about the Holocaust in a serious way, because at the worst, a school has four lessons on the syllabus in England, key stage three, which is a ridiculous age to teach the Holocaust anyway. We cannot expect teachers to have that… A history teacher to have that kind of knowledge. So what I think both of us really think having given so much time to education, we’ve got to rethink what the whole word means for the sake of our future generations. This goes way beyond the issue of anti-Semitism, the issue of any kind of -ism. Because what we got to do is to teach kids that the world, that we all inhabit the same planet. That’s my view, but how it happens, I’ve got no idea.
And that should truly be easier as we look at the end of the planet with the environmental crisis. It should become easier to focus. Now you may have various views about that, I can’t abide listening to politicians here talking about it, because they don’t get it. But you start talking to teenagers here, they get it. And what they say is, “We blame you. You should have done something 20, 30, 40, 50 years ago, and you did nothing.” And it’s no good to say that we didn’t know. There was a book published in England right back in the sixties, I think I’ve got the date right, maybe even the fif… No, sixties, called “Silent Spring.” Do you remember that book, Trudy? Which really opened up the whole environmental question. And in Britain, we had the present king as Prince of Wales talking about these issues, and he was lampooned in the press for talking to plants and all that sort of nonsense. But he had got the message, and yet our politicians never got the message because they don’t take a long-term view. They take a very short-term view. When is the next election? How can I make sure I win again? That’s their view. So we’ve got to change our outlook in its entirety, which means our political system and our educational system. And if you say, “Well, what do we do?” I don’t honestly know what we do. I know what I would like to see happen, but it would never. I’ll tell you a personal story. When I was principal of the City Lit, and we still hadn’t been privatised by the government and we were still part of the London Education Authority, which no longer exists, I was approached by one of the officers from County Hall in London and said, “William, we are going to set up six form colleges for the first time, and we’re going to do an experiment.
We’re going to set up nine of them, three of them are going to have secondary school headmasters in charge, three of them are going to have college of further education principals in charge, and three of them are going to have adult education principles in charge, and we would like you to start one off. And we can tell you this, you can appoint all the staff from the deputy principal to the caretaker, and you can run it as you see fit, and we shall see what happens.” And they said to me, “What do you think you would do differently than the other groups?” And I said, “Well, I can’t speak to the other adult educators, but for me, these are young people. I would ensure that they were involved in the running of their own courses and in the running of the college. I would treat them as adults.” Now, that’s not revolutionary for goodness sake, but the officer I was talking to was sort of, “Oh, well, if that’s what you think you can do, good luck to you.” But I’m convinced I would’ve been successful. Nothing to do with me, nothing to do with me as an individual, but because I was operating on the basis of research and of a belief in young people. And I think if you gave them that belief and you told them you believed in them, they would respond positively even in the grimmest area of London. And I was hoping to get a very grim area of London, and my voice alone, you know what Britain is like, my voice alone will have put them off. And I think I could have got them by treating them as adults and democratising the system, so they learned about democracy by doing it, not by reading a dot-dot-dot book about it. Gosh, you’re getting me going tonight, Trudy, you’ve got to stop me.
No, no, no. William, I’m going to give you a little bit of hope because my eldest grandson has just started at an academy, and 50% of the kids, they had to pass exams, something like 50% of the kids, their parents have to pay for school meal and can’t pay for school meals, and the results from that school, and my grandson is absolutely blown away by the teachers, just how interested they are, how they are getting the kids to be part of it. And the school is open early in the morning to late at night for kids to study. And you’ve got an absolutely inspirational head and you’ve got inspirational teachers. So it shows you, it can be done on a small scale, the problem is we’ve got to attract better teachers or people who aren’t so bogged down in administration. We’ve got to cut out that ridiculous layer of bureaucracy. I totally agree with you. And one of the things I find really depressing about Britain is the think tanks that advise various ministers, particularly of education, they are advised by people who don’t know anything about education. When was the last time you were consulted?
The last time I was consulted, I pretty well walked out of a meeting. It was with a shadow labour education secretary who I don’t want to frighten the horses, but is now the shadow foreign secretary. And I just thought he was limited, shall we say. And in fact, we began… It was a meeting I stood in for somebody who couldn’t go, and she rang me up and said, “William, could you go?” The meeting was about adult education for older people. So we all gathered, and I’d been retired a number of years, nobody knew who I was. And the the civil servant came in and said, “There’s just one thing I want to tell you all before the…” Sorry, he wasn’t a shadow minister then, he was a minister in the labour government, he said, “Before the minister comes in, I want you all to know that he doesn’t approve of the term adult education, so please could you not use it?” And he gave some silly phrase. And I thought, “This is dreadful. This is dreadful.” And I’ve never been consulted since. They don’t consult people. There’s a big committee recently been set up in the last few days, and I follow teachers on Twitter on a history site, a history teachers’ site. And they’re saying there’s not one, not one teacher on this panel they’ve set up, of advisors. Not one. Now, how? It’s me saying, “I don’t think you should have set up such a committee without children on it.” Well, my goodness me, what would the government think of that when they don’t even trust teachers to sit on the panel? And it’s not just in Britain, we had these silly arguments. We’ve had arguments every September about school uniforms, how schools are insisting they measure the length of girls skirts and colours of… Oh, it’s nonsense.
So going back.
France, France are now reintroducing, you know… I think the world’s gone mad, we should be concerned about… Can I…? Oh, Trudy, can I use a word that…?
Go on.
Out of place, really. We’re concerned about the soul of these children.
What’s wrong with using that word? I am fed up with having to cut our language. That’s another point. Okay, but let’s go back to what we were talking about. I think both you and I agree that there’s no way you’re going to beat prejudice without a deep look at the education systems, without a deep look of more teacher involvement, more student involvement, which is interesting. And also, but in terms of anti-Semitism, I also object to all the prejudices being lumped together in one big super prejudice, because they are different and they have different causes. And I think when you are dealing with anti-Semitism, you are dealing with the backlog of anti-Judaism, which puts it into a culture. I had a friend who was a theologian, a Christian theologian, and he dealt… He was a very interesting man, and the anti-Jewish passages in the gospels, he didn’t hide them from his students, he taught them about them and then discussed it. He was unusual because he had a huge brain and a big heart, that we need more people like that in education, I think, because we are running out of options. Look, I suppose in my very cynical way, I think if there’s economic recovery, everything will hush up a bit, but because we are living in very acute times, it comes to the surface. But whatever happens, we’ve got to do something about the way we’re educating future generations. Now I know there’s loads of questions. Do you want to finish with that story? Because I think this is a debate we’re just beginning to open up, William.
Well…
God, we’ve got 42 questions, William.
Can I just put some things together and then I’ll finish with the Korczak bit, okay?
Yes, please.
Well, to bring it together, if we think about Germany, but it applies elsewhere. But the first thing to say, and Trudy mentioned it, is the internet, which is a fantastic tool for good, but also a fantastic tool for evil. And we somehow have to get control. That is to say, governments have got to get control of the internet. It’s no good because you believe in democracy and free speech, to allow people… I went on, oh, years ago now, I went on a course for principles, looking at the issue of… It was looking at Black/white issues. And we were told very clearly in that if you came across racism, you had to stop it and call it out. So within a class, somebody said something that was unacceptable, you didn’t say, “Oh, that’s an interesting thought, but I disagree.” You simply have to say, “I disagree.” And the same applies in terms of anti-Semitism. If in a class, an all-ordinary adult education class, some students said something that’s antisemitic, I would say, “I’m sorry, we do not accept that sort of language in this college. The door is there, leave.” And that is important. So the internet is infinitely worse. We’ve also got, and we’ll come back to that, the Israel/Palestine issue, which Trudy mentioned. Now this is a difficult one, this is a difficult one for me, and if I was on my own, I wouldn’t approach it. But Trudy will untangle this, or maybe some of you will. There’s also the fact we’ve covered, that Holocaust education has failed, so how do we make Holocaust education work? Because we must, must go on teaching it. We also have to deal with the issue of extremist Islam in European societies. How do we deal with that in a society which says we’re open and free of speech, but we’ve become… The whole Islamic issue has become a really difficult one. Most Muslims living in Britain are perfectly normal, and normal citizens, a small minority are extremely dangerous to our whole society.
And then we have in Germany’s case, since we unification with East Germany, West German emphasis on anti-Semitism and on Holocaust education have been weakened by the emergence of East Germany and the rise not of the communist east, again, but of the Nazi fascist east arising, that I find both interesting and frightening. Now, I said to Trudy, I would… Trudy said, “Go and…” I often call Trudy, I should let you all know, Matron, because those of us who went to boarding school were in fear of Matron. We would say, “I had a Matron when I was 11 who said, ‘Have you been? If you haven’t been, you better go.’” You can imagine what that was about. And I’m in fear of a Matron. And Trudy said to me a couple days ago, “We should end about hope.” And she said, “Just go away and find something.” Well, it’s not so easy, but I’ve come up with something, we’ve talked about it. Yes, we must always have hope. That is the human condition. We have hope that the next generation will deal with things better. We have to hope for a better future for our children and our grandchildren and our great-grandchildren. And in a hope for a better future, I would add, we need to hope for a kinder future, a future in which we realise that we are part of a community, of communities, I should say. Whether it’s a family community, a religious community, a social community, a geographical community, we are all members of communities and not individuals.
We must hope for a better and a kinder future. Now, I found a quotation from JFK in 1963 in a speech that he wrote when addressing the American committee for UNICEF. And in this speech, it’s only a few words, Kennedy said, “Children are the world’s most valuable resource and its best hope for the future.” So I’m not on my own, and Trudy isn’t on her own. Kennedy said, “Children are the world’s most valuable resource and its best hope for the future.” Now, I mentioned earlier, one of my heroes, one of Trudy’s heroes, the great Polish Jewish educator, Janusz Korczak. In 1942, Korczak is in Warsaw. He’s in charge of an orphanage. If you haven’t read any of Korczak’s books, please do, you can get them all on Amazon. A lot of his books are written as fairytales. You have to turn your… Being rude, you have to turn your brain on to understand what he’s saying. Now, Korczak, in 1942, as the principal of this orphanage, was ordered to take his children to a square in which he knew that they were going to be taken, he didn’t know precisely, but they were going to be taken frankly, to their deaths. And we don’t know the entire story, whether it was a German officer who said to him, “You better go. Just go.” Because it said that the German officer had read his books to his own children. Or maybe it was a command from higher up, which is more likely, to let Korczak go, because the Nazis did let some people go. And you all know the story, how they then use these people. And Korczak refused. And he told the children as they were on the way, they did not know where, but it was in fact, to Treblinka, and Korczak told them, “We’re going into the country, isn’t that lovely? We’re going to pick flowers and eat mushrooms.”
And he taught the children, he knew what was going to happen, but to the last moment, I mean, that’s an extraordinary educator, to the last moment, he was protecting these children. And some were very young, I think some were under the age of five, he was protecting them from what was coming. And he was telling them all these lovely stories. And he was a great storyteller. And in the end, he went with them into the gas chambers at Treblinka. One of the things he wrote, and this is where I finish, this is a quotation from Korczak himself, “Children are not the people of tomorrow, but people today. They’re entitled to be taken seriously.” I so believe that, that’s why I think our education system is wrong. We’ve got to teach them. We’ve got to treat them in a different way. We cannot act as though we know everything and they know nothing. “Children are not the people of tomorrow, but people today. They are entitled to be taken seriously. They have a right to be treated by adults with tenderness and respect.” Think of your own education, and if there’s a teacher that comes out from your memories, they will have been this, they would’ve taken you seriously. They would’ve treated you as an adult, with tenderness and respect.
They would treat you, said Korczak, as equals. “They should be allowed to grow into whoever they were meant to be. The unknown person inside each of them is the hope for the future.” Never write any child off. Never ever write any child off. They are the hope for the future. I think that is a magnificent quote. I think I’m going to ask for it to be put on my memorial service when I’m no longer here, because that is the essence of what I believe education is about. We have to treat everybody as equals. We have to treat everybody as though they have hope and ability within them. Churchill once said when he was home secretary before the First World War in a liberal government, talking of criminals because he was home secretary and responsible for prisons, “We have to believe in the good, in the heart of every man, however often we are disappointed.” I can’t think of a home secretary since 1911 when Churchill said that, who even approaches understanding what he was saying. And I can’t say strongly enough that Korczak had everything right. And do we have an education system today as Korczak writes about? No, we do not. Do we have it in Poland? No. Do we have it in Germany? No. Do we have it in Britain? No. In the States, Canada, Australia, Israel? No, we do not. And we could, we could, we must move forward with a better education system.
You see that? So you are putting that forward as one of the only ways we are going to break the violent cycle and the cycle of Jew hatred and hatred of everyone who’s different. Now, as somebody asked on a practical level about Korczak, Korczak was a real activist, and in Poland, he was the first educator to actually suggest to a Polish newspaper that he has a children’s page. Children wrote articles. And don’t forget also, in the orphanage, both in the ghetto and before, the kids had the right… They had their jury trials. He was an extraordinary individual. But anyway, I can see we’ve got a lot of questions, William, so shall I start having a look at them?
Yes. There we are. Do you want to go for the first one?
Q&A and Comments:
What is…
Oh, Rose says, what is also sad is the group with you listened and simply walked on, that was my story about Germany. Today is the day that the Jews were made to put on the star of David on their arm to identify themselves, so tragic. Yes, that’s what upset me as well, that they just simply… It was another story on a walk.
Q - And then Marie is saying, did the Jewish community of Germany recite the prayer for the country between ‘24 and '33, and then when Hitler became chancellor?
A - Do you know, I’m going to check that out for you rather than give you a wrong answer. I’m very much… After '33, they wouldn’t even be allowed to. Angela, there seems to be a feeling about some of the population in Germany, that Germany has paid their Jews as far as the Holocaust concern, and their feelings about Jews and Israel. I would certainly say that that’s coming up in a lot of articles. Yes, they feel that they’ve paid, they’ve given blood. Yeah, that’s the problem. Don’t forget what Howard Jacobson said, “They cannot forgive us the Holocaust.”
Helen?
Yeah? Go on.
Sorry, I was going to the next question. Sorry.
Helen, you go on.
Q - Helen says, how does one address the anti-Semitic beliefs of the parents, which is a big influence on the children?
A - My answer is a very simple one, if we’re dealing with the children through education, we deal with the parents through education, and that means through adult education. And adult education has collapsed across Western Europe. And not only across Western Europe, across the western world in general, and because governments don’t want to spend money on it. But we do have to spend money on educating because adults need to be educated as much on democracy as anybody else needs to, and I perhaps don’t even need to say that, do I?
Okay, do you want to read Rombic? I think that’s interesting, William. Do you want to go? Do you want to read that one after…?
Rombic. Yes, sorry. After spending years thinking about anti-Semitism and racism, I’ve come to the conclusion that education about specific issues such as the Holocaust, does it for good, not that they should not be taught, but don’t expect it to help. I think what we need is to focus education on three fundamentals, humility, tolerance, and critical thinking. Everything else will follow. Too much emphasis on specific issues such as anti-Semitism or LGBTQ issues provokes a strong backlash. I agree with that. I can’t argue with you. I think that’s absolutely correct. Then the question comes, if we take your three fundamentals, I don’t disagree, humility, tolerance, and critical thinking, those are very difficult concepts in which to educate. Now, critical thinking is the easiest of the three. Humility, humility is the least easy. But I would add, many of you know, I was educated in an English public school, which was evangelically Christian. I’m not an evangelical Christian today, but the one good thing about the school is they taught humility. They taught, for example, I can’t go to the front of a queue, if I’m teaching students, for lunch, I still can’t do it. We were taught to go at the back. It’s like the the officer carder in the army in World War I, you lead from the front, but you take the hind position over everything else, before everyone else is satisfied. Older children would allow younger children. It was drilled into us. Humility was something that we… Not everybody carried it on, of course. And you may have great doubts, those of you are British, that it was ever taught successfully at Eton, but when you think about people like Boris, but humility is a difficult thing. Tolerance is a difficult thing, but that’s more possible. Critical thinking is the easiest. But you may have something more worthwhile to comment on, Trudy, on that.
Right, now I’m just looking, we’ve got 57 questions, so I’m having just to… I’m actually looking for the difficult ones. Now this is from Yuri Avin, and I’m thanking you all for your questions, but because of time, we could… I’m struck by the avoidance in this session and the previous one, on cancel culture of acknowledging left wing anti-Semitism as opposed to explicit and visible right wing version. The intersectional culture that cannot deal with Jewish exceptionalism and conflates anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism, and the soft complicity of some media deserves to be called out. I think you should answer that one, William.
Oh. Now, I told you I would be cut to ribbons today.
No, you won’t.
One of the things that Jake Simons in his book, “Israelophobia”, let me just get rid of this picture a minute, talks about, which this book’s only just come out. One of the things that he talks about is the link between… You would think that people who were progressive in politics would be distinctly anti-anti-Semitism, but the reverse has happened, and that’s what happened in Britain under Corbyn. That in a twisted way, they themselves become antisemitic. And what Simons argues in his book, is because they are able to link with extreme Jewish views on the left, which condemn other parts of Jewish culture, not least Israel. And so they link with that and say, “Oh, no, we’re not anti. Look, we’ve got all these Jewish friends.” And so that brings up this issue, which I find extremely difficult to get my head around, of the anti-Israeli view, which the left have in Britain and elsewhere, and, you know, this is Red Foreman, Israel is behaving like, and you gave me the phrase recently, Trudy, as a Nazi state. And then they say, “But there are Jews who also think that, so we can’t be antisemitic because we’ve got Jews agreeing with us.” And this conflation between anti-Semitism, what Simons calls Israelphobia, and he adds in Zionism, confuses the issue. And people use the phrase Zionism, I believe, without understanding it. In the Times of London today, there was a report of a Muslim solicitor being brought before the solicitor’s organisational professional body, accused of tweeting anti-Semitism. And he was accused by the prosecuting lawyer for the society, for the law society, of using the word Zionism to hide anti-Semitism. And can you, Trudy, I’m not passing the buck, except I really think you’re the person to try and unravel this anti-Semitism, anti-Zionism, and Israelophobia. And I find it really quite difficult. And when I’m asked-
Okay, I’ve got two things to say, Seth. Number one, I gave three lectures on this and you can get them now that the website’s up, because it’s something that really interests me, where it comes from, it actually comes out of Russia. And there’s a whole progression in the left. Or you could read Robert Wistrich’s magnificent tome on the subject. He died in 2014, but my goodness, did he predict what was going to happen. And the other point is that we’re going to invite Jake on, we’re going to do a book launch on this new book of his that you are talking about, William. In fact, my daughter Tanya’s going to interview him. So we’ve taken that on, that we will be doing it. And it is something that we are very, very aware of. Now, this is from Mary and I just have to read it, it’s sweet. It’s more than sweet, it’s tragic. When I landed in Poland where my great-grandfather and family were murdered by the Nazis for the first time, I told myself I’m Jewish and Israeli, and I kept my head high. And this is from Ronnie Gotkin, education can be manipulated. I just read an article on tablet about a new institute for the critical study of Zionism, define Zionism as a political, ideological, racial and gendered knowledge project intersecting with Palestine, blah, blah, blah, and all the rest of that ridiculous language. Yes, I know, Ronnie, what I think what we are talking about, aren’t we, William? Is a democratic education to open light. You know, Wendy supports an organisation called Shine A Light. Isn’t it about time that we used rational thought a little more?
Well, I’ve just read what Ron has quoted. I have absolutely no idea why the word gendered knowledge appears in that at all. I can’t… That’s meaningless to me. I have no idea. I can’t even understand what it means, let alone to be objected to it.
You know, there’s a wonderful comment, and it was Karl Popper, you know, that internationalist Austrian Jew who finished up at LSC? He said the 20th century is just going to be about the meaning of words. They obscure all philosophy. And I think I will say something about our so-called cancel culture, because it stopped people thinking. Sorry, maybe I’m going too far.
No, you’re right. Words are important. And if you are a simple soul like me, who finds philosophical writings difficult, simply read Orwell’s “1984”, and that tells you why language is so important and we have to be careful in the use of language. But the problem with language is it changes meaning, and that is confusing. If we give a simple example, when Trudy and I were young, if we used the word gay, I would be saying to Trudy, chatting her up, “Let’s go and have a gay evening out on the town.” Now, of course, gay means something quite different. That’s just a silly simple example, but words change their meaning. I’m not sure that some important political words aren’t changing meaning. One of the things I find extremely difficult is the use of the word fascism today. When we talk about… It’s used about Trump and it’s used about the conservative party in Britain. I’m not sure that’s the right word to use, and I’m not sure we know what words to use. We use the word neo-fascist, we use the word populous, we use the word extreme right, but none of these words really help us understand. And we’ve got to find language to talk about some of these problems.
Mmm-hmm. There’s an interesting comment from Ivan. We need teachers, but church leaders preaching love not hate. You and I did not kill their God. That’s from Ivan, obviously talking about the Dayaside myth. But that comes from religious leaders from every group. We’ve got to be careful.
I have to say, Ivan, that I was an Anglican. I’ve never heard an Anglican priest, that I’d be present at, preach that. But I went with my ex daughter-in-law to a Catholic mass before Christmas, to support her, and it was appalling. It was appallingly antisemitic. We had Jewish…. I just don’t want to think about it. It was so dreadful. I’ve never, ever experienced that. And I really do think the Catholic Church has a great deal… I’m not saying Protestant churches are clean, by no means, but I am saying that historically, the problem lies with the Church of Rome.
This is Yona, the solutions you propose are likely to backfire because both Islam and Christianity have as a basic philosophy, their superiority and exclusivity of their way of worship. Mmm. Okay.
I’ve lost where that is.
I’m going down because…
Who was the person that said that? Which lady said that?
Yona. Yona Yapu. I’m going down fast because we’ve got so many questions to answer.
I’ll take your word for it. So she’s saying that the problem lies with two of the monotheisms.
Yes.
Is that right?
She’s talking about Christianity and Islam in particular.
I think you would have… I understand the point and I think it is a well made point, but I think there’s a lot more that would have to be untangled from all of that. A simple piece of factual history, during the crusading centuries in central Germany, they were beginning to get people ready for a crusade. And the crusade meant you went to the holy land to rid the Christian holy sites from Muslims. But they then decided instead, they would massacre Jews in Germany. It would save them the trouble of going to the holy land. They were an easier target. And that is a dreadful story, and so that was not… I don’t know that that was to do with theology, I think it was much more to deal with the other, and the other was Jews because they were handy, whereas the other other was too far away to get to. There’s a lot of complications in looking at the issues between the different religion, and I think there’s a lot in that, what is said, but I think there’s a whole range of… I’d like to hear somebody do a longer talk about that.
I think we’ve opened a discussion, William, and we need to consider where we go with it, because I think with lockdown, we have a wonderful opportunity to discuss these ideas. There’s a comment from Carrie Supple who’s a brilliant educator, and she said, “I’ve been working with schools in the UK for 40 years. For decades, teachers here have been trying to practise democratic anti-racist thought, though rarely addressing anti-Semitism education in the whole school. Maybe not enough of them, maybe it’s not good enough, but this is not a new call out. Citizenship education at its best, has done great things. We need to share more.” The trouble is, is it’s putting one part of the syllabus. What we’re actually saying is much more radical, isn’t it?
Yes, it’s to underpin everything. It’s to underpin everything. And to be a good citizen, to talk to a child of 11, as my eldest grandson is, is to talk about how you can be a good person in the school. In fact, he had a talk, interestingly, in his high school here, in Worthing in Britain, he got a talk in week two from a 14-year-old boy. All the boys and girls at 11 were talked to by older children. And this 14-year-old talked about the importance of the school’s message, and it was not dissimilar to what we talked about before, that someone raised, about toleration and so on. And he talked to them about why this was important, and it was important to the school as a community. And I was very impressed by that, because I don’t think that’s done in many schools.
Q - This is… Somebody’s put this down, I don’t have a name, but it’s a three part question that we are not going to answer, but I think we should take note of it. Is the immigration of Islamic peoples contributing to the rise of anti-Semitism? Anti-Semitism, is it part of nationalism and therefore, there’s equally a rise of anti-Islamic sentiment? Yes.
A - Yes.
Q - Is the rise of anti-Semitism part of the rise of hatred of the other all over the world? Yes.
A - Yes.
So we agree with you.
All of those answers are yes.
That’s an essay in itself. And this is Ralph, in addition to the teachers, shouldn’t president’s, dean’s, council and faculty ought be held to account for their blinked attitude towards blatant antisemitic acts of their colleagues and the colleges and universities, even at the so-called elitist institutions? What can be done? In the US, it’s explained away as academic freedom, says her. Oh, Rita says we must do more together. As the lady.
What, you and I?
Yes.
Many more of these. I can’t make it. Trudy, if we’re finishing, can I give that quotation that you and I talked about?
Yes, please. And we’ve run a quarter of an hour early. Over, so…
Where are we? Hang on, I will get there.
I’ll tell you where we are, it’s 8:15.
It’s in Jake Simons book, and Trudy knew this, I did not know this quotation. The American writer, Dara Horn, memorily wrote this, quote, “People love dead Jews. Living Jews, not so much.”
Oh, William.
“Dead Jews. Living Jews, not so much.” Now I’ve got a suspicion that that is a very good analysis of Holocaust education.
Thank you for that. I think we have to stop it there. Thank you so much, William.
Thank you.
But I really think we’ve just begun to scratch the surface. And Wendy and I have been discussing more of these kind of sessions with different people, and I think this could be a good way forward now the website is up. And I must just praise William. Our next course is going to be on South Africa, then Switzerland, and then I said to William, I think we’re going to go to America. It’s such a big subject. Can I have 12 lectures from you? I get my 12 lectures. First of all, I asked for eight. I get my eight. That’s two months of work. Then I ask for 12. I’m soon going to be ask… And then I asked for 16. So what William has to do is expand it. So the way we construct our courses, we just push everything. So William, thank you for being the marvel that you are.
What Trudy doesn’t realise, people, is I have 20 prepared because I know she’ll ask for more, so it isn’t very difficult.
Oh, I’ve got to become more subtle, haven’t I? Matron is going to become subtle. Bye-bye. Goodnight, everybody.
Bye-bye, all. Thanks for listening. Thanks. Bye, Trudy.