discovered that teaching the Holocaust in Poland was a very different experience than teaching it in the U.S. Holli recalls, “These students viewed the Holocaust in very different terms. They saw it as a Polish tragedy, where 3 million Jewish and Catholic Poles were placed in concentration camps. Through our discussions, the students came to see the American Jewish perspective of the Holocaust, and to understand it as a Jewish tragedy.”
Dr. Levitsky has also found a renewed interest among American college students in learning about the Holocaust. She says, “Today's college students were raised in the shadow of 9/11. They have a real interest in wanting to understand the Holocaust." And as the Director of the Jewish Studies Program, Dr. Levitsky is keenly aware that being able to fund scholarly work on the Holocaust is critical to ensuring that there will be qualified people to teach, talk, and write about the Holocaust in the future.
While many Jewish pundits see a decline in interest and participation among American Jewish millennials, Dr. Levitsky sees things in a more optimistic light, pointing out, “I see an awful lot of what I'll call de-constructed Judaism. Maybe it's the local yoga studio that does something special on Friday night because it's Shabbat. But I'm far from giving up on Judaism as practiced. I just think that the practice is changing.”
Observing the dynamic growth of the Jewish Studies Program at Loyola Marymount University is one more reason to view Judaism's future, as well as the future of interfaith relations, in a very optimistic light.