by Leah Gelfand
In recent history, educators and researchers have been attempting to discover the best methods to teach students about the Holocaust. However, because the Holocaust is a unique historical event, this task is complicated (Carmon 3). Many educators and researchers believe that engaging students’ empathy is useful when teaching about the Holocaust (Mihr 526). Not only does empathy contribute to learning about the Holocaust, but it also helps with a second goal: namely, teaching students to empathize with people who are experiencing social injustices. In this post I will be discussing the use of cognitive and emotional empathy when teaching about the Holocaust. I will discuss the roles of each of these two types of empathy as well as the negative implications of using empathy while teaching about the Holocaust. I conclude with a short discussion of a recent attempt to teach the Holocaust differently from the ways in which we currently do so.
Empathy plays an important role in moral and social development. It aids people in developing healthy relationships with others and motivates prosocial behavior (Smith 3; Spinrad and Eisenberg 119). There are several types of empathy, and in this post I will be discussing two of them: cognitive empathy and emotional empathy. Cognitive empathy is described as mental perspective taking and understanding the emotions of others (Smith 3). Emotional empathy is described as sharing and feeling the same emotions with the person with whom you are empathizing (Smith 3). For example, if someone’s house was burglarized and they tell you about what happened, a cognitive empathetic response would be to put yourself in their shoes and try to understand how they may be feeling, whether it be anxious, scared, or violated. An emotional empathetic response would be to feel what they are feeling, whether it be anxious, scared, or violated.
Research suggests that empathy is an important component of learning for children, particularly when it comes to historical understanding (Dulberg 4). Both cognitive and emotional empathy play their own role in aiding the learning process for students. One study, conducted by Nancy Dulberg, explored the roles of cognitive and emotional empathy in learning history (3-8). Students were asked to interact with a diorama of an “old fashioned” kitchen, and then were asked questions about the diorama. These questions measured their emotional and cognitive responses to the material, as well as their historical understanding. The results found that emotional responses motivated students to engage with the material, which then led to cognitive responses and perspective taking (Dulberg 8-45). This suggests that both types of empathy play an important role in the teaching of history.
Since research suggests that empathy is important for historical understanding, many educators utilize empathy when teaching about the Holocaust (Gouws 55). Educators utilize survivor testimonies, first-person books or memoirs, and movies to accompany teaching material, and these sources have the potential to generate emotional responses and emotional empathy (Gouws 50). As mentioned above, these emotional responses lead students to engage with the subject matter.
Teachers use other types of material, second person descriptions of the Holocaust, worksheets, and textbooks, to encourage students to think about and try to understand the feelings that are exhibited in the first-person accounts (Rider 47). This is cognitive empathy because the students are encouraged to understand the feelings of others rather than feel the feelings of others.
The use of both cognitive and emotional empathy motivates students to think about Holocaust victims and survivors as unique individuals, rather than viewing them as a number or statistic (Gouws 64). One history teacher from South Africa stated that when teaching students about the Holocaust, “they must be able to think about those people and feel something” (Gouws 60). Notice that she is focusing on emotional empathy. She explains that encouraging empathy while teaching the Holocaust is necessary to develop a deep understanding of the Holocaust and to encourage sensitivity about the subject. Furthermore, research suggests that a lack of empathy is associated with an increase in aggressive and antisocial behaviors (Marshall and Marshall 742). Therefore, empathy may be an important skill to learn in school, whether directly or accompanying other lesson plans.
While the use of empathy is a common method of teaching about the Holocaust, there is still debate as to whether the use of empathy is beneficial or harmful to students when learning about the Holocaust. Some suggest that although cognitive and emotional empathy have the potential to motivate civic engagement, prosocial behavior, and a deep understanding of history, there may be some negative effects when using empathy to teach about the Holocaust. When individuals have strong emotional empathic responses, according to Eric Leake, this can lead to empathic overarousal, empathic distress, and egoistic drift, causing people to focus on their own emotions (152; Rider 44). This is harmful because instead of focusing on learning the material and empathizing with victims, students focus on themselves. Furthermore, some researchers suggest that using empathy to teach about the Holocaust can lead to normalization of the Holocaust (Rider 46). When the Holocaust becomes normalized, students become desensitized to the course material. This can lead students to not recognize the magnitude of this horrific event. Finally, empathy may result in students identifying with experiences from the Holocaust (Rider 46). This can be harmful because students may come to believe that they can truly understand what the Holocaust victims experienced. This may lead to trivialization, because they might come to think that they could have easily navigated being in concentration camps or other experiences of victims.
An artist named Ram Katzir believed that the normalization of the Holocaust was causing people to become desensitized to the Holocaust (Katzir 40). Based on his own experience, he believed that people have seen so many pictures, movies, etc. that these things no longer move them or motivate them to think deeply about the Holocaust. In an attempt to combat normalization, he came up with an alternative method to teach about the Holocaust (Popescu 135). Specifically, Katzir developed a traveling art exhibit, titled “Your Coloring Book.” This art exhibit encourages adults to interact with the subject matter of the Holocaust and reflect upon it.
Adults who entered a museum were invited to sit down and begin coloring in a coloring book. They were not told that what they were doing was related to the Holocaust. The pictures seemed to be inoffensive. The first was a person feeding a fawn. The person’s face was not revealed. As the visitors in the museum continued coloring, the pictures became more ominous. Eventually it was clear that the visitors were coloring pictures that were Nazi propaganda images. Visitors responded to these images in different ways. Some chose to walk away, and others chose to add their own interpretations when coloring. This interaction caused people to feel a sense of moral responsibility, without motivating strong empathetic responses. That is, they reflected on the Holocaust and related images in a novel way.
Research demonstrates that both cognitive and emotional empathy are crucial to gaining historical understanding, whether it is understanding of the signing of the United States’ Constitution or the Holocaust. That said, it is important to recognize that the use of empathy to teach history may not be an effective learning method for everybody, as people have different social cognitions. This is why it is important to develop and utilize other methods to teach about the Holocaust, and not to solely use empathy. The use of empathy has some additional negative implications, but this does not negate the benefits of using empathy when teaching about this Holocaust. This is not unusual. Chemotherapy is poison and will harm the cancer patient, but avoiding this harm results in something worse – the cancer spreading. Finally, to continue with the metaphor, in the same way that researchers continue to try to discover safer ways to treat cancer, it is important to continue to search for and utilize creative methods to teach about the Holocaust, like the method created by Katzir.
–Leah Gelfand
Works Cited
Carmon, Arye. “Teaching the Holocaust as a means of fostering values.” Curriculum Inquiry 9.3 (1979): 209-228.
Dulberg, Nancy. “Engaging in History: Empathy and Perspective-Taking in Children’s Historical Thinking.” (2002).
Gouws, Brenda. “Emotions in Holocaust education-the narrative of a history teacher.” Yesterday and Today 21 (2019): 47-79.
Katzir, Ram. Introduction. Your Coloring Book a Wandering Installation, by Gary Schwartz, self published, 1998.
Leake, Eric. “The (Un) knowable self and others: critical empathy and expressivism.” Critical Expressivism: Theory and Practice in the Composition Classroom (2015): 149-60.
Marshall, Liam E., and William L. Marshall. “Empathy and antisocial behaviour.” Journal of Forensic Psychiatry & Psychology 22.5 (2011): 742-759.
Mihr, Anja. “Why holocaust education is not always human rights education.” Journal of Human Rights 14.4 (2015): 525-544.
Popescu, Diana I. “Teach ‘the Holocaust’to the children.” PaRDeS: Zeitschrift der Vereinigung für Jüdische Studien eV 16 (2010): 134-152.
Powell, Philip A. “Individual differences in emotion regulation moderate the associations between empathy and affective distress.” Motivation and emotion 42.4 (2018): 602-613.
Rider, N. Ann. “The Perils of Empathy: Holocaust Narratives, Cognitive Studies and the Politics of Sentiment.” Holocaust Studies 19.3 (2013): 43-72.
Smith, A. (2006). Cognitive empathy and emotional empathy in human behavior and evolution. The Psychological Record, 56(1), 3-21. Spinrad, Tracy L., and Nancy Eisenberg. “Empathy, prosocial behavior, and positive development in schools.” Handbook of positive psychology in schools. Routledge, 2014. 82-98.