Exploring the Yiddish language of my father, grandmother, her grandmother, and beyond, this autobiographical article frames language as an ever-changing space where identities are negotiated, formed, and contested. Placing the history of Yiddish alongside my own familial relationship to the language, I explore how the stories of individual lives…

In this article, the author recounts her teaching experience with new high school students at Northwest Yeshiva High School, an Orthodox Jewish high school on Mercer Island. In teaching the students about writing, the author describes how she was moved by the narratives written by her students, and that after reading their stories she decided to…

"Where is God now?" is a question from the Holocaust memoir "Night" by Elie Wiesel and an underlying narrative dilemma for the teachers and most student participants in this qualitative study of three Holocaust units in secondary English classrooms in the Midwestern United States. Using a narrative theory framework, this study explores how…

This essay provides a rhetorical analysis of the "Wilkomirski" Affair and some of the recent public debates that have discussed the importance of childhood memoirs and the formation of authentic Holocaust identities. The author argues that rhetorical processes are involved in both the construction of what are deemed "authentic" memoirs and the…

Offers selected passages from autobiographical and fictional accounts of the Holocaust by inmates and survivors and by artists as evidence that "everything is possible." Argues that, although the death camps cannot be completely comprehended, they can be sensitively imagined. (DMM)

This article describes the experience of a teacher invited to discuss Paul Cowan's "An Orphan in History" at a "Let's Talk About It" book program on the theme, "Being Ethnic, Becoming American: Struggles, Successes, Symbols." This was one of a series of book reading and discussion programs jointly sponsored by the…

Experiential education provides a safe environment for the sharing of personal stories that promote understanding of diversity and commonalities. Describes the Play for Peace program to promote understanding by facilitating the play and sharing of children of conflicting cultures. (SAS)

Gerda Weissmann Klein was 15 years old in September 1939 when Germany invaded the city of Bielitz (present-day Bielsko), Poland. In her memoir, "All But My Life," she recounts the horror of losing family and friends, of life in concentration camps, of the death march and of liberation in 1945 by an American soldier named Kurt Klein, who…