Setting Precedence Network

The following websites offer informative perspectives on contemporary antisemitism.

Academic Engagement Network; https://academicengagement.org/

AEN mobilizes networks of university faculty and administrators to counter antisemitism, oppose the denigration of Jewish and Zionist identities, promote academic freedom, and advance education about Israel. AEN envisions a world where American higher education welcomes, respects, and supports the expression of Jewish identity and robust discourse about Israel.

Anti-Defamation League; https://www.adl.org/

ADL is the leading anti-hate organization in the world. Founded in 1913, its timeless mission is "to stop the defamation of the Jewish people and to secure justice and fair treatment to all." Today, ADL continues to fight all forms of antisemitism and bias, using innovation and partnerships to drive impact. A global leader in combating antisemitism, countering extremism and battling bigotry wherever and whenever it happens, ADL works to protect democracy and ensure a just and inclusive society for all.

Facing History, Facing Ourselves; https://www.facinghistory.org/

Facing History & Ourselves uses lessons of history to challenge teachers and their students to stand up to bigotry and hate. From one classroom in Brookline, Massachusetts in 1976, Facing History & Ourselves has become a global organization with a network of hundreds of thousands of middle and secondary school educators reaching millions of students worldwide. They help educators prepare students to participate in civic life – using intellect, empathy, ethics, and choice to stand up to bigotry and hate in their own lives, communities, and schools.

Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy; https://isgap.org/

The Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP) is committed to fighting antisemitism on the battlefield of ideas. ISGAP is dedicated to scholarly research into the origins, processes, and manifestations of global antisemitism and of other forms of prejudice, including various forms of racism, as they relate to policy in an age of globalization. On the basis of this examination of antisemitism and policy, ISGAP disseminates analytical and scholarly materials to help combat hatred and promote understanding.

International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance; https://www.holocaustremembrance.com/

The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance IHRA (formerly the Task Force for International Cooperation on Holocaust Education, Remembrance and Research, or ITF) unites governments and experts to strengthen, advance and promote Holocaust education, research and remembrance and to uphold the commitments to the 2000 Stockholm Declaration. The IHRA’s network of trusted experts share their knowledge on early warning signs of present-day genocide and education on the Holocaust. This knowledge supports policymakers and educational multipliers in their efforts to develop effective curricula, and it informs government officials and NGOs active in global initiatives for genocide prevention.

Network Contagion Research Institute; https://networkcontagion.us/

The Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI) provides pioneering technology, research, and analysis to identify and forecast cyber-social threats targeting individuals, organizations, and communities. The NCRI is committed to empowering partners to become proactive in protecting themselves against false narratives that create rifts of distrust that impact institutions, capital markets, public health, and safety.

Researching for the Future (UT Dallas); https://ackerman.utdallas.edu/academics/researching-for-the-future/

Researching for the Future represents a new initiative that recognizes that the digital age dramatically changes the way we read, see, interpret and create. Whereas the first wave of technological innovation simply produced tools to enhance existing patterns of research and creativity, Digital Humanities 2 embraces the openness and transformative quality of digital studies. Our growing cluster of research projects is intent on promoting technologies for the study and teaching of the Holocaust. The projects bring together enabling technologies for scholarly exploration and civic engagement about the Holocaust and its remembrance.

Southern Poverty Law Center (Hate Map); https://www.splcenter.org/

The SPLC is a catalyst for racial justice in the South and beyond, working in partnership with communities to dismantle white supremacy, strengthen intersectional movements, and advance the human rights of all people.

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum; https://www.ushmm.org/

A living memorial to the Holocaust, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum inspires citizens and leaders worldwide to confront hatred, prevent genocide, and promote human dignity. Federal support guarantees the Museum’s permanent place on the National Mall, and its far-reaching educational programs and global impact are made possible by generous donors.

Viewing Holocaust Literature as an Artifact

The term ‘Holocaust’ when followed by ‘literature’ covers the persistent efforts by so many to articulate the unprecedented distortions of humanity in the Holocaust itself. As Rosenfeld notes in his work A Double Dying: Reflections on Holocaust Literature,  

"An age is known not only by the books it produces but by those it labors to preserve and pass on to succeeding generations. On both counts – that of original creation as well as that of vital cultural transmission – Holocaust literature must be counted among the most compelling literature of our day."

Holocaust literature is an international literature, covering a broad geographical compass. Occupying a multiplicity of all the major European languages and most of the minor ones, as well as Hebrew and Yiddish, this literature has found its way into all the forms of language. The forms particularly examined in this bibliography are diaries, memoires, short stories, poetry and novels. (Plays, essays, parables, ballads and songs all add to the literary outpouring, but fall out of the scope of this bibliography.) The writers who wrote during and/or after the Holocaust, each in their own way, took up the moral and literary challenge – the command of an ethical and aesthetic imperative to bear witness. They found the means, not to succumb to silence in the face of massive daily atrocities around them, not to be overcome by silence, but to get beyond expressionless despair and the incredibility of the Holocaust and live up to their last breadth with the ‘obligation to express’. 

Building on my Studies in Technology and Knowledge bibliography, I note the much-expanded definition of the term artifact by Randall Dipert in his seminal work, Artifacts, Artworks and Agency. This opens the door to a deeper examination of Holocaust artifact intentionality –as specifically applied to the literary works and in particular, to the intentionality of those writers who wrote of their experiences during and/or after the Holocaust. Many hoped against all hope that their ‘bearing witness’ would find the ‘ears, eyes and hearts‘ of ‘future agents’ of the different literary artifact genres they employed.  

By shining a light on the intentionality of Holocaust literary artifacts and drawing from my education bibliography and Geoffrey Hartman’s  demand for an ‘ethics of response’ to the Holocaust; it may be possible to discover nuances in literary interpretations. Those nuances may help future generations discover that their own responses to exposure of these literary texts becomes a pledge… to take up responsibility for the victims of genocide and themselves work to affect the future.

Holocaust Diaries

Diaries, like memoires and journals, form the documentary part of the Holocaust literature that has survived and come down to us. Out of most probably thousands of diaries that were kept by Jewish men, women and youth under German occupation, throughout the Holocaust, only several hundred diaries still survive - in archives, mostly in the United States, Europe and Israel, and in private hands.  The majority of these surviving diaries were written in Yiddish and in Polish - though many of these have never been translated into English. 

The unique quality of diaries is that they “preserve the gradual acquisition of knowledge and shifting values that occur in life.”  The fact that any diaries written inside the camps and the Ghettos survived The Holocaust is extraordinary. The danger of keeping a diary meant instant death if discovered and the tortuous, appalling living conditions and daily organized murder going on around all of the diarists inside the camps and ghettos, makes their tenacity and courage to continue writing at all costs, even more extraordinary. Most of the diaries we can read today were written by Jews in hiding – and this includes diaries written by adolescents such as Moshe Flinker. (A recent publication, Salvaged Pages: Young Writers’ Diaries of the Holocaust, draws previously un known and unpublished scraps of unfinished diaries written by many young holocaust victims to our new attention. ) 

Alexandra Garbarini in her 2006 analysis of largely unpublished Holocaust diaries written mostly by Jews in hiding in Eastern Europe as well as by little known diarists from Germany and France, called: Numbered days: Diaries and the Holocaust, has added much to our understanding of this genre.

The qualities of these diaries written during the Holocaust, take on special meaning because hardly any of the writers survived, and therefore none of their diaries are ‘complete’ - even as many missing pages from diaries hidden during the Holocaust, were never found.  Yet as Gabarini notes, the diarists “possessed a keen sense of the historicity of their experiences and wrote in their dual capacity as victims and witnesses.” 

As noted by Rosenfeld, in A Double Dying, with many stories of mass slaughter of Jewish communities by German killing squads becoming known, “Record, record!” became the motivating impulse of the day….to get it all down on paper, without exaggeration or distortion, became nothing short of a sacred task.”  

It is true that there exists a deeply rooted Jewish literary tradition of bearing witness to tragedy as a means of transcending it. As noted however by Gabarini, there were “different impulses – familial, ethical, theological and historical -that compelled individuals to record their experiences.” She goes on to note, 

in response to the mounting knowledge about the ensuing extermination, people’s reasons for writing their diaries changed. “Jewish diarists were the first people to attempt to represent the extermination of European Jewry - … while at the same time frequently alluding to the unrepresentable nature of their experiences.” 

Holocaust Memoirs

Holocaust memoirs are all works written after the Holocaust by those who were surviving victims of the Holocaust. Unlike a diary that is written ‘in the moment’ – usually from day to day, a memoire is an unfolding story that is always being remembered.  It is written ‘after the fact.’ What distinguishes Holocaust memoirs from Holocaust diaries, is the struggle that all these survivor -victims had: the diarists with the often-impossible task of daily writing ‘witnessing’ and living with the fear of imminent discovery and extinction and those who wrote memoirs with having survived. Their living takes on an extended (in its anguish) - ‘life -after -death aspect.  As Alvin Rosenfeld puts it: “A life afflicted by guilt, absurdity and irreality…indicted for unspecified but unforgiveable crimes – chief among them the “crime” of having returned to the living while others and often ones “betters” went to their deaths.”  

And as if that was not enough, all of them struggled with how to write and describe in any credible way, the nightmare they had managed to live through that was totally senseless: the ‘l’unvers concentrationaire.’ Tasking himself with finding the language to communicate his experiences, Primo Levi who survived a year of incarceration at Auschwitz, stated:

"When normal language cannot represent its object, and when conventional literary figures seem inadequate to the expressive demands made of them, what recourse does the survivor writer have?

It is worth noting that according to David Roskies, several famous diarists during the Holocaust, (Ringelblum, Kaplan, and other Ghetto diarists) were inspired by the quintessential Jewish war memoire, S. Ansky’s “Khurbm Galitsye,”  Roskies describes his memoire (about the deliberate destruction of Jewish communities by the Russian army in the First World War), as focused on the nature of the group – not on the individual, and that Ansky excelled at describing a ‘collective portraiture’ – one where the individual submerged his personal experience so as to highlight the broad panorama of Jewish suffering.” What was apparent to Roskies as perhaps it was to those Holocaust diarists, was that Ansky’s fears were not just about the mere repetition of antisemitic acts, but that “a breach in the covenant of humanity at large”  was occurring – and nothing was being done to stop it.

Holocaust Poetry

It can be said that the one constant in all poetry, in all times, has been the belief “in the potential of language to serve the poet’s endless expressional quest.”  However, this belief needs to be anchored in the constancy of “some recognizably, commonly accepted human scale – that was severely challenged by the Nazi terror:”  – a satanic movement bent on the total extermination and annihilation of the Jewish race – for the crime of simply being born.

A common thread in the genre of post-Holocaust poetry is that The Holocaust literally caused the very system of language itself to fracture; making communication for the survivors problematic if not almost impossible. 

But poets did emerge out of the camps and ghettos and have proceeded however painfully to add their voices to Holocaust literature. What the examples of poetry cited in this section of the bibliography show, is individual efforts by men and women of different nationalities and linguistic backgrounds, to add their own unique experience in the form of what Rosenfeld calls, “a poetics of expiration,”  and later refers to as a “literature of silence.” 

Hilda Schiff whose work on analysis of hundreds of poets who created Holocaust poetry, is that poets who wrote about their experiences in the Holocaust, despite often declaring that no language would suffice to describe the indescribable and un precedented horrors they lived through.  Yet poetry, according to Schiff,  more than other literary genre, is able to “give proximity to the feel of events or situations… in the ‘other planet’ more than any other form of writing.

"To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric." It is still debated whether Theodor W. Adorno's sentence condemning the writing of poetry after Auschwitz was an injunction, or as Anthony Rowland suggests: something more descriptive…In style and syntax, Rowland suggests the sentence seems to be: 

nothing less than a moral interdiction—unless we allow the word barbaric to signify differently than the Enlightenment binary of civilization and brutality suggests. With Kristeva's  etymology of barbaric in mind—as the Hellenistic onomatopoeia for foreign speech, "bari-bari"/"bla-bla"— Poetry after Auschwitz will have the quality of mixed, foreign speech—perhaps even of "inarticulate, unimportant scribbling."  The question that Holocaust poetry as literary artifact poses, is can the power of these poets’ ‘inner speech’ enable future generations to hear and be aroused to action.

Holocaust Novels

Without books, (according to Chaim Kaplan’s diary, the Jews were condemned to a state of double darkness: physical because of no electricity, “but worse than that, mental darkness.” 

This section of my literature bibliography covers novelists from a wide variety of different national literatures and languages, all of whom have written novels in which, with various and diverse approaches, they attempt to come to terms with the legacy of the Holocaust. Over time, novels concerning the Holocaust have helped post Holocaust generations understand how Auschwitz has changed the way we think about humanity and the human condition.

As Efraim Sicher claims, "The Holocaust novel bursts the already fuzzy generic boundaries of autobiography and fiction, memoir and fantasy, historical document and realist novel. The incredible invites the surreal, and the absurdity of mass death defies narrative conventions of life stories, the Bildungsroman, or the epistolary form."

A Holocaust novel: Night, written by possibly the most world-famous Holocaust survivor and Nobel prize winner for literature, Elie Wiesel, is the second most famous work on the Holocaust ever read; (the first being The Diary of Anne Frank). 

Night is primarily read as a testimony – of how Wiesel, at the age of 14 was initiated – not into life – but death in Auschwitz.  His early Trilogy of Night, Dawn and Day all read like an existential search for ‘moral purpose – where an alien universe challenges his faith.’  Wiesel’s later novels: The Town beyond the Wall, and the Gates of the Forrest, are complex tales of belief and truth in revisited scenes of The Holocaust. With no hope in sight, characters have to make a choice between whether to sacrifices their lives in order to save another human being. During the 1990’s Wiesel became more and more pre-occupied with the legacy for the next generation. His later novels probe the meaning of remembrance after there are no more survivors to bear witness.

The language of the Holocaust universe could not be easily understood or reached using common vocabulary.

Secondary Sources

These works highlight how the critics have tried since the 1970s to deal with the ethics and aesthetics of Holocaust literature. All these studies help shine light on Holocaust literature as written by victims and survivors. They also bring to the fore the writings of the “secondary witnesses”- the sons and daughters of survivors. An examination of statements on post-modernity and post-Holocaust writing, pave the way for further insights into the role of Holocaust literary artifacts in shaping Holocaust remembrance – particularly after there are no more surviving witnesses to bear the torch of remembrance.

My thesis investigates whether or not artifacts can be used to make the Holocaust more relevant to millennials and future generations. Today, knowledge is derived from information that usually is accessed by an enabling technology. That said, digital discovery will play an ever-increasing role in the ways artifacts shape Holocaust remembrance. Rapid advances in enabling technologies continue to change the playing field and the players. In this way, technology influences culture and culture influences technology.

The advancement of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) is often described as the third revolution in the dissemination of knowledge and in the enhancement of instruction. The first revolution being the invention of written language and the second the development of movable type and books. 

Young adults already expect – and typically default to – immediate answers from the Internet and the World Wide Web over face-face discussion and reading print material. Likely, in some form or fashion, so too will future generations. Ever-changing search technologies enable us to discover all at once, hitherto unimaginable amounts of information. New applications strive to keep up and to assist users in turning that ‘firehose of information’ into actionable knowledge. In the era of ‘Big Data’ in which we now live, an understanding of how technology impacts on information discovery and knowledge acquisition informs how we can make a difference in terms of access and accuracy of artifact discovery that may lead to better decision-making for all ages in all fields – especially complex, controversial, and current topics like the Holocaust.

As such, this bibliography complements the other two areas of interest for my doctoral work. My Literature Bibliography focuses on Holocaust literature as an artifact. My Education Bibliography concentrates on American public schools, highlighting the profound effects of legislative policies and educational technologies on teaching and learning and knowledge acquisition. In order to explore the relationships among critical factors of technology and knowledge that relate to the role of digital objects in remembrance, this Studies of Technology and Knowledge Bibliography is organized into four sections: Critical Aspects of Electronic Search, Information in Digital Times, Technology-Empowered Lifelong Learners, and The Future of Technology and Knowledge.

Critical Aspects of Electronic Search

In the context of digital discovery, the Internet and the World Wide Web bring into central focus three critical aspects of ‘search’: 

1. information retrieval, driven by metadata and the impact of algorithms in that effort; 

2. access to information, limited by digital availability and license restrictions; and 

3. representation of information, biased by commercial optimization and obscured provenance. 

According to Gerard Salton, a pioneer in information retrieval from the 1960s to the 1990s, information retrieval is “a field concerned with the structure, analysis, organization, storage, searching, and retrieval of information”. Metadata is data about data, (for example, information about a document such as the document type, e.g. a web page, document size, etc.). An algorithm is a set of rules created to solve a given problem. In computing, algorithms provide a set of instructions to define a process for searching content on the World Wide Web. Searchers, and even search engines, often encounter digital ‘road blocks’ that literally block access to any kind of digital object – be it a document, an image, a video or any other kind of digital content. At the same time, many publishers, vendors, and indeed individual copyright owners, are developing proprietary platforms to distribute works in order to control paywalls and to incentivize licensed subscriptions. These challenges for digital discovery limit the potential for painting a complete picture of a topic, thus negatively impacting on the potential for technology-enabled knowledge acquisition. On top of that, commercial interests are also driving biased representation of available information. Custom algorithms can affect the results displayed by search engines thereby confusing everyday users by presenting paid results and advertisements before more relevant results. Even experienced academic researchers often succumb to the ease of replying on the first results of common search engines at face value. Retrieving information based primarily on keyword frequency, rather than conceptual relevancy, is not the sort of discovery that will lead to novel approaches to Holocaust remembrance in the future.

Digitization has opened the world to an ever-increasing glut of information that has also enabled information bias under many guises – both inadvertent and advertent. The World Wide Web is a perfect application for enabling commercial optimization and obscuring provenance at the same time. Search engine optimization (SEO) means that search engines and individual companies placing information online about their products and services, can try to take advantage of the ways search engines calculate information relevancy and then can optimize their sources to come to the top of a search page. Information searchers need to ask such questions as what entity is responsible for the creation of a digital object of interest. Adding copyright issues into the mix, questions of authorship, ownership of the copyright, date of creation and first publication, whether the work is a work for hire and for who and whether the work includes or is derivative of another work, all affect provenance. Obscuring of any of these kinds of details puts into question the credibility and authenticity of the information discovery process.

As far as my research is concerned, particularly in the field of Holocaust Studies, it is imperative to become as aware as possible of the potential for bias in search algorithms, and the dangers of misleading or opaque provenance and access bias relating to digital availability. At the same time, it is equally important to stay abreast of the emergent advances in search technologies, like the recent arrival of the Semantic Web. All of these factors have significant implications for accurate and complete digital discovery in the field of Holocaust Studies, in terms of remembrance and the impact of artifacts in shaping that memory of the Holocaust. The processes of digital discovery today, as my research focus compels, merit careful exploration regarding the implications for Holocaust-related digital artifacts. How the Semantic Web and emergent applications will affect artifact discovery and use in preserving and archiving the history of the Holocaust matters for future generations.

Information in Digital Times

Information in digital times focuses on the impact of digitized content flowing onto and over the Internet and computer networks. Digital media has eliminated text-centric and cultural boundaries, linking people and information instantaneously all over the world. This section examines some of the new information environments that are springing up, hoping to help people learn how, as Pirolli puts it, to “best shape themselves for their information environments and how information environments can best be shaped for people.” 

What publishing is and means today is no longer simple. The power of what and when to publish no longer lies in the hands of the publishing elite, but in the hands of the many. Authorship is no longer just about writing books, journal articles or encyclopedic tomes. Archiving is so much more than selection among those textual outcomes today. Yet the answer cannot be the title of Gabrielle Gianachi’s work: “Archive Everything.”

Information in digital times is inextricably tied to technology and vice versa. The readings in this section help to develop an understanding of technology that places interconnectedness front and center within which digital artifacts appear, are developed, and have effects. What is most revealing is the process of development, which relies “on the theoretical concepts of articulation and assemblage. 

Technology Empowered Lifelong learners

The readings in this section point to the profound changes enabling technologies bring to learning. No longer teacher-centered or text-based; now teachers can truly introduce and support the habit of life-long learning. This means the inter-weaving of both formal and informal learning opportunities throughout people’s lives. These readings do not extoll the virtues of this learning approach for picking up and staying current with skills for employment - thought that would be a natural outcome of life-long learning. Rather they focus on “agency” The taking of personal responsibility for action – both in choice, in interest, in participation, in action – and therefore in taking responsibility for stewardship of culture into the future.

The Future of Technology and Knowledge

As the World Wide Web continues to evolve, we are breaking away from modernity and post –modernity – into perhaps a post- postmodern age. One where the ubiquity of networked machines both frees us and captures us in the Web at the same time. We are freed from having to remember facts and spend time doing rote tasks. New enabling technologies mean that life-long learning has arrived and we can think more imaginatively and work and socialize individually and collaboratively in ways unimaginable even as little as ten years ago.

The World Wide Web has already gone through four iterations since its introduction in 1989 by Tim Berners-Lee. (The Web introduced humanity to a ‘non-linear’ world of information, via ‘hot links.’ These hot links enable any Web user to link anything to anything – starting with texts, and as the Web matured, linking all kinds of digitized objects in new media formats.) Berners-Lee thought of Web 1.0 as being document-focused (text-based). He saw the second phase as being 'people-based' (driven by people self-publishing and flooding on to the World Wide Web in their millions in the mid-1990s.) Web 3.0 is still where the Web is at today: The Web today is 'data-focused.' This state includes the beginning of the 'Semantic Web' and its semantic framework that is setting the next stage for Web 4.0 which will be the Web of applications – referred to by Berners-Lee as becoming the ‘Social Web.’

At the same time this puts a huge collective responsibility on humanity’s shoulders as stewards of our culture into the future. The readings in this section highlight the paradigm shift started by the invention of the Internet and deepening in implications as this digital age progresses. This literature selection points out the perils and the pitfalls, but also potential ways forward to ensuring that we enhance knowledge and figure out ways to preserve it for future generations.

Clearly digital artifacts will be a part of remembering in the future. What that actually means in the context of Holocaust remembrance depends largely on how present and future generations protect and enhance the knowledge outcomes of digital discovery.

Shortly after being awarded the Nobel Peace prize in 2004, Elie Wiesel, Holocaust survivor and renowned author, was asked if he could talk across the barriers of hate. He responded that his answer to anything is ‘education.’  

My literature bibliography focuses on Holocaust literature as an artifact. My Technology bibliography is centered on ‘digital discovery.’ To that end, the readings for my Education bibliography are key to the web of intricate relationships between these readings and my other two focus areas. The Education bibliography has four sections that highlight key events in American public education over the last 200 years that have particularly affected and brought about profound change in the goals of public education and the teaching mandated to bring about those goals. A basic understanding of these areas is needed in order to define the context of future artifacts that will be of use to education and life-long learners to write their own stories that will be meaningful in individual content groupings.

A review of the literature highlights the profound effects of ever-changing technology on teaching and learning and knowledge acquisition. When we want to ‘remember’ today, we are most likely to click on a link. However, understanding the lessons of the Holocaust is no longer just a question of memory; today, it is even more a matter of learning. In addition, today’s possibilities for learning are virtually unlimited. The Internet, World Wide Web and Big Data tools and techniques afford us the opportunity for opening new conversations and for exploring new interpretations about the Holocaust. Though search technologies like Google make fact-finding easy today, deep discovery through asking good questions is not a natural outcome. These readings point to an opportunity to leverage new enabling technologies that can help open up different routes to knowledge discovery and knowledge formation. This potentially offers a new dimension for Holocaust scholarship and education. 

Learning in American Public Schools

The direction and expansion of free public education from the time of the founding of the American Republic in 1776 has much to do with the guiding educational principles espoused by Thomas Jefferson in his lifetime. No one, according to Gordon C. Lee,  has had more impact on the American tradition and upon education than Thomas Jefferson - who saw education as the sine qua non of ‘a truly viable democracy.’ Jefferson appreciated that freedom depends on self-government and that education ‘contributes to both the knowledge and virtues that form a self-governing citizen’. He sought to establish free schools throughout the State of Virginia where all children in the state could be taught reading, writing and arithmetic. To Jefferson, this basic education was an instrument to securing “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” for Americans – because it helps ‘each individual understand his duties’ and ‘know his rights.’  

Jefferson was equally passionate about the need for separation of Church and State – culminating in his Bill for establishing religious freedom in 1777, which finally became law in 1786. In Everson v. Board of Education (1947), the Supreme Court drew on Thomas Jefferson's correspondence to call for "a wall of separation between church and State", though the precise boundary of this separation remains in dispute to this day.

As the 19th century drew to a close, the combined influences of urbanization, industrialization and immigration gave rise to the need for an American labor force with more specialized skills than those taught in common schools. If the 19th Century was all about the expansion of access to free schooling; (where free schooling became the primary mechanism through which a democratic society provides its citizens the opportunity to attain literacy and social mobility), the 20th Century – the World War II era was all about satisfying the demands of an ever-growing manufacturing industrial complex.  Business and education leaders began to apply new principles of industrial organization to education, such as top-down organization and a “factory-floor” model in which administrators, teachers, and students all had to adhere to a ‘standardized “final product’. Between 1945 and 1983, this era saw major controversies such as over McCarthyism, progressive education (child-centered ideas and practices that aimed to make schools more effective agencies of a democratic society), the civil rights movement, bilingual education and the women’s movement. Particularly notable during this time, Brown v Board of Education overturned school segregation laws that had been in effect since the late 19th Century, setting the stage for a new era of diversity in public education.  However, school desegregation needed the upholding of the constitutionality of bussing as a means of achieving racial balance in the 1970s. 

In 1983 the Report, “A Nation at Risk”  catapulted education to the top of the Government’s agenda.  This report found that an “incoherent, outdated patchwork quilt” of classroom learning led to huge numbers of students receiving a diluted, “cafeteria-style curriculum” that allowed them to advance through their schooling with minimal effort, enabling millions of children to leave high school illiterate. Over the next 30 years, the pendulum swung heavily to holding teachers accountable, with standardized testing and measurement viewed as THE answer to low student achievement. The focus during these years was also on thinking that Market forces could be the unleasher of innovation in schools and bring greater efficiencies to education. In other words, schools started to be viewed as needing to be run like businesses – where students were to be considered as ‘consumers’.

During the first two decades of the 21st Century, standards based reform emerged as the single most dominant feature of American educational policy. President Bush’s ‘No Child Left Behind’ Act  passed in 2002. It based its outcomes on the virtues of high standards, rigorous testing accountability and school choice to improve education. Ironically, former Assistant Secretary of Education, Diane Ravitch  came to the realization that rather than promoting equity, instead, rigorous testing and teacher accountability produced high rates of failure for many students and widened the gap between those at the bottom and those at the top.

The shift from  the ‘One-Room Schoolhouse’ to the ‘Factory school model’  to ‘21st Century’ Education opens the door and sets the stage for us to redesign education partnerships with respect to The Holocaust in terms of post-modern culture.

Educational Practice in Holocaust Studies

A sector of education, Holocaust Studies at the graduate level is where I believe the paradigm shift can be enacted. The ‘educational beginnings’ of Holocaust Studies was in the late 1950s as teaching about The Holocaust to college-age students. Franklin Littell, co-founder of the first conference about the Holocaust to focus on Christian culpability (the Annual Scholar’s Conference on the Holocaust and the Churches) labored to shift educational understanding away from historical crisis of the Jews to a focus on the crisis in Christianity caused by a “crucified and resurrected Jewry.”   

The reason for teaching The Holocaust to future generations is no longer just about remembrance and hoping that Holocaust education will help to stop future genocides from occurring – which clearly, it has not . It is to help future generations understand its profound danger to the human rights of all minorities – no longer just the Jews. As leading Holocaust historian, Yehuda Bauer argued in 2001, “the warning to humankind is written on the wall, beware and learn. Learning is crucial here, not only for Jews but for everyone, children as well as adults.”  Yehuda Bauer’s words harbor more urgency when reports and research show that discrimination of all kinds against the human rights of another is on the rise everywhere.   The readings under Holocaust Studies point the spotlight on how Holocaust education and antisemitism has been and is being taught – both formally and informally. The methods and the content of teaching about The Holocaust varies greatly among countries around the world . There is a focus on use of educational tools and resources used by many museums, exhibitions and permanent memorials to the Holocaust, because that is where most Holocaust-related artifacts are housed and discussed. One of the biggest challenges is the lack of formal training of teachers in teaching about the Holocaust, and the continuing existence of prejudices and stereotypes among educators. This is why an investigation of educational technologies is necessary for my research.

Access to Information via Education Technologies

A review of literature concerning educational technology points out the importance for educators to adjust their teaching of the Holocaust to the social, cultural and historical contexts of the students – and in particular, to focus on and teach about modern antisemitisms  that are mushrooming around the world today. With regard to the Holocaust, being able to clearly identify and include the “past dimension of history” may mean that the “unexamined stories and sub-conscious assumptions” will no longer remain buried. Complementing current practice, the readings about educational technologies point to the potential for advanced inquiry tools to draw on the research scholarship and historical evidence about the Holocaust. The next generation of learners and scholars may be able to uncover different insights from the ever-expanding body of Holocaust research given the ever-growing, newly digitized data available and new ways of discovering new insights through enabling discovery technologies from existing and new information.

Thanks to the Internet, the World Wide Web and mobile technologies, information comes from many places beyond the teacher and the school or public library. Teachers are struggling to meet the challenge of engaging diverse populations and supporting emerging applications and devices. 21st Century learning environments move students to the center of the learning process. Fueled by their own curiosity, students become the stewards of their own learning which means teachers assume a more facilitative role and thus can focus more on the process rather than the procedures of integrating technology into their teaching.  I aim to investigate how virtual communities can change the way people of all ages learn, play, make decisions, socialize, and engage in Civic life. Awareness of this shift is fundamental to designing and delivering teaching and learning about the Holocaust by future generations. 

Impact of Technology on Education

The final focus of the Education Bibliography is on readings covering ‘influencing factors.’ Here, the urgent need for development of new skillsets for citizens of the 21st Century is exposed. Kathy Davidson  has written and spoken about her in-depth research into the best ways of learning and thriving in the 21st century world in which we live. She points out that we are still training students with the methods, philosophy, and metrics designed for the Fordist era of the Model T. Yet since 1993 when the Internet and the World Wide Web came into our lives; our work, our occupations and our lives have changed radically – but not so our Universities and colleges. 

Focusing on the role of digital artifacts in education, this section summarizes several influencing factors that are pertinent to my research. Serving as an overarching theme, Krippendorff’s work on the foundations of design discusses how “artifacts relate to each other meaningfully, and what they do to each other consequent to how humans conceive of them.”  This has particular importance in light of how literature is viewed as an artifact in the context of digital discovery in a post-modern culture. 

One cannot ignore the increasingly exponential rates of change. The influence of technology on culture and visa versa has even been marked with a new period called the Anthropocene. Key to my research, the prominence of societal pressures couched often in religious dogma, signals the increasing urgency of strengthening the understanding of The Holocaust as a unique and as a universal historical event. New media channels confound knowledge discovery particularly when fake news and other forms of mis-information are deliberately and immediately pushed out across expansive networks. To our advantage, advances in neuroscience inform the design of new learning environments and suggest new ways for leveraging new technologies.

For example, interest in inquiry has sparked focus on thinking skills and query development. Collaborative and participatory learning models promote digital literacy that supports student production of digital artifacts.  Stories have been the predominant way of keeping the memory of the Holocaust alive. Ever-growing repositories of digitized Holocaust artifacts afford new opportunities for multi-disciplinary representations of the Holocaust. A single continuous information view of disparate individual collections would allow for relational archiving and expand curatorial practice to ensure a more complete picture as we move further away in both time and space from the Holocaust itself.  The success of the Maker Movement and ‘do-it-yourself’ (DIY) learning, establish a solid foundation for defining the role that enabling technologies can play in supporting digital discovery of Holocaust related artifacts.

An understanding of the trends associated with the ‘Big Data’ revolution can catalyze innovation for the creation of new knowledge pathways in education. For example, 3D visualizations and other graphical representations of information empower learners to gain new perspectives that offer new insights.  My research concentrates on the potential of redesigning education with the intent of affecting remembrance of the Holocaust for the future. The time is now to evolve Holocaust studies by adapting current pedagogy to promote the production of customized artifacts based on digital collections that can be assembled to address the unique learning needs of today’s learners.

Summary of the Educational Bibliography

This review of literature sheds light on the role of artifacts in shaping post-modern culture, and on the implications for future digital discovery. It indicates that Holocaust studies programs at the graduate level under the influence of Holocaust scholars is a viable entry point for affecting new tools and resources for educators and lifelong learners.

The importance of improving the automatization of text summarization is due to the ever-increasingly massive volumes of data that humans need to analyze and understand quickly. This Literature review covers methodologies and processes practiced in achieving accurate summarization of texts: namely ‘extractive summarization’, known as sentence ranking, and ‘abstractive summarization’ known as re-writing new sentences containing the most important idea of the original text.  Generative AI text summarization is the newest and most advanced method of text summarization. It functions by learning patterns in data and using that knowledge to create new content – based on fitting the patterns that it learns. Generative AI does not require a deep understanding of context to generate its new content.

This review describes and exposes the difficulties and trade-offs in achieving ‘good-enough’ summarization – whether the text summarization outcome is in the form of text or a visual format, and whether the summarization is performed by a human or by Generative AI -through its application of Natural Language Processing (NLP); or by a combination of human and machine generation. One arena of research that is highlighted in this review, is awareness of the need and the challenge of providing ‘plain language Summarizations’ (PLSs) so that scientific literature can reach a wider audience circulation / dissemination. The aim being to help improve open access to scientific information.

The research focus is on improving both extractive and abstractive summarization by developing new techniques and models that address some of the challenges and limitations of each approach. The research also makes clear the dangers of human reliance on visual summarizations of text – particularly when the objective may be to analyze a series of text summarizations from a given ‘collection’ of texts. In the arena of research into using generative AI to provide plain language summarizations, a lot more research needs to be done – however the authors in the largest study to date, feel that this use of AI may do more good than harm…

Finally, additional research includes examining the use of Word clouds for visualizing bodies of text and how this use can be improved. The research clearly sets out the dangers in the use of word clouds (such as Wordle which is one of the most popular word cloud generators). The research points out that there is no co-ordination in the placement of similar words across clouds. Discussion about new approaches – such as ‘Word Storms’, explains a novel algorithm that “builds coordinated word storms, placing shared words in a similar location across clouds. The research demonstrates that coordinated word storms were markedly superior to independent word clouds for comparing documents.