The Anti-Defamation League’s (ADL) annual Holocaust Education Workshop, which emphasizes Holocaust education in the classroom and will feature four sessions Nov. 3-10, will, for the first time, overlap with “Bearing Witness,” the organization’s long-running, three-day workshop for Catholic-school teachers, seminarians and priests, which takes place Nov. 7-9.
Attendees from the two programs will come together for an eight-hour intensive learning session Nov. 7 at American Jewish University, where topics will include the “History of Anti-Semitism,” “Guidelines and Methodologies for Teaching the Holocaust,” “History of the Holocaust” and “Israel and Modern Anti-Semitism.”
The last, a new addition to the workshop curriculum, examines the “linkage between what happened in the Holocaust and how Israel is perceived around the world now,” said ADL Pacific Southwest Regional Director Amanda Susskind.
Father Dennis McManus, a consultant on Catholic-Jewish affairs at the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, will speak at the “Bearing Witness” program, which, Susskind said, is “a program tailored to the Catholic-school experience.”
Its purpose, Susskind added, “is not just to teach about the Holocaust, but to teach about the miraculous change in the Catholic-Jewish relationship in the last 40 years.”
Father Alexei Smith, ecumenical and interreligious officer for the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, said he hopes teachers don’t confuse the two ADL workshops as being in competition with each other.
“I’m a little afraid that one will outdo the other,” Smith said. “I know teachers, [and] they only have so much time to come to programs.”
Earlier this month, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, in partnership with Loyola Marymount University (LMU), similarly revised its 10th annual Southern California Teacher Forum on Holocaust Education. Organizers for the program, which is held at LMU, for the first time developed the agenda with Catholic educators in mind.
For information on the upcoming ADL workshops, visit regions.adl.org/pacific-southwest.
