BUZZ
‘Some of you felt like your own history, your identity or your community was left out or erased‘
A Massachusetts middle school principal is under fire for apologizing to Arab students after they said they felt “unseen” during a lesson on the Holocaust.
In an email sent to seventh grade students, Diamond Middle School Principal Johnny Cole explained that the lesson was meant to help students “recognize hate, understand where it comes from, and encourage you to speak up against it.”
But Cole noted he and other school officials “learned from speaking to some […] families that the experience did not feel that way …
“Some of you felt unseen. Some of you felt like your own history, your identity or your community was left out or erased.”
We are sorry. Not because the topic was too hard; hard conversations are part of growing up and part of what we do here at Diamond. We are sorry because every one of you deserves to walk into this school and feel that who you are matters—Arab students; Jewish students; Lebanese students; Muslim students; Palestinian students—every student. And in this case, we missed the mark and did not achieve what we hoped to.
CAMERA, the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis, said in a press release “it should be common sense that Holocaust education is not an affront to any student’s identity, and it is not something for which a school should apologize.”
CAMERA CEO Kurt Schwartz noted students at Diamond MS previously had “reportedly confronted neo-Nazi imagery,” the latest in December of last year.
In addition, eighth grade student Teagan Murtagh wrote a letter to The Lexington Observer last month noting Principal Cole had stopped her in the hallway and requested she not wear a sweatshirt that read “Save the bees. Plant more trees. Clean the seas. Punch Nazis.”
Murtagh, whose great-grandmother survived the Holocaust, said Cole told her some students had indicated they “felt threatened” by the shirt.
Schwartz said Cole’s response “reflects profoundly poor judgment, an inadequate understanding of antisemitism, and a failure by the community to stand with its Jewish children and families.”
The American Enterprise Institute’s Samuel Abrams says that a lesson on the Holocaust “is under no obligation” to center those who may feel, as some students said, “unseen.”
Cole’s email, Abrams says, “accepts the premise that the measure of a Holocaust lesson is how the non-Jewish children in the room feel about their own visibility.” It is also that “Jewish memory is an imposition, and discomfort is a veto.”
MORE: High schoolers’ assignment: Present argument in favor of the Holocaust
