This lesson explores the online exhibition Some Were Neighbors. In this lesson, students will examine examples of choices of ordinary people during the Holocaust and think critically about the fears, pressures, and motivations that might have shaped their behaviors.
After viewing archival film footage documenting Jewish life in Nasielsk, a small town in Poland, before the German invasion in September 1939, students explore how the community changed during the Nazi occupation that followed.
This lesson explores the online exhibition State of Deception. Students will dialogue and reflect on the ways in which propaganda affected society during the Holocaust and how it continues to affect people today.
Students will examine Anne Frank’s diary as both a historical and a deliberately-created literary text, and will understand how the Holocaust affected the lives of the Frank family.
By focusing on the history and meaning of the swastika, the lesson provides a model for teachers to use when examining the origins of symbols, terms, and ideology from Nazi Germany and Holocaust-era fascist movements that students are seeing in contemporary American culture, promoting critical historical thinking and analysis.
Although different in many ways, antisemitism in Nazi Germany during the 1930s and anti-Black racism in Jim Crow-era America deeply affected communities in these countries. While individual experiences and context are unique and it is important to avoid comparisons of suffering, looking at these two places in the same historical period raises critical questions about the impact of antisemitism and racism in the past and present.
By exploring the Americans and the Holocaust online exhibition, students will examine the motives, pressures, and fears that shaped American attitudes and responses to the threats of Nazism and the Holocaust during the 1930s and 1940s.
Students will understand the complex factors that led German Jews to seek to emigrate from Nazi Germany and the complex factors that impeded their immigration to the United States in the 1930s and 1940s.
In order to better understand what Jewish cultural and communal life was like in Europe before World War II, students search the Museum’s digital archive collections, select photographs depicting pre-war Jewish life in Europe, analyze them, and research the town(s) where the photos were taken.
This lesson is designed as both a two-day and four-day unit. In both versions, students analyze how and why the Nazis and their collaborators persecuted and murdered Jews as well as other people targeted in the era of the Holocaust between 1933 and 1945.
Watch videos and read articles about the Holocaust and the conditions that made it possible.
