What’s a Concentration Camp, Dad?: Museums, Pedagogy, and the Rhetoric of Popular Culture

Abstract

In this chapter I explore why educators need to take into account unconscious rhetorical defense mechanisms when they attempt to use the Holocaust and other cultural traumas to teach important lessons concerning cultural tolerance, social responsibility, and personal engagement. By analyzing comments from students and discussants on the Web concerning the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, I examine the rhetoric of idealization, identification, assimilation, and universalization and how these defense mechanisms function as unconscious resistances to individual and social change. Moreover, in looking at the Los Angeles Museum of Tolerance, I discuss many of the possible ways that educators and other cultural workers can anticipate and work against popular resistances to ethical education. I also use this chapter to outline why the central rhetorical defenses serve to block the importance of the public sphere in contemporary society.