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The Politics of Teaching Palestine to Americans pp 103–147Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

Narrating the Nakba, Teaching Palestine

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Abstract

Growing up I turned to literature to learn about the world. In Hebrew school, memoirs like The Diary of Anne Frank and Elie Wiesel’s Night were used to reinforce the Zionist idea that because of the Nazi holocaust Israel must exist. They were tools to create empathy for Jews who were oppressed and to undergird an ideological view. We were never asked to learn another side to this story, nor should we have. But neither were we asked to apply the dictum “never again” to other genocides. As far as my teachers were concerned, there was only one genocide. In some ways I build on this logic here arguing that to understand Palestine, one needs to understand the history through voices of Palestinians.1

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Authors
  1. Marcy Jane Knopf-Newman
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© 2011 Marcy Jane Knopf-Newman

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Knopf-Newman, M.J. (2011). Narrating the Nakba, Teaching Palestine. In: The Politics of Teaching Palestine to Americans. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137002204_4

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