In my experiences during primary education, the extent of learning about the Holocaust was shallow; it primarily consisted of the stories told from the European perspective of the Jewish experience during the Holocaust, such as Anne Frank’s diary. The history books that I had learned from had small tidbits of information, ranging from paragraphs to a few pages, with intentions to teach young minds about the Holocaust—“how can writing of such short length possibly illustrate the disastrous severity of mass genocide of a group of people?” I started to wonder when entering The Holocaust Museum in Los Angeles, California. As a part of CAUSE’s agenda, interns were to meet at The Holocaust Museum to learn more about cross-cultural communications and how to use this to stand in solidarity with one another. The most important takeaway from this experience was how learning intentionally about everyone’s history encourages others to learn about my own.
Taking a tour of the museum’s new exhibition, focusing on Shanghai’s role in offering Jewish refugees sanctuary from the violence occurring in their community, the first thought I had was how powerful allyship is for communities facing humanitarian crises. Witnessing, through remnants of the lives of Jewish families who resided in Shanghai, the impact of having a safe haven and even more so, providing one, reiterated a repeated theme throughout CLA, that community feeds, supports, and strengthens community. The definition of a community is not limited to a single definitive environment, such as our home towns, but also includes the communities to which our identities belong; with this, comes the ability to develop communities beyond physical space and borders and more importantly, the responsibility to work alongside other communities fighting for the same initiatives as you.
In relation to learning about one another’s histories, Jordanna Gessler, Vice President of Education and Exhibits Chief at The Holocaust Museum LA, expressed a sentiment that I feel perfectly encompasses the importance of cross-community relationship building. She expresses that learning about The Holocaust is important not solely from the perspective of a student, but from the perspective of a human being, as this was a crime against the humanity in which we all exist. I feel as though all history is my history, our history, in some way, shape, or form. This impacted me profoundly, and truly encouraged me to learn more attentively about the history of all marginalized communities in order to stand in solidarity alongside them with any human rights fights that might be occurring; I feel like this encouragement is beyond necessary for me mentally and emotionally, especially in times like today, where political polarization makes it so difficult to communicate through justice reform with others. If society could see one another as human beings before all other self- or societally-inflicted identities, perhaps a bridge of common ground between people could form, especially in the face of humanitarian crises, hatred, and discrimination.
I want to note another point that panelist Zach Ritter, Vice President of Leadership Development of the Jewish Federation, expressed that encapsulates how inspired I was after this session, which is when he said that “Doing the good work is the rent we pay to live in this world”. This felt personal, what he said, that this is my rent, my responsibility, to do good in this world, how and wherever I see fit. At this point in my life, I feel that my rent is learning about the history of my AAPI community, and communities that have faced systems put in place clearly against them; my responsibility to humanity is to educate myself about the mistakes and travesties of the past in order to recognize preventable patterns of hate and intervene.