On Sep. 8, 2015, Professor Zehavit Gross from the School of Education, Bar-Ilan University in Israel, delivered a lecture entitled “A Global Perspective of Holocaust Education and Cosmopolitanism” for IICE’s International Education Podium. The lecture was chaired by IICE Professor LIU Baocun and attended by Master’s and PhD students.
Professor Gross has multiple titles, such as the head of the Graduate Program of Management and Development of Informal Educational Systems in Bar-IIlan University, chair-holder of UNESCO Chair for Education for Human Values, Tolerance and Peace, president of the Israeli Association of Comparative Education Association (IACE), and head of the Sal Van Gelder Holocaust Literature Center. Her main research interests include gender education, civic education, religion and education and peace education.
The lecture began with an overview of “holocaust education.” She pointed out that the holocaust here referred to the Nazi holocaust toward Jews during the Second World War. In 2005, the United Nations adopted a resolution that established January 27th as the International Holocaust Remembrance Day, and urged all member countries to initiate educational programs on the history of the holocaust nationwide in order to avoid the history of genocide by learning from the past. Then, she discussed educational programs in Germany, Austria, Poland, Australia, Switzerland, Canada and Israel.
In the second part, Professor Gross introduced the theory of global civil society and cosmopolitanism and exemplified the relationship between those two and holocaust education. She said research had shown that holocaust education incorporated in citizenship courses turned out to be more effective than that of history courses in primary and secondary schools.
Finally, Prof. Gross shared the suffering of her father and her own family, advocating that holocaust education be made an effective pathway toward cosmopolitanism. Professor LIU also shared his own experience with the attendees and wrapped it up with a short summary.
