Gary Gershman, J.D., Ph.D., had a taste of being a student again under the tutelage of some of the nation’s premier scholars in Holocaust studies. Gershman, associate professor in the Division of Humanities at the Farquhar College of Arts and Sciences, was awarded a fellowship last year by the Holocaust Education Foundation.

Each year, the private, non-profit organization invites about two dozen professors and advanced graduate students to its Summer Institute on the Holocaust and Jewish Civilization at Northwestern University. Scholars and participants bring expertise in a variety of disciplines, including literature, history, politics, psychology, philosophy, film, and religion.

The intensive two-week study course is designed to give these current and future educators a broader view of the Holocaust, and ideas on how to incorporate that view into their teaching.

“This really changed my perspective. It enhanced my ability to teach the class,” said Gershman, who has taught the history of the Holocaust (HIST3140) at Nova Southeastern University during the past five years and has taken students to Europe to study genocide.

“We all approach [teaching the Holocaust] from slightly different angles. I tend to focus more on being a cultural and social historian. You have to pull in psychology, literature, philosophy, film, together with the history. Psychology, especially, becomes an important role in trying to comprehend the Holocaust specifically, and genocide generally. “I already use a lot of these materials. This told me my gut was correct. I knew I was on the right track. But this gave me more nuances in my teaching. Before I was very traditional about the way I taught the class.” For instance, Gershman was inspired by scholar Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern, Ph.D., a professor at Northwestern University and an expert in Jewish history and pre-modern and modern Eastern Europe.

After studying with Petrovsky-Shtern, “I spent a lot more time in my class talking about the complexities of Jewish history and life in Eastern and Central Europe,” Gershman said.

After listening to Sara Horowitz, Ph.D., professor of comparative literature and director of the Centre for Jewish Studies at York University in Toronto, Gershman is reconsidering using fiction in his Holocaust course. “I had read a lot of these books before and I struggled with how to use them,” Gershman said. “Using fiction in a Holocaust class is controversial to begin with. As a literature professor, Sara Horowitz explained how to use literature and fiction in a Holocaust class as effectively as I do in other classes. She broke it down.”

In 2006, Gershman took a travel-study class to Europe where they visited Auschwitz-Birkenau and traveled to Serbia and Kosovo to discuss the genocide in Bosnia and how such an event might have occurred in Kosovo. He hopes to make a similar trip in the spring of 2010.

Another scholar, James Waller, Ph.D., psychology professor at Whitworth College and the author of Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Can Commit Genocide and Mass Killing, stressed the importance of teaching the Holocaust within the context of other genocides of the past century.

“We can talk about Poland in 1941. And then I’ll ask a student, ‘What can you do about Darfur?’” Gershman said. “The response is, ‘What am I supposed to do?’ I’ll say, ‘What should the Poles or other nations have done?’ And the student will say, ‘That’s different.’ This brings a certain realism to the class that the Holocaust is not just a piece of history.”

During his stay at Northwestern University, Gershman got the chance to live “like a student again.” He went to classes all day. He lived in a dormitory. He had to do his homework.

“It was nice to be a student again and be able to exchange ideas and materials and explore subjects like literature and psychology. I don’t get to spend much time there,” he said. “It reacquainted me with a lot of things that students do. I blended right back into that life again. And I think it made me a better teacher.”