By Andrew Adler
Community Editor
Art is a powerful tool that can be used when exploring difficult subject matter in the classroom, representing the human condition and the world in ways that are nuanced and deeply impactful. As a universal language, art can express stories of joy, sadness, courage and fear, helping students understand the human experience in profound ways.
So goes the introduction to the A Time Remembered study guide, which employs the Louisville Ballet’s January 2025 production of “A Time Remembered” as a jumping-off point for educating middle and high school students about the Holocaust. That production, which marked the 80th anniversary of Auschwitz’s liberation, featured a performance of choreographer Stephen Mills’ “Light/The Holocaust & Humanity Project.” Call it an evocation of ultimate tenacity in the face of ultimate horror.
Mills’ work was inspired by the astonishing narrative of Holocaust survivor Naomi Warren (1920-2016), who endured three years at Auschwitz before eventually being liberated from Bergen-Belsen. The digital study guide, comprising 76 slides and associated links, incorporates numerous additional survivor testimonies alongside three extended excerpts from “Light.” Prodigiously interactive, the guide is intended to provide teachers with an alternative, centralized approach to make Holocaust education come alive in the classroom.
The study guide, which meets National Core Standards and Kentucky’s own mandates for Holocaust education in public schools, was developed in collaboration with the University of Kentucky-Jewish Heritage Fund Holocaust Education Initiative. Teachers have already employed the guide in classroom trials, with widespread adoption expected by this coming February.
The guide’s origin was part inspiration, part necessity. Typically, the Louisville Ballet buses in students to attend a matinee performance of a given work. But “Light,” which runs for almost two hours and incorporates images of nudity, was deemed potentially problematic.
“So we brainstormed a bit about what we could do,” recalled Stacey Blakeman, the company’s Director of Community Engagement, “and my best suggestion was that we film the performance, use excerpts from it, and then create a study guide that would be a living document that educators can use as an ongoing tool in their classrooms.
“There’s no shortage of content out there on the Holocaust – almost too much,” said JHF Program Director Jaime Jorrisch. “And that was one of the challenges the teachers run into: They’re inundated with all these resources, and they don’t know how filter down to what will be most useful to them.”
The JHF-UK collaboration “is one of the biggest investments that we’ve made for the past four years out of our Jewish life portfolio,” Jorrisch said. “A big piece of our mission when it comes to Jewish life is ensuring that people who identify as Jewish feel safe and accepted.”
From the genesis of planning the study guide, a vital partnership was envisioned.
“We reached out to the UK-JHF Holocaust Education Initiative because I’m not a Holocaust expert,” Blakeman said. Her thinking was: “I will help lead this project, but I need help. I know dance and I know what dance can do, but I am not a classroom teacher, nor have I ever taught students about the Holocaust through dance.”
Blakeman brought in Lauren Hill, a recently retired veteran public school teacher who is one of the leaders of the UK-JHF initiative. “She brought in three teachers from across the state, and we had two rabbis and educator from Louisville.
“We began meeting last November and just started brainstorming about how one could design a guide that really could set students up for success,” Blakeman explained. The goal was to produce “an easy tool that educators would want to use in their classrooms, making it as user-friendly as possible. There’s so much information that already exists, so how could we link to those resources that have already been created?”
Hill, a native of northern California who spent almost 30 years teaching in Frankfort and Lexington public schools, was already working with teachers statewide on implementing Kentucky’s Holocaust education mandates – which have been in place since 2018.
Crafting a study guide with input from her UK colleagues “became sort of a subproject,” Hill said, “something we felt passionately about. We had three teacher leaders who worked on helping create the study guide: one who taught social studies, one librarian, and one English language-arts teacher – two taught middle school, and one, high school. They all worked with Stacey for a year to make that guide happen.”
With more than 600,000 students spread among 171 school districts – plus an array of private and parochial schools – Kentucky’s student population is hugely diverse both in demographics and experiences. Recognizing this reality, the study guide makes no assumptions about what students may know (or may not know) about the subjects it covers.
Under the heading of “Guiding Questions,” the guide sets out a sequence of “What Is” outlines: “What Is Judaism?” “What Is Anti-Semitism?” “What was the Holocaust?” “Who is Naomi Warren?” “What is ballet?” “What is ‘Light/the Holocaust & Humanity Project’?” and lastly, “Who is Stephen Mills?”
Then comes Lesson One: “Exploring ‘Written in Pencil in the Sealed Freight Car’ by Dan Pagis.”
It is the shortest of poems:
here in this carload
i am eve
with abel my son
if you see my other son
cain son of man
tell him that i
A “Read and Reflect” section directs students to read the poem aloud with a partner, ask questions, and consider “familiar themes, words, connections, and grammatical choices.” Next, “Discussion Questions” probe deeper – exploring structure, syntax, and perhaps most tellingly, inquires “What emotions does the poem evoke? “What specific words or phrases created that impact?” A subsequent treatment of “The story of Cain and Abel” observes that, in the Torah, we feel the rage of God finding Abel. In the poem we feel the loss of Eve. Why would the author change that perspective?”
Soon afterward, the study guide presents the first of its excerpts from “Light/The Holocaust & Humanity Project” – appropriately, a two-minute segment depicting Adam & Eve, preceded by a projection of Pagis’s tersely evocative verse.
“The neat thing about this is that it includes reading, writing, social studies, visual and performing arts,” said Leslie Smart, Louisville Ballet’s executive director. “Meeting Kentucky academic content standards was a big piece of this. The other piece that I’m hopeful will come to fruition is a documentary we’ve created. Our goal is to have this aired not only on KET, but also on PBS” – though its ultimate disposition will depend on whether the Ballet can secure necessary music rights, which is proving to be a thorny challenge.
“We want to inspire other cities and states across the United States to take this on,” Smart said.
Initially, “we set (the study guide) up as a free resource for middle and high school students across the state of Kentucky,” Blakeman said. “But then we thought, why stop there? You don’t have to live in the state of Kentucky. Let’s put this on our website and make it available to anyone who can go there.”
Meanwhile, as organizers prepare for the study guide’s official launch, there is another reality that must be confronted: the two-year war in Gaza, and its immediate aftermath. Some students may compare the Holocaust to what they regard as the unwarranted deaths of Palestinian civilians, raising all sorts of questions around the issues of antisemitism, moral responsibility, and the relationship of Israel to the rest of the world.
There is also the challenge of working with students who may be recent immigrants to the U.S, whose English language skills are still developing. Hill recalled arriving at an urban middle school in Lexington, discovering unexpected layers of confusion while teaching her students about the Holocaust.
“I’m standing in front of my class, and I’ve got kids who ran from gang violence in Honduras, and I have Spanish-speaking individuals who can’t understand me,” she said. “I say that the Holocaust was prompted by state-sponsored violence toward a specific group – and one girl said, ‘Did Kentucky help sponsor the Holocaust?’”
Hill soon realized that it was impossible to ignore current events, fraught as they may be. “You can’t talk about the Holocaust without confronting contemporary reality,” she said.
“Ten of us went to Brandeis (University) over the summer (to attend) an institute for middle and high school teachers,” Hill recalled, “to understand enough about the history of Israel, the history of Palestinians, have a history of the land in Gaza and the West Bank – to be able to at least articulate something to our young people. But it’s still very, very difficult.”
Ultimately, the study guide’s success may depend on whether both teachers and students believe that the Holocaust is more than simply a circumstance of history.
“We’re not only helping our teachers feel comfortable talking about living, breathing Jewish culture and the Holocaust,” Hill said, “but also effective pedagogy” that acknowledges a paradigm shift in how to best connect with students.
“If you’re going to teach like it’s 1985, it doesn’t matter what we do for you,” Hill emphasized. “If it’s just like what a noun and a verb is, they’ve heard it a million times, and it’s going in one ear and out the other because nobody cares.”
Instead, the imperative is “how can we shift the weight you are teaching,” she said, “not just about the Holocaust, but about all the things to make you a more effective educator.”
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You can access the A Time Remembered study guide online at tinyurl.com/2uxv4u6v.