Hello all! Happy early Purim! We hope that you join us
tomorrow night for some CSZ Purim festivities! We have had a fabulous week,
albeit one with some serious discussion. We are in the middle of
discussing anti-Semitism, and its place within the narrative of the Exodus
story. Your child should be GOOD TO GO for retelling the Passover story
this holiday! We read the beginning of the text and discussed how the new
Pharaoh was concerned with how MANY Jews there were and how he did not know
Joseph. This mean that he did not know how the Jewish people had helped Egypt;
he had no context for them other than what was in front of him. What was
in front of him?! A whole bunch of Jews. And he was worried. In
fact, he was a bit paranoid. Pharaoh thought that the Jews were going to
join up with another army and try and defeat him. Pharaoh did not like
the Jews simply because he was scared of them. It began with FEAR.
After we looked at the text, we moved on to look at various
pictures from advertisements and cartoons that depict Jewish figures in
antiemetic ways. These images span from the 1930s to political cartoons from
publications that are only weeks old. We studied the various similarities
in how the Jews are portrayed: big noses, hunched over, animalistic, vampires,
hairy, homeless looking, beast like, greedy looking, beady eyed, blood sucking,
controlling, crazy, big eared, ugly, insane. We talked about WHY would
Jewish people be portrayed in such ways?! We will continue discussing this and
talk about why these images KEEP popping up in modern day publications.
We are also going to talk about HOW we can combat these stereotypes.
We have a FANTASTIC adult learning piece that ties
into this, which is scheduled for Thursday, April 27th at 7pm called
Turning Words into Action which will be led by the Education Department from the Michigan Anti Defamation League. I highly recommend attending!
Have a wonderful holiday and can’t wait to see you IN
COSTUME!
No comments:
Post a Comment