The Holocaust Friedman Summary

One brilliant point that Friedman makes is that the Holocaust is unique as a learning tool in sociology because it is the first state sponsored genocide of a group of people. Without the organization and public power Hitler and the Nazi Party would not have reach the levels of horror and death that they did. For example, Friedman speaks of how it would have been impossible to transport all the Jewish people to the death camps with the bureaucratic consolidation of the German train system. One critique of organizing a class around the causes of prejudice is that it focuses too much on the perpetrators of the Holocaust and not the victims. Friedman addresses this by showing how educations can organize the class around the reactions of minority groups to prejudices. …show more content…
By framing a class in this way students are able to move pass the false presumption that the Jews were passive in the face of certain death and the instructor is able to use that insight to springboard into a discussion about the complex nature of the Holocaust and how it relates to other minority groups that have found themselves in similarly pathways as the Jews of