In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

THE NEW JERSEY FAMINE CURRICULUM: A REPORT JAMES V. MULLIN The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it. oscar wilde In 1995, when I first learned that the New Jersey Holocaust Education Commission had been empowered by the legislature to consider course materials on “a wide range of genocides,” I contacted Dr. Paul Winkler, Executive Director of the Commission, and asked him if the Great Irish Famine could be included. He immediately asked me, “Are you claiming genocide?” I said, “I would like the teachers and students to make up their own minds.” He agreed, and encouraged the development of our Irish Famine Curriculum. The 116-page curriculum is available on the Web site of the Nebraska Department of Education. Any teacher or student with a computer and modem can read, print, or download all of it using HTML or PDF formats. The Illinois, Colorado, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Idaho Departments of Education have linked to the curriculum on the Nebraska site, along with the National Archives of the Republic of Ireland and the Gateway to Educational Materials (GEM) at Syracuse University. The curriculum is indexed by the Educational Resources Information Center (ERIC) at Indiana University, which has distributed microfiche copies to one thousand subscribing college and university libraries. The New Jersey curriculum was approved by the state Holocaust Commission on 10 September 1996 and distributed to state schools. The following month, New York Governor George Pataki signed a law mandating instruction on the mass starvation in Ireland. The Sunday Times of London responded on 13 October with a staff editorial entitled “An Irish Hell, but not a Holocaust,” which stated: To compare, as Mr. Pataki has done, Britain’s policy to that of Hitler towards the Jews is as unhistorical as it is offensive. Not the least to the Jews, the tragedy of whose Holocaust is necessarily lessened by compariTHE NEW JERSEY FAMINE CURRICULUM 119 The logo of the New Jersey Famine Curriculum: “Searching for Potatoes in a Stubble Field,” London Illustrated News, 22 December 1849. Courtesy of the “Views of the Famine” Website (http://vassun.vassar.edu/ ~sttaylor/FAMINE), Vassar University. son with an Irish catastrophe that was neither premeditated nor man-made. Yet Governor Pataki had not compared the Great Famine to the Holocaust in either his written or spoken remarks. A week later, British Ambassador John Kerr wrote to Pataki, saying: It seems to me rather insulting to the many millions who suffered and died in concentration camps across Europe to imply that their man-made fate was in any way analogous to the natural disaster in Ireland a century before. The Famine, unlike the Holocaust, was not deliberate, not premeditated , not man-made, not genocide.1 On 10 March 1997 the Washington Times published a full-page Insight magazine editorial deriding Pataki as “the greatest liar in America” and ridiculing the idea of Irish Famine education. “You say Potato, They say Holocaust” was illustrated by a photograph of a potato wrapped in barbed wire. On 26 August, the Boston Globe published “Unnecessary Curriculum Bill,” attacking Massachusetts State Senator Warren Tolman for promoting instruction on the Great Irish Famine, the Armenian Genocide, and the Holocaust: As the Tolman bill is now worded, teachers might be encouraged to treat the Irish famine on the same level of moral depravity as the Armenian genocide and the Holocaust. That would be a misreading of the historical record. While the British approach to the mass starvation was often brutal , arrogant and unfeeling, no state-run death camps disfigured the Irish countryside. The argument that classroom discussion of the mass starvation should be discouraged because British behavior did not match the barbarity of the Nazis during the Holocaust is central to all objections against famine education . Because the Holocaust is the best documented, most systematic, cruel, and ruthless genocide of the twentieth century, it has almost become the very definition of genocide. Opponents of famine education raise the Holocaust with the intention of demonstrating that, if the Great Irish Famine was not comparable (“no state-run death camps”), then the famine was not a matter of genocide. THE NEW JERSEY FAMINE CURRICULUM 121 1 John Kerr, British Ambassador...

pdf

Share