Reflections on the Academy: Tales from an Arab-Jewish Genocide Scholar, 2020–2025

Per TheodorAdorno, "the premier demand upon all education is that Auschwitz not happen again." Transcending disciplines, this missive calls educators to "provide an intellectual, cultural, and social climate in which a recurrence would no longer be possible; a climate, therefore, in which the motives that led to the horror would become relatively conscious." In the United States, a renewed opportunity to examine this premise arose in the summer of 2020, as planning for the academic year coincided with the brutal murder of George Floyd and the COVID-19 pandemic. This convergence laid bare the nation's inequalities of race and class, spurring the most civically engaged, racially charged, and consciously awakened epoch since the 1960's. This milieu provided unique opportunities to deconstruct and reconceive the classroom setting; not as a container for answers, but as a venue to explore harsh global and domestic realities; whereby students could bear the weight of history as a community, rather than through the isolation of a colonial-infused social strata. Then came October 7, 2023. The day of my birth, and the morn of what would become another failure in the illusory quest of "Never Again." As an Arab-Irish Jew and genocide scholar, the irony was cosmic. This essay weaves together personal narrative and pedagogical reflection, exploring the intersections of mixed Jewish identity, gender, and the practice of teaching, in an academy whiplashed from virtue signaling to polarization.