As 1st period was winding down this morning, a student asked, “Is it true that Hitler was half Jewish?” I must admit this question caught me off guard since we were not discussing either WWII or Judaism. I asked the student where he was getting his information so I could research the source. It was his language arts teacher.
I continued to research the topic, but I couldn’t find anything that confirms Hitler was half Jewish.
I approached the teacher. I asked her what they were covering that has to do with WWII. She said they were reading about Anne Frank. She asked what questions they were asking. “They asked if it was true that Hitler was half Jewish,” I told her. She was pleased they were asking “intelligent questions.” She defended her position and explained that Hitler’s mother’s mother was Jewish, thus Hitler was one-quarter Jewish. I asked her what the other half was. “German,” she says. I tried to explain that if your mother was Jewish, you are Jewish. She said she meant it as a nationality as opposed to a religion. A fellow teacher heard this and he chimed in, “You can’t be born in ‘Jewland.’” You can’t equate being Jewish to being German. If you are going to tell your students historical “facts” give them the entire story! Do a little research.
You stupid, stupid woman! Your degree is in theater arts, not history. I’ll make a deal with you: You don’t tell my students stuff that makes you look stupid and I won’t tell your students what a moron you are. You shouldn’t even be discussing Anne Frank; that is 8th grade.
Please, correct me if I am wrong. I was unable to find in any of my research that Hitler’s mother’s mother was Jewish. Everything indicated, at best, Hitler might have had a Jewish paternal grandfather, but that has been dismissed as rumor.
Well, according to my Nazi Germany Prof. David Spires, the Jewish paternal grandfather “rumor” is plausible with no certain evidence either way, although it seems more likely than not that he was just German.
You can argue about the semantics of Germanness or Jewishness all you want, but it doesn’t matter. What is relevant is the fact that the Nazi’s did define “Jewishness” as genetically inherited without regard for how Jews define their own maternal succession, and if his grandfather was Jewish, Hitler would have indeed been classified as a partial-Jew under the Nuremburg Laws. He indeed was worried enough about the rumour to decide to basically torch his birth-place, although it’s not at all clear that he did it to avoid his Jewish past more than any other reason. He took leveling cities with brutality and no real purpose rather lightly.
And also, at any rate, the other Whatever-Eights wasn’t German, it was Austrian.
As to the OP as a whole; what’s wrong with teaching about literature in context? No, it’s not a history course, but a bit of history can be important for the reading. All in all, I say weak rant. God forbids some kid is struck with intellectual curiosity and dares ask a teacher about it, huh?
Just out of curriosity, does the General Questions forum piss you off in the same way as what this kid asked?
What bothers me most about this is that construction is exactly what the nazis and other racists have used to hound the Jews for centuries, perhaps millenia.
The idea that if you’re of the Jewish religion you can’t be a ‘true’ citizen of a country is laughable at best, racist at worst.
That dumb bitch of a teacher wouldn’t have suggested “He was half german, and half protestant.”
Oh yes, and one more thing. Nazi’s weren’t the only ones to consider Jewishness more than merely a religion. Look at individuals that self-identify as a “Secular Jew.”
And Jewland? Would that be Israel? Considering that being Jewish is a chance to gain citizenship without a naturalization period, isn’t this an example of even normal people considering Jewishness to be not only religious but also ethnic?
Yes, but even though I self identify as a secular Jew (or a Thelemite, or a Gnostic Agnostic, etc…) I’m still 100% American. A culture is not a nationality.
For some it is a question of bloodlines. The orthodox trace descent through the maternal line, and have even argued that a catholic priest who was born a Jew should be admitted under the Law of Return.
But, still, not all Jews are citizens of Israel, and not all citizens of Israel are Jews. There’s still a difference between nationality and cultural identity.
I have no problem teaching literature in context. That is one of the reasons 8th graders cover WWII during social studies and read Anne Frank’s diary in language arts. She shouldn’t even be teaching them about Anne Frank since that is part of the 8th grade curriculum.
Okay… I don’t mean any offense to anybody, but I’m getting a very bad vibe from this talk about “Jewish girls”. As if every Jew who is also a girl has something in common on a fundemental level or an aesthetic level.
Racism, in my mind, is the attempt to make groups fungible.
It’s no more accurate to talk about “Jewish girls” as if they were a real group rather than a linguistic fiction than it is to talk about “black girls” as if they were somehow all alike because of their skin tone.
I’m just curious how considering Israel as “Jewland” would make Hitler’s maternal grandmother from there. Wasn’t the creation of the state of Israel as a “separate Jewish nation” more a result of the Holocaust rather than existing prior to it?
There have always been Jews in what is now known as the State of Israel. The First Aliyah, or immigration, of European Jews to Palestine took place from 1882-1903 and the Second Aliyah was from 1904-1914, though, so there has been European aliyah since before Hitler ever came to power.
However, without the Holocaust, it’s doubtful that the State of Israel would have come into being, at least in the manner in which it did.
As a technical quibble, Hitler was Austrian not German.
There’s been a long standing open question on one of Hitler’s grandparents. The identities of his paternal grandparents and his maternal grandmother are pretty well established. But his maternal grandfather (his mother’s father) is more ambiguous. As I recall the situation, his grandmother became pregnant while single. She subsequently married a man who later died. After his death, the man was retroactively acknowleged as the father of the child. It was certainly possible that he was the actual father of the child. Another possibility is that a relative of the deceased man was the actual father (I won’t get into the complications of this). But at the time the woman became pregnant she was working as a servant for a Jewish family and some people raised the possibility that the father might be her employer or his son. If this was true, then the child was half Jewish and her child, Adolf Hitler, would have been one quarter Jewish.
But there are many varying and competing models of Jewish identity, among them the concept that if your mother is Jewish, you’re a Jew. Some conservative Jews don’t consider reform Jews to be Jewish. Etc…
Again, would we speak of someone being “one quarter protestant by birth?”
Um, well, they are Jewish. If you accept it as an ethnicity then it holds true, moreso than “black” girls or “Asian” girls. You seem to be taking offence at someone saying the equivalent of “Chinese girls are cute”.
Second, saying a girl is “Jewish” tells you no more about her than “she likes the works of Milton.” It’s simply one factor out of many that may, or may not, go into the creation of personal identity.
Disclaimer: The following is used for illustrative purposes only.
[ul]
[li]Chinese girls are cute[/li][li]Irish men drink too much[/li][li]Jewish people are good at accounting[/li][li]Black chicks are great in bed[/li][li]Americans are rude[/li][li]Christians are intollerant[/li][li]Mexicans are hard working[/li][/ul]
The difference is not in whether or not you use fallaciously fungible concepts to make a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ generalization, it’s in the very act of attempting to make a ‘group’ fungible.
It is in the act of blanking out individuality and individual essence in order to put emotional and cognitive energy into a linguistic fiction.
There is no such thing as a group, never has been, never will be. To speak of groups as if they’re real, and to treat individuals a certain way because of the ‘group’ to which they belong is simply wrong.
First off, I see from reading the linked article in the OP that I had the ancestry issues wrong. I shouldn’t have tried to write from memory without looking up the facts.
Any ethnic issue is subject to debate. Technically we’re human by birth and everything else is a social construct. But the idea that a person can be ethnically Jewish is a common belief among both Jews and non-Jews.
By the way, saying that “Jewish chicks are cute” implies that they somehow have a unifying physicality which makes them attractive. This is far too close to “she looks Jewish” for my tastes.
