EAST BRUNSWICK — When it comes to studying the Holocaust, East Brunswick High School teacher Robert Gangi said the more you learn, the more you find there is to learn.
This summer Gangi, 39, will have the opportunity to learn even more about the Holocaust as he was recently named anAl- fred Lerner fellow by the Jewish Foundation for the Righteous. The Freehold resident will join 35 other educators from the United States, Poland and Croatia for a five-day program at Columbia University, where he will study the history of the Holocaust with some of the top scholars in the field and explore new ways to teach the subject to students.
“I feel very honored,” Gangi said. “This is a very prestigious award.”
Gangi said he developed an interest in the Holocaust as an undergraduate, taking many classes in European History. Soon Gangi said he started to ponder one central question that gravitated him toward the study of the Holocaust:
“Who were the people that would have done something like this?”
From this central question stemmed even more: How could a civilized world tolerate something like this? What was it like to experience the Holocaust?
“There’s so many different facets, so many different ways of thinking, so many different avenues of study in this that it is endlessly fascinating,” he said.
Gangi’s interest with the Holocaust has led to prestigious scholarship opportunities all around the world. He attended the Museum Teacher Fellows Program at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington,
D.C. and has participated in other Holocaust programs in Israel and Poland. He has also studied in Turkey in 2004 as part of a Fulbright scholarship for teachers.
But Gangi said these opportunities are not only personally meaningful. He said they help him as a teacher as well.
“I take [what I learn] directly into the classroom and I think it makes me a better teacher and creates a better class for my students,” Gangi said.
Gangi teaches a popular elective class entitled “Genocide and the Modern World” at East Brunswick High School. The class delves into some of examples of genocide in the 20th and 21st centuries including the Armenian Genocide, Darfur, Rwanda and the Holocaust. The class shows that genocide, unfortunately, is not a historic phenomenon or something of the ancient past, he said.
“This is something that is still in our world today,” he said. “You see this over and over again.”
Though the class is only a quarter long, by focusing on one topic, Gangi said, his students can examine these examples of genocide in a much more thorough manner than in a traditional history course.
Gangi said he relies heavily on primary documents and first-hand accounts to give students the personal experience that he says is so necessary to truly understand the Holocaust.
“I tell my students, I can tell you my experiences but you will never really understand it understand until you hear it directly from those that experienced it,” he said.
To do this, Gangi has students write analytical papers on a memoir by a Holocaust victim, where students think critically about themes and historical context and identify passages they feel are important and poignant.
He has also brought Holocaust survivors to the high school so students can ask questions and hear first-hand from the people who experienced it. Gangi plans to work with the Daniel Pearl Learning Center in the future to bring second-generation Holocaust family members into the school to share their experiences as well.
All this, he said, helps to evoke powerful emotional responses from students and keep the humanity of the Holocaust in perspective.
“The kids see that it is not just abstract numbers and history and statistics, these were real people who are very much like themselves,” He said.
Gangi thinks that school systems do a fairly good job of teaching the Holocaust to students, noting that the state has built Holocaust education into its mandatory history curriculum. But while some have argued that students are getting enough Holocaust education, Gangi believes this is a misconception.
“This is something that should not cede from history,” he said. “It’s something that is so staggeringly mind-boggling that something like this could happen in the modern world and preserving the history of that is an important task that teachers need to be teaching and students need to be learning about.”