Martin Liepach, Dirk Sadowski (eds): Jüdische Geschichte im Schulbuch
Göttingen: V&R unipress, 2014, 145 p. ISBN 978-3-8471-0371-4
How do recent German lower-secondary school textbooks depict Jewish history and culture? Focusing both on historical contextualisations and interpretations of content and on issues around its teaching in the classroom, the authors of this volume explore representations of Jewish history in textbook units spanning the period from antiquity to the National Socialist era, in books from a number of German federal states. One of the volume’s key findings is that, despite a number of calls for a change of perspective that would take into account the diverse facets of Jewish history across the centuries, textbooks continue to narrate Jewish history largely as a history revolving exclusively around victimhood and persecution.
