Jerry Springer . . . Is ENGLISH by birth?! Who Do You Think You Are?

[expatinscotland]

OMG!

I had NO idea.

He was born in London, the son of two German Jewish refugees.

another book recommendation
about surviving Terezin
I knew the lady who wrote this book.She beacme a dance teacher in Northern ireland.

PAL. if you can it would be amazing

It was a great programme, and I would use it in both RE and history without hesitation.

For those who teach, the other great resources for the Shoah are Grandchild of the Holocaust, which I think was a BBC1 programme. It showed a 13 year old boy going back to the Lodz ghetto with his Gran who had married a British serviceman when he helped liberate the camps after WW2. The students start off by laughing at the teenager, but are normally quiet and totally engrossed by about 10 minutes in.

Band of Brothers has a section where the soldiers discover a camp in the forest. It can only be shown to the older kids, but again, has a huge impact on the students.

When I was teaching I made a point of teaching a series of lessons about the Holocaust on National Holocaust day, and using the free resources and display items that you can obtain from them. It HAS to be taught as it has happened again - the footage of those people in Kosovo being loaded into trucks and driven off made me go cold and sick to my stomach, as it was almost a carbon copy of the trains to Poland.

Vulgar you said:
'The thing that worries me most is perhaps it is too easy for people to dehumanise each other. Maybe that's how it happened - people no longer thought of the Jews as human. . . .

I hope I'm wrong. '

I think that's exactly what happened actually. When my mother was 20, she had been on a few 'dates' with this guy. They got along fine but he seemed ot have a slight preoccupation with her head. He must have started to actually feel around because she eventually asked him what was going on. He said he just really wanted to feel the bumps where her ancestors' 'horns' had been. . He had grown up being told that Jews were descended from the devil and that now all Jews had tell-tale bumps....

This would have been about 10 years after the war ended. In America.

I don't recall learning much about the Holocaust at school, I wish we had. We did look at Propaganda from WW2- but I really cannot recall any lessons dedicated to the Holocaust.

I was listening to a radio program yesterday about Jewish people fleeing WW II Germany. Most would apply as domestic staff, but it was UK Home Office policy not to allow domestic servants into the UK who were married.

Bloody hell buttercreamfrosting!

I recently read a book about Judaism (my DIL is Jewish) which says that the world population of Jews has never recovered from WW2 and is in fact still in decline today. Apart from the Ultra/Orthodox Jews, they don't have enough babies to keep the numbers up.

I was also struck by a chapter in which it said the most important things to Jews down the ages have been their families and books. I wonder if this is why many Jews seem to be so successful.

My ds's FIL was only the second Jew ever to join his law firm in the US, when he was starting his career. That was only 40-odd years ago, so not exactly pre-history.

Yes, that seems to be the case, from what dil tells me. Jews/blacks were not allowed to join many of the Country Clubs that arose in LA and, to this day still have no black members.

I also learnt from Ferguson's book about the Miscegenation Laws that America passed. Forty States implemented them and they were still in place as recently as 1970.

Sorry, that should be some clubs to this day...

Oh good grief, I need to give my head a shake and hang my backside out the window...what I meant to say was 'About 12 US states still had miscenagation laws in 1970.'

I think dehumanisation was the key: I can't think that you treat babies in such a way unless you had discounted them as fellow humans.

we coverd the Holocaust n the history module of my Access courzse, although it was briefly touched on in my degree only (the ne German girl left the room which we were all about but fond later our prof had advised her to- counterproductive imo).

The Jewish population ahs been the victim of so many atrocities- thre was a bristish verson many years ago too (will find link), propaganda seems to be the key- people actually believed that Jews ate children. pathetic

'The Jewish population ahs been the victim of so many atrocities- thre was a bristish verson many years ago too (will find link), propaganda seems to be the key- people actually believed that Jews ate children. pathetic '

As an amateur student of medieval European history, European Jews have been the victims of many atrocities for centuries.

During the Crusades, for example, they were subject to wide-scale persecution, during the Inquisition, etc.

It's a lot of the reason why many Jewish populations in Europe were concentrated into distinct geographical areas.

'Toward the close of the Middle Ages many Jews became homeless wanderers. They were expelled from England in 1290, from France in 1306, and from cities in Spain, Germany, and Austria in the following years.'

I knew there was something- a pre-cursor to the Holocaust

During the Inquisitin the Jews committed mass suicide.

It's so awful what can happen when one side takes against another.

Very sad

It's hard to believe that this all happened only 20 or so years before I was born.

During Roman times Jewish mass suicide is also recorded, as an alternative to extermination/genocide .

The British one is in Simon Schama's "A History of Britain". It was in the middle ages at some point (bit vague - sorry!) and they put all the Jewish people onto a boat, sailed them out into the river, forced them out onto a sandbank and left them to drown when the tide came in.

At various times in history the Jews have been expelled from European countries - Spain under Ferdinand and Isabella, and from Britain at one point (possibly under Elizabeth I - think it was Charles II who lifted the ban).

Think there's something similar going on with gypsies today (who Hitler also murdered) - in Italy there's a big programme to fingerprint all gypsies and in (IIRC) the Czech republic there's a big court case about gypsy children being forced to attend special schools (special as in for kids with learning disabilities) .

Also for a long period in Christian history, it was forbidden for Christians to loan money for interest. So they got Jewish people to do it. Then persecuted them.

Oops, see I was way out on the dates for England. Maybe it was Elizabeth who let them back in?

Obscurely comforting to know it was 800 years ago as far as England is concerned though.

i've just watched this on iplayer and cried most of the way through. I can't come to terms with the fact that all this went on 40 years before I was born, instead of , like Jerry said, 800 years ago in barbaric times.