October 14, 2022

Hello AACP Blog readers.

Happy autumn!

For those of you that only read our newsletter from this website, sorry for not linking to the September newsletter sooner. I can’t believe we’ve almost finished two weeks in October. Anyway, you can now get to the September newsletter from this blog page.

We have two interesting articles and also a reader submitted book review. Our first article was submitted by author Frances Kakugawa called Cow 1 is Not Cow 2. It’s about a lesson she learned on not prejudging.

Our second article Wait Wait, Don’t Look Away is about why you should watch the new Ken Burns documentary, The U.S. and the Holocaust, and how it has connections and important messages for AAPIs.

The things that I didn’t get into this article are some interesting surveys about American’s knowledge and lack of knowledge about the Holocaust. Here are two of the articles that I looked at – one by the Pew Research Center (What Americans Know About the Holocaust) and the other by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germans (the Claims Conference’s article: First-Ever 50- State Survey On Holocaust Knowledge of American Millennials and Gen Z Reveals Shocking Results).

I think you can look at the results as the “glass half empty or half full.” On the one hand, it’s scary to see that there’s a sizable percentage that are pretty ignorant, but it’s also kind of nice to know that there’s a sizable amount of people that are pretty well informed.

The Claims Conference’s website further states that 80% of the respondents to their survey believe that it is important to teach about the Holocaust to keep it from happening again. So this is comforting to know that a sizable majority of Americans see the value in learning about the Holocaust.

What the Ken Burns documentary reminds us though is that Hitler came to power with less than a majority of German voter support. All Hitler needed was the silence, indifference, and inaction of the majority in order to take power.

For free educational resources on the Holocaust, check out the Untied States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s website.

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Remember, even though we may be living in a relative low period of the pandemic, there’s still an average of over 300 people dying each day.

Take care.

Bye.

Leonard Chan