Teaching Channel Talks Episode 107: Ending Antisemitism through Education and Empowerment (w/Dr. Luke Berryman, The Ninth Candle)

Dr. Wendy Amato: Welcome to Teaching Channel Talks. I’m your host, Wendy Amato, and as often as I can, I jump into conversations about topics that matter in education. In this episode, I welcome Luke Berryman, founder of the Ninth Candle. Luke, welcome.

Dr. Luke Berryman: Thank you for having me.

Dr. Wendy Amato: Can you tell us a little bit about how and why you founded the Ninth Candle?

Dr. Luke Berryman: So, I founded the Ninth Candle in 2020, and it had been a long term aspiration for me. I did a PhD on the history of Nazi Germany, so I’d done some academic work on the subject. After that, I went into education and worked in a variety of settings for Many years teaching in some universities and schools, both in the US and the UK, and also working for an education company that ran study abroad programs for high school students all around the world.

And for a long time, I aspired to be a teacher. Bring these two streams together, the research that I’ve done on the one hand and the experience that I’ve had in education on the other into a new organization that would help schools to improve Holocaust education. And that’s where the ninth candle came from.

Dr. Wendy Amato: Dr. Berryman, I don’t think anybody accidentally earns a PhD on Nazi Germany. Can you explain how you ended up with that as an area of focus for your research?

Dr. Luke Berryman: I came to that through classical music. So I had studied classical music as an undergraduate and then as a master’s level student.

And as my studies went on, I became increasingly interested in the, German opera composer, Richard Wagner who died in the 19th century, but later became a great favorite of Adolf Hitler. And I just became more and more interested in this historical conundrum and all of the questions that surrounded the Hitler Wagner relationship.

For example, should we discount Wagner because he was a favorite of Hitler’s? Was the fact that he was a favorite of Hitler’s just an accident, or was there some reason that the dictator was drawn to this music in particular? And the more I thought about those questions, the more I got dragged into them, and I ended up doing a PhD that looked at how they had used his music in their propaganda machine.

So it involved doing a lot of research into, you know, Nazi propaganda, the mechanics of how it worked, how they’d exploited the mass media of their day, and that eventually bled into all sorts of other topics too.

Dr. Wendy Amato: So you’ve moved from studying classical music and its role in Nazi propaganda into helping to end antisemitism by sharing knowledge.

Tell me more about the Ninth Candle.

Dr. Luke Berryman: Yeah, so well, that motto, I should say the first reason that we say to end anti semitism is because if you look in our field, right, if you look around our space, other organizations doing things that are similar to us, you will often find that they talk about fighting anti semitism, combating it or tackling it, right?

Lots of aggressive language. And I understand why people speak that way, right? It’s an inflammatory topic. But I feel that it doesn’t help because what it ends up doing is painting antisemitism as a worthy adversary, right? As an adversary who needs to be engaged in battle. And what I wanted when I started this organization was a new approach, one that would frame antisemitism instead as this ridiculous ideology that is self contradictory, that is not worth anybody’s time, and that must simply be ended, right?

So we’re not seeking to fight it, we’re going one step beyond that, we just want to end it. And then the second half of the motto, by sharing knowledge like I just mentioned, I think antisemitism is a position that contradicts itself, right? Because in the antisemitic imagination. Jews are both poor and rich.

They are both in charge of the world and tearing it apart, right? So none of these positions actually mesh together. And the way to expose the facts that it’s full of these internal contradictions is to study it, to learn about it, to learn about The historical context from which it emerged and that’s all about sharing knowledge, right?

It’s about gaining knowledge and disseminating it. And so that’s where our motto comes from. And I think that motto encapsulates our inquiry based learning approach.

Dr. Wendy Amato: I’m grateful for your attentiveness to the semantics because your explanation really makes sense. Ending antisemitism starts to have a logic that combating and fighting is, it’s not the right word choice for the behaviors that you’re seeking.

And so as you work to improve Holocaust education in the United States, what kinds of tools and resources are you getting out into people’s hands?

Dr. Luke Berryman: Yeah, so that’s also a great question. And so for us, all of our programs will involve getting the students to engage with historical documents

so we will look at documents going from the late 19th century, which is where antisemitism begins, all through the early 20th when eugenics and racial science in quote marks are beginning to gain more traction in intellectual circles and then all the way through The Weimar era in Germany and then the Third Reich era.

So those documents will be anything from newspapers to movies to propaganda posters to diaries, letters, memoirs. Then we want students to first of all understand how one finds these things. where one goes to find them how one tells if they are coming from a reliable source or an unreliable source.

Then we want them to learn how to analyze them. So, you know, how they can understand what these documents tell us about the time and place in which they were created. And then we want them to learn how to take that analysis and turn it into some kind of meaningful narrative that will help them to explain and to understand how and why the holocaust happened in the time and the place that it did.

And I feel that all of that is quite a marked shift from what happens in holocaust education generally. I think that holocaust education as it is right now for the large part, it’s very much focused on storytelling, right? Whether we reading fiction like The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, or watching fiction like Schindler’s List, or whether we’re hearing.

stories from Holocaust survivors. There’s this great emphasis on the story as the kind of currency of learning. And that certainly has its place. It can elicit a very strong emotional response from the students, but just because they’ve become upset, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they’ve understood anything about how and why this happened.

And That’s what the Ninth Candle is trying to balance out. We are not looking to elicit an emotional response from them. Sometimes it happens, of course, but it’s not our primary goal. Our primary goal is to give them the tools that they need to think critically about this era and to understand how and why it unfolded in the way that it did.

Dr. Wendy Amato: So the difference is this, we shift away from storytelling and getting the emotional response or tears the investment, that personal maybe attachment to a character, and you have the greater goal then of helping people to achieve a deeper understanding and to move into critical thinking.

Dr. Luke Berryman: Yeah, exactly. And to be clear, you know, we’re not advocating for, The abandonment of storytelling as a teaching tool, right? It’s important. It serves an important function. It will always have a place in the classroom. What we’re saying is that it is not as effective as it can be if it’s not framed in some kind of historical context, right?

If the students don’t have the tools to make sense of the story, then it is not going to have a deep and lasting impact on them. And so rather than being a replacement for those kind of storytelling techniques, my hope is that the Ninth Candle’s approach will be something that can support it, right?

Something that can run in parallel with it and, Yeah, bring out some kind of greater goal.

Dr. Wendy Amato: I’m thinking about many of the teachers who want to educate students about the Holocaust, but who lack confidence in designing something that would provide context around the storytelling approach. Can you offer some guidance, perhaps, to these educators who may be visiting the website of the Ninth Candle?

How would you like for them to navigate what you have there?

Dr. Luke Berryman: I think that one of the things that will strike a teacher visiting it for the first time is that there are no lesson plans that you can download, there are no kind of curriculum maps there that you can take away from the site.

Instead, what the site tries to do is. outline the approach that I’ve described share some of the media work that the Ninth Candle’s done so they can see newspaper articles that we’ve written, for example, which will give them a greater idea of who we are and what we’re trying to achieve. Then if they go to our programs page, they’ll learn a bit more about our educational programs for students.

So we’re going to talk a little bit about how we use our professional development programs for teachers and how those two sets of programs work and most importantly, they will also see a form that they can use to contact us. One of the things that. makes us unique is that every single program we do is tailor made to the school that we are working with.

So again, one of the driving forces in founding the Ninth Candle for me was this feeling that the era of one size fits all Holocaust education is over, right? The landscape of Holocaust education in the United States is so very uneven. You know, if you’re a teacher in a school that has a big Jewish community, and maybe you have a Holocaust museum in your city, and maybe there is a state mandate requiring you to teach this subject, and therefore there’s a lot of internal support from your principal and all of your administrators.

What works in a school like that will not work in a rural public school in a state that has no Jewish communities to speak of, that has no Holocaust museum, and where maybe the principal is wary of introducing Holocaust education, right? So we can’t just hand out the same lesson plans to those two teachers.

Instead, what we need to do is work with them to build something collaboratively that’s going to help them achieve their specific, unique goals.

Dr. Wendy Amato: Customizing programs and taking into consideration the local context, the community, the school leadership, the access to resources, that all makes sense and very much mirrors what we know is important in education where we meet our students where they are

what are some of the variables that you can adjust when you’re customizing a program for an educator?

Dr. Luke Berryman: Yeah, that’s a great question. Like I said, all of these programs are tailored, custom made, so we always start with a blank slate. But that said, some requests come up more often than others. A lot of the times teachers will ask, can we just do an introduction?

I’ve not taught this before. So those kinds of introductory courses we have ready to go. At the other end of the scale where this subject has been taught before there are some subjects that teachers want to lean into more often than others. I think Nazi propaganda is a big one because people are interested in.

social media today and how misinformation spreads. So there’s always a lot of interest in learning more about how misinformation works in the 30s and 40s. In terms of what can be adjusted. Well, timescale is always one big thing. Some teachers will come to us and say, we can lean into this for three or four weeks.

Other teachers will come and say, we’ve got one 90 minute assembly, and that’s it. We’ve got to make it work. And either way, we will work within the parameters that we have. Obviously, the kind of level of the content and the differentiation, some of the materials that I mentioned right at the beginning are easier to interact with than others.

For example, if a teacher wants a, an entry level introductory course, then maybe we have only English language. Resources. If a teacher comes to us and says, look, I really want to push at least some of my students to another level. We can get quite creative with German language sources like newspaper articles or satirical cartoons, showing kids how they can upload those into an AI program like ChatGPT to Get an English translation of it and and then analyze from there.

That kind of thing students always get really excited about first of all, because they’re using AI and second because, you know, they’re doing what real historians do right? They’re taking an archival document. They’re translating it. They’re working on it for themselves. So yeah, that. Content level is another thing.

And then topic. There may be some that come up more often than others, but it doesn’t matter how niche the request is we will always lean into it and find a way of building a program around it to help that teacher with their curriculum.

Dr. Wendy Amato: Do you find that it makes the most sense to have an educational program for students paired with professional development for teachers, or can they stand alone?

Dr. Luke Berryman: They can definitely stand alone because that is generally how we do them. I think if there is a process, it’s normally that the teachers will do a professional development program with us first. And on that program get to know a bit about the Ninth Candle and how we work and kind of see it up close for themselves.

And then they’ll feel a bit more confident about reaching out to us and saying, Let’s get an education program in. I suppose there’s no reason that they couldn’t be done in tandem, but generally speaking, the way it works is that. A teacher will do the PD program first and then work on the educational programs for the students.

Dr. Wendy Amato: Well, we’re looking to you for the optimal recommendations, so I appreciate hearing that. If you’re an educator listening to this conversation, this may be a conversation that you want to share with a school administrator or superintendent and work at the leadership level so that colleagues across your district can have some shared work and really improve the impact on the student group.

You are a book author. Dr. Berryman, tell me about your book.

Dr. Luke Berryman: Yeah, so the book is called Resisting Nazism. It’s going to be published by Roman and Littlefield. And the book came out of the question that is asked the most on the Ninth Candle’s programs, both by students and by teachers, which is, Why didn’t more people resist Nazism?

And the answer to that question is that in fact, there were a fair number of people who resisted Nazism. It’s just for one reason or other. Their stories are not as familiar to us as perhaps they should be today. And as schools asked more and more, well, can you tell us something about Jewish resistance during the Holocaust?

Can you tell us something about German resistance during the Holocaust? And we were putting programs together about these individuals. Who had done something remarkable but whose stories had kind of been swallowed up by history. I realized that, you know, there’s a trend here, there’s a pattern, and this bigger project began to emerge.

And what I hope the book will show, is that Nazism as an idea, as an ideology has faced resistance ever since the moment it was born in the 1920s, right up until the present day. So there are 12 chapters in the book. Each chapter tells a story. a forgotten story about someone who did something to resist Nazism in some way at some moment in time.

And as part of these stories, I interview people. So experts filmmakers, museum directors, academics, eyewitnesses to try and get, you know, more of A real inside look at these things, and the book runs all the way from the satirical cartoons that Hitler’s opponents made of him during the 1920s in Germany, right up to the people who had been in neo Nazi movements in the United States, but who’ve left them, and are now trying to convince other people to leave themselves.

So, it’s quite a broad spread but like I said, the goal is to show the readers, a lot of whom I hope will be students, that this ideology, this toxic ideology, has always faced pushback from people of all faiths and races and nationalities, no matter where it has been. Popped up. It’s always faced that resistance.

Dr. Wendy Amato: Can you tell me if there are any misconceptions or anything that you’d like to debunk about educating people about ending antisemitism?

Dr. Luke Berryman: So number one is that the Jews In Germany didn’t put up any fight, right?

There’s this this kind of cliche that they went to the slaughter like lambs, right? That they just went silently along with the process and Showed no concern for their own mortality and that that’s just completely untrue, right? There’s a lot of reasons that myth Exists and we go into those on our programs very often but it is a myth.

So that’s definitely one thing that we seek to debunk number two the flip side of that coin is a misconception that seems to be gaining traction all the time. Young people in particular are prone to mistakenly believing that the Nazis were some kind of super organized, almost anti heroic organization, right?

That they were these dark supermen, right, for want of another term. And again, What we seek to show in the programs when we get onto this topic is that actually the Nazi party as a political entity was remarkably unstable because of the amount of infighting that went on the amount of backstabbing that went on between different people in this organization and then the other thing that we seek to show is that far from being these kind of supermen that they like to show themselves as in their propaganda. What marked them out was cowardice a willingness to run away from their own actions a willingness to abandon their own beliefs the moment that they were caught and we try and cast a spotlight on all of those things to convince students that the way these guys are shown in pop culture, In movies and so on is more often than not dramatically misleading.

 There’s

Dr. Wendy Amato: a lot we can learn from you, Dr. Berryman and a lot we can learn from the Night Candle. I’m grateful for this conversation and appreciative of what you’re providing in the education community. Thank you.

Dr. Luke Berryman: Yeah, thanks for having me on.

It’s been a great conversation.

Dr. Wendy Amato: To our fellow educators, thank you all for participating with us in this important conversation. If you’d like to explore topics that Dr. Berryman and I discussed today, please check out the show notes at teachingchannel. com slash podcast, and be sure to subscribe on whatever listening app you use.

That will help others to find us. We’ll see you again soon for the next episode. Thanks for listening.