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Proposed minor offers study of tolerance |
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Thursday, 28 February 2008 |
by JEFF KOEHLER
Intern News Reporter
Appalachian State University’s Center for Judaic, Holocaust and Peace Studies is developing its own academic minor.
Co-director of the center and professor of history Dr. Rennie W. Brantz said he hopes the minor will be available to students by the end of fall 2008.
“I think it’s something that students should be offered an opportunity to look at in depth,” Brantz said.
The minor will offer courses in all three of the department’s areas of study, including classes about the
history of the Holocaust, Judaic studies and peace studies.
In the planned minor, students will take basic classes in each of the three areas in which the center
specializes, and then will be able to choose a specific area of study to pursue, Brantz said.
“The center has a broad mission,” Brantz said. “We thought we’d need a minor that reflects this
breadth.”
The center’s mission, he said, includes making issues available that are not readily available for study
elsewhere in the university.
The study of Judaism, one of the three central areas available in the proposed minor, is a topic that is
sometimes overlooked, Brantz said.
“There’s not as much exposure in general history classes to the Jewish experience,” he said.
He gave examples of several modern thinkers, including Karl Marx, Albert Einstein and Sigmund
Freud, who were of Jewish background, and said, “It’s worth looking at where this comes from.”
Studies of the peace process, like intensive study of Judaism, are also often overlooked, said Dr.
Zohara Boyd, who has retired from Appalachian State University but continues to participate in the
center’s activities as another of its co-directors.
“We have war colleges, but no peace college,” Boyd said.
She said a major motivation for teaching peace classes was “the hope, and the possibility that we can
create a better world through peace.”
 A course listing of the proposed minor.
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In addition to teaching students about Judaism and peace studies, a critical portion of the proposed
minor will be the teaching of the history of the Holocaust, Boyd said.
“That thing that was said after the Holocaust, ‘never again,’ rings hollow looking at the headlines,” she said.
Brantz said one of the major purposes of the Holocaust education portion of the minor is to “create a
baseline with which we can identify contemporary tragedies.”
“[It’s] a kind of bellwether… an industrialized, Christian nation went off the tracks, almost exterminating
a whole group of people for racial reasons,” Brantz said.
He said study of the Holocaust could help students better understand what goes wrong in societies and
why people turn to violence.
The minor itself will consist of a diverse array of courses.
According to a proposed course list, students pursuing the minor will be able to take courses in the
departments of philosophy and religion, history, foreign languages and literatures, anthropology,
English, communication, sociology, psychology, political science, and human development and
psychological counseling.
The 55 proposed courses within the minor include such course names as Biblical Hebrew, the Nazi
Holocaust, Global Conflict and Mediation: The U.N., and Race and Minority Relations, to name a few.
Brantz said students currently taking courses on this list could be allowed to earn minor credit after the
minor itself is approved by the university administration.
The main office of the Center for Judaic, Holocaust and Peace Studies is located in room 1011 of Old
Belk Library Classroom Building.
The center may be reached by phone at 262-2311.
For a full listing of proposed courses, interested students can go to theapp.appstate.edu.
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