Boston University Launches New Minor in Holocaust and Genocide Studies

Scene from death marches during the Armenian Genocide

BOSTON, Massachusetts (Boston University)””In launching a new minor in Holocaust and genocide studies at the College of Arts & Sciences, faculty hope that BU students won’t just learn history, but learn from history. Students will study how the 20th century’s most horrific state-sponsored mass murders, from the Nazi Holocaust to Pol Pot’s wholesale slaughter in Cambodia to Rwanda’s deadly rampage against its Tutsis, evolved. As well, the new minor will offer historical context and teach humane vigilance, says Nancy Harrowitz, a CAS associate professor of Italian, who is teaching the minor’s required course, History of the Holocaust. The minor is being offered through the Elie Wiesel Center for Jewish Studies.

Instead of viewing these atrocities as distant in time and place, an emphasis is being placed on studying them as a mirror to present-day conflicts and simmering hatreds. The multimedia coursework also answers the more urgent question, could it happen again? The answer is yes””in fact, as the coursework illuminates, attempts at genocide could likely rise from many simmering ethnic, religious, and political conflicts in the world today.

Through study of world genocide in the 20th and current centuries, “we are protecting memory,”