Reflecting about who we are and how we behave are central to the High Holiday experience. Beginning with Elul and running through Simchat Torah, Jews ask forgiveness for our sins and shortcomings. For sins against people we must ask people for forgiveness (ben adam lechavero), for sins against God we must address God (ben adam lemaqom). In this lesson students will study what it means to make and keep a promise. What do our promises – to ourselves, to each other, to God – mean if we don’t keep them? Do promises mean nothing or do promises mean everything

This Holocaust ELA lesson for 7th or 9th grade students, addresses the following essential questions: What important factors make people leave their homeland? Do people always have a choice or rights to life safely? Does cultural assimilation still exist today in the world? Why or why not? Do we embrace or punish diversity?

Students build a more complex and deeper understanding about the Civil Rights’ Movement as well as the activists and their non-compliance/non-violence approach to halt the laws and people in positions of power that oppose change to the status quo and contrast it to the defiance of laws in Sarajevo during the war in the 1990s.

Students in Chicago, Berlin, and Skopje explored minorities in each of their cultures, and stereotypes about them. Students first tried to predict what life was like for the students in the other countries (US, Berlin, Macedonia) - many of these were based on stereotypes and they discussed that. They created films about their own schools and cities and shared them with one another. Then they each researched how minorities came to their countries, and interviewed people from those minorities in order to break down stereotypes. They reported back to one another.

In this lesson, students will be able to analyze a documentary about two young cousins who survived the Holocaust in order to extend our understanding of what we can learn from individual experiences of significant historical events.

The fourth and final unit I teach each year is entitled “A Nation Divided and Rebuilt.” The content begins with the events leading up to the American Civil War, moves to the actual fighting of the war, and ends with the period of Reconstruction. Specifically, this unit highlights the economic, political and social tension that ensued between the North and South throughout the mid to late 1800s. Though the harsh realities endured during the Bosnian War occurred over one hundred years later, I push my historians to draw connections to the concepts of change and unity beyond difference.