​

I am not a big fan of the “Let us introduce the speaker” style of introductions. You tend to get a list of degrees and accomplishments, but apart from identifying areas of interest (the Holocaust, World War Two, Foreign Languages), you don’t learn much of anything about the person behind the list. So, I am going to write a different style of introduction, leaving you to decide whether to read this or the more traditional “About.” First, I am English and American; born in London, raised in the ‘burbs, and emigrating to New York after university. I have been teaching most of my adult life, first at university, then in high school, and finally in middle school. I never planned to be a teacher, teaching chose me, but I loved it from the first moment and still do.

 

 For the past ten plus years, I have been studying and teaching about the Holocaust and volunteering at the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center, where I trained to facilitate in the holographic theater. My experience with the holograms has changed me in profound ways and is central to my growth as an individual and a teacher. Ultimately, it led me to move from teaching in a traditional setting and moving towards teaching to a wider audience,  all of which begs the questions, “Why this subject and why now?”

 

Growing up in England, no one is very far from the Second World War. It shaped the country and the conversation in myriad ways. Across the channel in Europe, countries were also deeply impacted and shaped by the Second World War. When you consider what is happening now in Ukraine and how Russia sees itself and the West, you cannot avoid seeing how WWII shaped contemporary life. Similarly, the experiences of the 1930s and 1940s inform much of the Asian experience and people’s attitudes to contemporary events in Japan, in China, in Taiwan and elsewhere. 

​

  I am not fascinated by the Nazis nor obsessively focused on the Holocaust; rather I am preoccupied by the present and by the urgent need to learn from the past. The unchecked spread of prejudice, stereotyping, and propaganda can, will, and have done incalculable harm if left unchallenged. I write and teach about the Holocaust because it provides a horrifying example of what people can do at their worst and a warning of what we at our best must do to prevent the triumph of paranoia, greed, and frankly, evil.