Antisemitism in high schools over the last decade has been on the rise, and literature has increasingly stepped in to confront the moral failures and blind spots of educational institutions. In 2017, a history teacher in upstate New York drew national attention when he assigned a project where students had to argue for or against the Final Solution from the perspective of a Nazi official. Students were encouraged to “think like a Nazi” to “expand their point of view,” a framing that many Jewish students and families found deeply disturbing.
Jewish author Liza Weimer had already been researching contemporary antisemitism when she learned of the assignment and began speaking with students, parents, and educators involved in the situation. The result was her 2020 novel, The Assignment, which fictionalizes the incident while probing the ethical responsibilities of teachers, schools, and students.
Weimer’s novel follows 17-year-old Cade and Logan in history, taught by Mr. Bartley, one of their school’s best teachers. They would soon be appalled by a project where they would recreate the Wannsee conference, the 1942 meeting where Nazi officials gathered to discuss the implementation of the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question.” Cade and Logan later bring up their concerns about the exercise with Mr. Bartley, who remains adamant that the assignment is morally sound and even implies that by doing a historical reenactment, students would be developing their critical thinking. Mr. Bartley offers a different project to them, and anyone else who has an issue with the project, but no one else takes the offer, conveying the bigger problem: the normalization of genocidal discourse in a school setting. Through the example of this disagreement, Weimer explores the parenthetic question of whether detachment and academic distance are the correct approaches in the teaching of hatred and related atrocities.
Literary critics and educators have pointed out that The Assignment, released at a time when Holocaust education is in dire need and is being inconsistently carried out. The Anti-Defamation League and the Claims Conference report that there are still a large number of American students who are unaware of the most basic facts about the Holocaust, while at the same time, antisemitic incidents in schools are on the rise. The novel by Weimer is a narrative as well as a warning: if teaching is not done carefully and ethically, schools will turn into places where trauma is being relived instead of being studied.
In the end, The Assignment is a work that provokes the reader to think about the boundary between the end of education and the beginning of moral responsibility. Giving students voices and the emotional consequences a central role, Weimer’s work maintains that the method of teaching history is equally important as the content of the lesson. 2