Challenging Antisemitism

Mara Lee Grayson is the author of Teaching Racial Literacy: Reflective Practices for Critical Writing, Race Talk in the Age of the Trigger Warning: Recognizing and Challenging Classroom Cultures of Silence, and Antisemitism and the White Supremacist Imaginary: Conflations and Contradictions in Composition and Rhetoric. She works as an associate professor of English at California State University, Dominguez Hills. Judith Chriqui Benchimol is a college composition and English education lecturer with Sephardic Jewish roots. She holds a Masters degree in Life Writing from University of East Anglia and is presently a Ph.D. candidate and nonfiction writing lecturer at Teachers College, Columbia University.

Challenging Antisemitism: Lessons from Literacy Classrooms provides secondary and university teachers with insightful perspective, language, understanding, and practical resources for addressing antisemitism endemic throughout the curriculum, the texts used in schools, pedagogy, and classroom interaction. With the publication of Challenging Antisemitism, never again can educators say they did not know how antisemitism is woven into the fabric of education; never again can they say they do not know how to rend its invisibility; never again can they say that the pursuit of social justice in education can eschew challenging antisemitism.

• Introduction to the Collection: Why Is It So Hard to Talk about Antisemitism?Mara Lee Grayson & Judith Chriqui BenchimolChapter 1: The Study of Comedic Rhetoric as an Antidote to AntisemitismLauri MattensonChapter 2: Repairing the World: Raising Awareness through Social Justice Action in the English ClassroomRachel KraushaarChapter 3: Avoiding Conflation, Deflection, and Distraction: Untangling Antisemitism from Zionism and Anti-ZionismMara Lee GraysonChapter 4: Community Engagement Positionality Statements: An IntroductionAlex SlotkinChapter 5: Expanding a Pedagogy of IdentityGillian Steinberg Chapter 6: Teaching the Past to Protect the Future: Degenerate Art as a Modern-Day Cultural Warning Cheryl Hogue SmithChapter 7: Representations of the Holocaust and Connected HistoriesAnia SwitzerChapter 8: Teaching Art Spiegelman’s Maus and Kendrick Lamar’s album DAMN. in the Predominantly White, Catholic College ClassroomMaureen Daniels AkeribChapter 9: Jewish Experiences That Move Beyond Holocaust Narratives: A Resource For English TeachersJudith Chriqui Benchimol About the Contributors