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Andrea Heymann
Sasha Rogelberg | Staff Writer
Courtesy of Andrea Heymann
B y now, anyone reading Jewish news has seen the Anti-Defamation
League’s “Audit of Antisemitic Incidents,” reporting the number
of hate and bias incidents that occurred nationally over the year.

For many, the report has become a useful statistic or numbers they’ve
grown numb to, but for Andrea Heymann, associate regional director of
ADL Philadelphia, the report is the culmination of a year of work.

“I am our point person for managing and responding to every bias or
hate incident that gets reported to us,” she said.

Liaising between local, state and federal officials, Heymann, 33, also
collects and investigates data from law enforcement. She oversees
ADL’s leadership division, which includes the associated board and
Glass Leadership Institute for young professionals.

Heymann can see antisemitism and other forms of hate beyond just
the numbers, observing the bigger picture on the future of discrimination
in the U.S.

“The most frightening thing that I’ve noticed in the past six months is
how intense and vile the rhetoric I’ve seen in K to 12 schools, in the past
six months specifically,” she said.

Heymann has heard of instances of physical attacks on Jewish
children in middle schools, students throwing paper airplanes with
swastikas drawn on them and mimick-
ing rapper Ye’s (formerly Kanye West’s)
antisemitic comments.

Schools are now the hotbeds of
antisemitic activity but, according to
Heymann, they can also lay the founda-
tion to combat hate.

“Education is by far the best remedy”
to antisemitism and other -isms,
Heymann said. ADL has a host of educa-
tional opportunities, including providing
diversity, equity and inclusion materials
for workplace leaders. But Heymann
is interested in what goes on in the
classroom. Heymann lives in Head House Square
and has lived in the Philadelphia area
most of her life. She was raised in a
Conservative Jewish household in Cherry
Hill, New Jersey, attending Perelman
Jewish Day School, then Solomon
Schechter Day School, before attend-
ing Goucher College to study history
and women’s studies and Stockton
University to get her master’s degree in
Holocaust and genocide studies. Before
joining the ADL, she was the assistant
director of the Jewish Graduate Student
Network. Jewish education was at the
heart of all she did professionally.

But teaching the Holocaust must
be done thoughtfully to be effective,
Heymann argued. Jewish educa-
tors haven’t always gotten it right, she
believes. Back in the 1990s, Solomon Schechter
Day School taught the Holocaust in a
way that represented the times.

“Every year, when Yom HaShoah
happened, they would dim the lights
in the entire school,” she recalled.

“Everybody would have to wear a yellow
zachor sticker with a Jewish star. And on
the walls, they would have the now-fa-
mous black-and-white photographs
documented by Russian and American
soldiers of people after liberating
Auschwitz.” From kindergarten through eighth
grade, Heymann was haunted by the
efforts. “I had no context. I just remember
being really scared by that,” she said.

Thirty years ago, role-play activities
to teach the Holocaust were common,
as were showing images and primary
sources that answered the “what,” as
opposed to the “why” of the Holocaust.

By showing young people disturbing
images of the Shoah, they would have
an emotional connection to the curricu-
lum, Heymann posited, but this form of
education risked having the opposite
effect. “Sometimes, if you cross an emotional
line with someone, it touches them and
it scares them and makes them turn
around and run the other way,” she said.

That approach has changed. Heymann
recalls recently going to the United
States Holocaust Memorial Museum and
seeing graphic images hidden behind a
drape for audiences to view voluntarily.

Other exhibits feature sensitive content
at eye level for adults, not children, to
view. Today, age-appropriate Holocaust
education materials are ubiquitous, with
the Disney+ series “A Small Light” about
Anne Frank, told from the perspective
of the woman who helped hide her.

Holocaust educators feature art created
by children in Theresienstadt to teach
about the concentration camp.

But with a large push for Holocaust
education amid the rise in antisemitism,
there’s still risk in how stories of the
Shoah are told. It’s important that even in
times of rising hate, antisemitism doesn’t
become the dominant narrative of the
Jewish people, painting Jews as solely
victims of white supremacy.

“We sometimes forget that antisem-
itism shouldn’t define a Jewish person
or the Jewish community as a whole,
but there’s so much more to the Jewish
community than just the problem of
antisemitism,” Heymann said.

Heymann proposes teaching about
what makes Judaism great, so non-Jews
can garner respect for Jewish people.

“When I’ve been in conversation,
whether it’s a school administrator
or clergy or whoever, it’s been really
important to also acknowledge and talk
about Jewish joy,” she said. ■
srogelberg@midatlanticmedia.com JEWISHEXPONENT.COM
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