Name: Sawyer Gersh

Social Justice Group: 2022-2023, Technology: Free Speech v Hate Speech Online

Date of Fieldwork: January 26, 2023

Name of Organization and person (people) with whom you met and their title(s):The Molly Blank Fund of the Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation

Type of Fieldwork: Tour of Organization

What I did and what I learned about my topic, activism, social justice work or civil and human rights work from this fieldwork?[:: :

We met up with our teacher Jacob Farkas in the lobby of our school at 1:15pm. After that, we went to the Jewish Heritage Museum. Once we got there we went to the Exhibition called: The Holocaust: What Hate Can Do. When we first went into the exhibition there were photos everywhere of just regular people just like everyone else. This was done to connect us to the culture and make it feel all the more real. Next, we saw an overview. We saw a quick history of antisemitism going back thousands of years, next. Then, we got associated with Judaism. After that it talked about concentration camps and execution sites. We spent around 1 hour on the first floor and so we had to pick up the pace throughout the rest of the museum. On the second floor it talked more about the holocaust but focused more on individual stories, atrocities and resistance. I especially remember listening to a survivor talk about his experience seeing a dead boy inside a basket of laundry. On the last floor we saw a documentary about a photographer taking 75 pictures of holocaust survivors for the 75th anniversary of the Auschwitz liberation and behind us was a room filled with the pictures of them. Through this experience I learned that antisemitism has been prevalent throughout the history of the entire world. I also learned that there has been activists counteracting this throughout everyone’s history.