Smith College School of Social Work 

The topic of this workshop was anti-Semitism and the impact of Jewish historical memory on Jewish students and clients.

Hatikvah was invited to do this workshop in response to an incident at the college in 2004 in which some Jewish students had been marginalized. The first part of the workshop included the analysis of primary source documents from different periods of Jewish history.  They included the oppression of Jews in Czarist Russia; the experience of discrimination of turn-of-the-century immigrants:  pre-Holocaust and Holocaust periods in Germany and Poland; the birth of Zionism; contemporary anti-Semitism.   In the second part of the workshop, participants were engaged in a series of prejudice reduction exercises.