One Story
Your generous contributions to Federation’s Annual Campaign lead to meaningful initiatives in Berkshire County that educate local students about bias and antisemitism. Here is one story of how a local teacher partnered with Federation and brought engaging and impactful programs to her school in Sheffield.
In February, the Berkshire Jewish Voice reported on how Lindsey Brown, a science teacher at Mount Everett Regional School in Sheffield, took the initiative to partner with Jewish Federation of the Berkshires through our Hate Has No Home Here. The school has also taken advantage of the resources provided by the Changemakers for Good program – funded locally by Federation – which teaches students strategies that facilitate discussions with their peers around issues such as bias and antisemitism.
In February, the school welcomed choreographer Shany Dagan for of 3RD GEN – A Survivor’s Story, one day after dancers Yochai Greenfeld and Morgana Mauney and multi-instrumentalist Luke Wygodny performed the piece at Jacob’s Pillow, a program co-sponsored by the Jewish Women’s Foundation of Berkshire County and Federation. 3RD GEN incorporates interviews that Dagan’s maternal grandmother and paternal grandfather recorded at Yad Vashem – both stories are gut-wrenchingly violent and heartbreaking, and no doubt represented the first time many of the students had been exposed to firsthand survivor testimonies.
A talkback followed the performance, during which students asked Dagan pointed questions about her grandparents’ Holocaust experiences. They also wanted to know more about the creative process – how Dagan conceived the piece, how Wygodny composed the music, and how the dancers inhabited their roles. Experiencing the performance with an audience of enthusiastic and thoughtful teenagers demonstrated the effectiveness of exploring difficult and important stories outside a classroom setting. Kudos to Sherry Londy for bringing 3RD GEN to the Berkshires and sponsoring the performance at Mount Everett.
In March, the Massachusetts Mobile Museum of Tolerance (MMOT), an initiative of the Simon Wiesenthal Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles, visited the Mount Everett campus for two days of workshops. The MMOT is funded by the Massachusetts state legislature and our Federation has partnered locally with Berk12 to make its powerful educational experience available to all middle and high schools in the Berkshires.
While the MMOT offers engaging multimedia approaches to telling stories about the Holocaust in Europe and the Civil Rights movement in the United States, even more impressive to me were the erudition and didactic facility of the two presenters, lead educator Brian Strafach and associate Elijah Cohen. Using a 1937 painting of Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch in 1923, “In the beginning was the Word,” the two educators led the 9th grade students through the artwork’s propagandistic messaging not only to teach them about the history, but also to impart messages relevant to their own experiences and impressions of the unsettled times in which they are growing up.
The students picked up on a key point the educators imparted about stereotyping – if a bad actor can get you to believe one big lie, they can probably get you to believe other lies. They screened a short film with footage from the 1930s and 1940s, after warning the students that what they were going to see was not AI and was in fact real acts of violence and images of dead bodies. Students were given the opportunity to opt out, but in both sessions, none did. Indeed, in their discussion of the film, they seized on the idea that it was in fact ordinary people who enabled the horrors of the Holocaust, not just their leaders. Strafach and Cohen then presented them with images from a children’s book of the era that portrayed Jews as poisonous mushrooms. The students were quick to recognize how teaching hatred to children was essential to an oppressor’s success, but also a way of undermining the confidence and sense of self of young people of a reviled group.
And the students by and large seemed able to draw parallels to antisemitism today. I was not only impressed by how perceptive the students could be as they were guided by Strafach and Cohen, but also by how much history they already were aware of and how eager they were to learn more.
Student Owen Siket, who says he is a history buff, observed: “The workshop showed how normal it is in society for people to believe misconceptions and how easily hate can spread.” His classmate Olivia Fusco said that the separate sessions on the Holocaust and the struggle for civil rights connected the two events and allowed her to see “other peoples’ perspectives from other times.” She added that she was able to see how hate gets normalized when ordinary people “are surrounded by other people saying ‘Heil, Hitler’ or when you see signs for segregated water fountains.”
No session is exactly like another, says Brian Strafach. “We go to wherever the students are going. Most important, we are having conversations with students that they don’t have otherwise.”
Jewish Federation of the Berkshires and our partners are doing our utmost to reach out to young people and meeting them where they are at in order to educate them about the history and dangers of antisemitism and bias. Every day, it seems, a new poll comes out showing how significant pluralities among young people – and sometimes even majorities – harbor negative impressions about Jews and Israel. These polls are very disturbing, but I have to say that after experiencing 3RD GEN and MMOT workshops with the young people at Mount Everett, I came away more hopeful. The students I met were thoughtful, sympathetic, culturally aware, and curious. They understand the power of their cell phones and that social media outlets feed them misinformation. They know more about history than I expected and clearly want to learn more. Moreover, they are capable of engaging with and processing very difficult ideas.
No doubt this is, in part, to having teachers like Lindsey Brown, who took the initiative to work with Changemakers for Good, the MMOT, and our Hate Has No Home Here campaign. As she explained to me, the entire process started when she contacted Federation and began to explore possibilities with our executive director, Dara Kaufman. The enthusiasm and support she received allowed her and Mount Everett to implement ongoing initiatives to combat bias.
I know that in the months to come, you’ll be hearing a lot from us about our 2026 Annual Campaign – what Lindsey Brown and students and staff at Mount Everett are accomplishing is just one story of how your generous donations to our Federation help us promote tolerance, community, and education in Berkshires.
PHOTO: Students in the MMOT with lead educator Brian Strafach