Introduction                                                                                        

                To whom it may concern, my name is Benjamin Haskell Fowle and I am currently a senior at Westborough High School in Westborough, Massachusetts.  A few miscellaneous facts that you may not know about me is that I am a third generation Russian American, although I am not religious whatsoever I associate myself with the Judaic religion, in public I tend to be a fairly quite person but that changes as soon as someone gets to know me, and I’d also like to think of myself as being a well cultured person (in the sense that I am well versed in foreign customs and traditions).  One of the main reasons that I chose to take this course was that I felt guilty that I did not know a whole lot about the holocaust even though I am Jewish and had relatives only a few generations before me that had to go through the holocaust.  Another reason that I wanted to take the course was from a referral that was given to me from a former student named Yakov.  He described Facing History and Ourselves as one of the best classes if not the best class of all time, which I know does not sound very specific but still it hard to find a student that is that passionate about a class.

                Facing History starts off with going over how people can be manipulated in a way to make them complacent for example if the majority of people are doing one thing it can influence someone in a way that they will assimilate into the group.  The film that embodies this section is the film about Native Americans being assimilated into white Anglo-Saxon protestant culture by fear of death.  The introduction into the history behind why Judaism was and on some level still is under attack is the film the “Eternal Jew.”  Then you will be given the prospective of Jews in all different areas for example Auschwitz, the Warsaw uprising, France, and liberated concentration camps by the Americans.  All of which serves as a reminder because if there is one thing that I have learned it is that if you allow people to forget what happened in the holocaust you are risking that it could happen again.