Teaching with and for Empathy: Humanities Resources for Jewish Studies Pedagogy Today

• In Event: In the Wake of October 7

Abstract

Many have remarked upon the evident crisis in the classroom, and beyond, in the wake of 10/8. Notably, in her essay “Are Scholars of Anti-Semitism Partly to Blame for the Lack of Empathy for its Victims?,” Magda Teter wonders whether those who teach the history of antisemitism are doing something different pedeagogically than those teaching about the history of other oppressions, discriminations, and hatreds. She suggests that those teaching the history of antisemitism might benefit from learning from those teaching about other forms of oppression, discrimination, and hate. The lack of empathy regarding Anti-Semitism, Teter opines, may be at least in part a result of pedagogy.
Picking up this clue and question, I suggest that although a lack of empathy in the classroom and beyond may be due to reasons other than pedagogy, how we teach may yet be part of the “solution” to this problem. I will argue that social media has created a culture that divides between “the hunter” and “the hunted,” resulting in group- and even mob-think, as users join the hunters to avoid faling into the category of the hunted. This effect of social media dovetails with the polarization within our larger culture and society which increasingly is divided between “us” and “them.”
I will argue that the humanities may provide resources for pedagogical intervention into this polarization-driven lack of empathy in the university classroom for those with whom one disagrees politically and otherwise. While Emmanual Levinas is suspicious of empathy because it is grounded within identity and sameness, thereby potentially effacing the irreducible alterity of other persons, I will argue for the importance of empathy (as well compassion) for our pedagogy today. Without reducing otherness to sameness, empathy can remind us of our shared humanity despite—and, perhaps, because of—our differences. In this regard, I will turn to Edith Stein “On the Problem of Empathy” as an interlocutor for Levinas.
Having framed the issue of empathy by referring to Levinas and Stein, I will then turn related pedagogical matters. Using the example of the Jewish Studies classroom, I will argue for the teaching of specific skills and practices of reading, argument, attentiveness, and interpretation traditionally found in the Humanities. These skills and practices, of course, will be portable well beyond the field of Jewish Studies (which is also located in the Social Sciences) and the Humanities. I see this explicit pedagogical turn as providing a way to enhance empathetic learning and exchanges not only among students, but among colleagues as well. While Teter’s observations about the lack of empathy were occasioned by 10/7, of course the problem pertains not only to antisemitism, but to Islamaphobia and other forms of prejudice and hate as well. Empathy, by definition, cannot be a one-way street.

Author

• Susan Shapiro, University of Massachusetts Amherst