[LINK] "History course proposal upsets Canadian Turks"

A year and a half after the Canadian Parliament's recognition of the Armenian genocide, the Toronto District School Board has begun to prepare curriculum for a new Grade 11 history course, "Genocide: Historical and Contemporary Implications". This course would examine the courses of various genocides, including the Holocaust, the Rwandan genocide, and the Armenian genocide, and their implicatuions for the modern world. As Louise Brown reported in today's Toronto Star ("History course proposal upsets Canadian Turks"), the course has managed

The Grade 11 history course, believed the only one of its kind at a high school in Ontario and possibly Canada, is designed to teach teenagers what happens when a government sets out to destroy people of a particular nationality, race or religion, through three examples: the Holocaust which exterminated 6 million Jews in World War II, the Rwandan slaughter of nearly one million Tutsis and moderate Hutus in 1994, and the Turkish killing of an estimated 1.5 million Armenians between 1915 and 1923.

"These are very significant, horrible parts of history, and without sounding hackneyed, we hope we can learn something from them so we can make a better world for our children's children," said Trustee Gerri Gershon, of the Toronto District School Board, who proposed the course after a moving tour in 2005 of the Nazi death camps in Poland.

"This isn't a course to teach hatred or blame the perpetrators--no, no, no," said Gershon. "Our goal is the exact opposite: To explore how this happens so we can become better people and make sure it never happens again."

But the Council of Turkish Canadians has gathered more than 1,200 signatures on an online petition opposed to the course for calling the Armenian killings a "genocide" and inciting anti-Turkish sentiment. The Turkish government has long denied the slaughter was a genocide, but rather part of the wartime casualties of World War I, with both sides guilty of some provocation.

"To pick Armenia as a genocide when it is so controversial--especially when there are atrocities by other countries that could have been chosen--is just wrong, and will inadvertently lead to the bullying of Turkish-Canadian children," argues Ottawa engineer Lale Eskicioglu, executive director of the council and author of the petition, which she will present to school board staff at a meeting this month.

"Children of Turkish descent already face bullying, racism and hatred in the school yards. We rely on our schools to provide a shelter free from hate-inciting propaganda and not contribute to the divisions between ethnic minorities," she says.

School board Superintendent Nadine Segal says teachers already are being trained to handle these issues "with sensitivity to the cultural mosaic in our schools," and insists the course is not designed to "point fingers, but to examine the early warning signs of genocide and the role of the perpetrator and bystander.

"Our own Canadian government has recognized the Armenian genocide as uncontestable reality, the original genocide of the 20th century, and the course has been approved by the Ontario Ministry of Education," says Segal.

"But students will also be doing independent studies of their own choosing that will allow them to examine other examples of genocide. The goal is to help students gain a deeper understanding of human rights and their responsibilities as global citizens."

Kudos for the new course have been rolling in from historians and human rights advocates, Segal adds, including former United Nations special envoy Stephen Lewis, author Joy Kogawa and genocide historian Frank Chalk, co-director of the Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies at Concordia University.

[LINK] "How Hebrew rose from the dead"

Oakland Ross' article in yesterday's Sunday Star, "How Hebrew rose from the dead", is an interesting overview of the history behind Eliezer Ben-Yehuda's kickstarting the late 19th century revival of the Hebrew language as an everyday vernacular after nearly two thousand years.

Little more than 100 years have passed since Hebrew first began to rediscover its tongue. Last spoken in Old Testament times, it now is firmly established as the primary language of about 5 million Jewish Israelis, not to mention some 2 million additional Hebrew speakers scattered through the world.

The once-dead language possesses a rich, modern vocabulary, extensive enough to support a 16-volume dictionary, with an even more comprehensive work on the way.

Its speakers can swear, sing, argue, mate, conduct wars, negotiate peace treaties, publish newspapers and carry out any of the countless other human activities that profit from the use of words.

Hebrew also boasts a thriving literature, including a Nobel laureate--Shmuel Agnon in 1966--plus a host of prominent contemporary writers, led by Amos Oz.

This, in any language, would constitute a mouthful. In the case of Hebrew, however, the transformation is extraordinary.

A parlance last used in oral form by biblical prophets has accommodated itself in only a few decades to a world of six-lane highways, reality TV and the Internet.

Born in 1858, Ben Yehuda arrived in the Holy Land in the early 1880s as a pilgrim from czarist Russia.

At the time, not a solitary person on Earth used Hebrew as a means of communication for daily affairs. In fact, barely a soul had done so for more than 2,000 years.

True, the language survived in written form for liturgical purposes, but nobody spoke it at the dinner table, during sporting contests or while preparing for bed.

Depending on where they lived, Jews in modern times spoke a variety of languages, ranging from Yiddish, Ladino and Arabic to an array of European tongues.

Inspired by the early stirrings of Zionism, Ben Yehuda decided that what Jews really needed in order to become a nation--apart from a land of their own--was a common means of communication.

Quixotically perhaps, he settled on Hebrew, which had ceased to be the spoken language of the Jews several centuries before the birth of Christ, according to Frieden.

By the time of the Romans' destruction of the second temple in 70 AD--the event that sparked the flight of the Jews into the Diaspora--those fleeing souls mostly spoke Aramaic.

Nonetheless, on his arrival in Jerusalem in the years of Ottoman rule, Ben Yehuda somehow convinced his wife that they should converse exclusively in Hebrew, both between themselves and with their children. Their first son, Yitzhak, is credited with the first child whose first language was Hebrew in two millennia.

"This is what they did," says Birnbaum. "This was the start of the whole thing."

Other Jews were moving to the Holy Land, many of them inspired by the Zionist dream, and Ben Yehuda managed to persuade neighbouring families to take part in what quickly became his life's central project.

Although not a linguist, Ben Yehuda set about coining thousands of words to describe daily phenomena--articles and activities missing from Hebrew's ancient vocabulary.

"There wasn't a vernacular in Hebrew," notes Frieden. "How do you speak a language that only exists as a religious language?"

Against great odds, Hebrew began to catch on among Jews as a means of conversing about their day-to-day affairs.

In 1914, eight years before Ben Yehuda's death, an association of Jewish teachers in the Holy Land decided to make Hebrew the official medium of instruction in their schools, a critical milestone in the language's journey back from the dead. By the time Israel was established as a state in 1948, it was home to 600,000 Hebrew speakers.