After a few years of teaching Anne’s diary, I began to examine my teaching practices. As an English teacher, just how much history did I need to include in my unit on Anne and her story? And if I did include some history lessons, what was the most necessary? Did my sixth graders need to understand the political environment of Germany before Hitler’s rise? Surely not. But if not, then how would I explain antisemitism? Where then to begin? I realized that being an English teacher was not an excuse for not properly teaching my students the historical and religious contexts of the Holocaust literature I was introducing them to.
