Alter Wiener was imprisoned in five different concentration camps during the Holocaust. Most of his family was killed, including his father. He weighed eighty pounds when he was liberated in 1945. Wiener moved to the US after the war and eventually made his home in Oregon.
High school freshman Claire Sarnowski first met Wiener at one of his talks about the Holocaust when she was a fourth-grader. The two became friends. According to Claire, it was Wiener’s lifelong dream to confront anti-Semitism by implementing mandatory curriculum standards for teaching students about the Holocaust.
She reached out to a state senator, Rob Wagner, who then co-sponsored a bill requiring such instruction. Wiener and Claire testified at a hearing last September.
“Learning about the Holocaust is not just a chapter in recent history, but a derived lesson how to be more tolerant, more loving and that hatred is, eventually, self-destructive,” Wiener told lawmakers. “Remember, be better, rather than bitter.”
Wiener died last December. The Oregon Senate passed Wagner’s legislation last March; the House passed the bill unanimously last week. If Gov. Kate Brown signs it, Oregon will begin providing such instruction in the 2020–2021 school year.
The world will be better because a fourteen-year-old did what she could to make it so.
The solution is solutions
David Brooks recently cited his New York Times colleague David Bornstein, who points out that much of American journalism is based on a “mistaken theory of change.” The theory: “The world will get better when we show where things have gone wrong.” As a result, Brooks notes, much of what journalists do is “expose error, cover problems and identify conflict.”
Here’s the problem: “We leave people feeling disempowered and depressed. People who consume a lot of media of this sort sink into this toxic…
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