The Mitzvah Project

The Mitzvah Project is a three-part Holocaust-themed, theatrical-educational presentation comprised of a short play, lecture and talkback. The Mitzvah Project engages several critical socio-historical questions: “Who decides the meaning of culture, race and ethnicity?” “How is one’s identity determined?” “Why do we demonize ‘the other?’” The first part of the presentation, The Mitzvah, is a one-act, one-person drama that dramatically explores the nature of prejudice through the interconnected lives of a Polish-Jewish Auschwitz survivor and a half-Jewish Wehrmacht officer. In the lecture I explore the ways in which the Holocaust - and being the son of two German Jews - shaped me as a boy, a teen and as a young adult. I examine the unique history that produced tens of thousands of half and quarter Jewish Wehrmacht soldiers who themselves were the product of two centuries of German-Jewish assimilation, intermarriage, conversion and the striving of a people committed to calling the German Fatherland their home. I segue to American history and the role that America’s Jim Crow Laws played in providing a model for the Nuremberg Laws and reference the recent resurgence of white supremacy and intolerance, how it has been manifesting itself around the country and, most alarmingly, in our schools. The last section of my talk examines how advances in human biology and genetics have totally debunked racialist mythology. History The Mitzvah Project is in homage to my mother who used her Holocaust experience as a tool for teaching the lessons of history to young people. Over the years, I have presented The Mitzvah Project (www.themitzvah.org) at over 80 venues and institutions in 24 states, the U.K., Canada and Israel, including Stanford and Oxford Universities, Hebrew University, the University of Pennsylvania and the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center in Skokie. I have also presented The Mitzvah Project for high school students in Nebraska and Wisconsin.