Karen Shawn

Dr. Karen Shawn was born in Albany, New York. Her father, of blessed memory, was a master teacher, an Associate in the New York State Department of Education in the field of Special Education. Her mother, the principal stenographer and secretary for the Assistant Commissioner for the New York State Department of Health, was a master teacher by nature. Karen’s future as an educator was assured. Her early desire to teach was encouraged at home and cemented by the heady experience, in first grade, of being put in charge of her reading group.

Of her future in Jewish education, however, her childhood gave no hint. Her parents’ Jewish world was steeped in Yiddishkeit and its attendant warmth, love, food, community service, and customs, but devoid of traditional religious education and observance.

With a Bachelor of Arts in English from Adelphi University, Karen became a junior high school English teacher. She received her Master of Arts in English Education from New York University and continued to study for her doctorate, specializing in curriculum development in middle level education.

In the summer of 1985, Karen and her husband, Keith Breiman, participated in the Jewish National Fund’s Family Living Experience in Israel. The experience of working, touring, and welcoming Shabbat each week “kindled a spark long dormant” in Karen. These experiences, coupled with visits to Beit Lohamei Hageta’ot, the Ghetto Fighters’ Museum in the Western Galilee, and to Yad Vashem, were to change the course of Karen’s life.

The following summer Karen was awarded a Summer Study in Israel Fellowship in Holocaust and Jewish Resistance sponsored by the Jewish Labor Committee, the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, and the United Federation of Teachers. She returned as a student to the Ghetto Fighters’ House and to Yad Vashem. She credits her teachers that year, including Vladka Meed, Dr. Yehuda Bauer, and Dr. Emil Fackenheim, with helping her to understand the imperative to teach her students about the Shoah. It would take years more, however, before she had the content and the methods to do so effectively.

Each summer she returned to Israel to study; each fall she practiced what she had learned, helping her young public school students find ways to make the Holocaust personally meaningful. In 1989, her first textbook, The End of Innocence: Anne Frank and the Holocaust, was published by the Anti-Defamation League. Also, that year, she was awarded a Mt. Scopus Fellowship, enabling her to live in Jerusalem and study at Hebrew University. Under the mentorship of Shalmi Barmor and Dr. Ze’ev Mankowitz, she wrote curriculum for Yad Vashem and taught a Holocaust literature course at the World Union of Jewish Students (WUJS) in Arad. In 1990, she joined the faculty of the Yad Vashem Summer Institute for Educators from Abroad, where she would design and teach the seminar’s pedagogic workshops for the next decade.

As Karen’s knowledge of the Holocaust deepened, and her involvement as a consultant broadened, so too did her interest in embracing a more traditional Jewish lifestyle. In 1993 she accepted a position creating and developing a Holocaust Studies program at the Moriah School of Englewood. She was delighted to devote herself to this task, but of equal importance was the opportunity such a position afforded her and her family to work and live in an observant community.

In her third year at Moriah, she was offered the newly created position of Assistant Principal for Secular Studies for the junior high school. In her concurrent role as consultant to the Ghetto Fighters’ House and their Children’s Holocaust Museum, Yad LaYeled, she has made Moriah a laboratory for learning based on materials she and the GFH staff have prepared collaboratively.

2018 Update:

Dr. Karen Shawn is currently the associate professor of Jewish education at the Azrieli Graduate School of Jewish Education and Administration at Yeshiva University, where she teaches educational practice, including Holocaust pedagogy. She is the founding editor of Yeshiva University’s award-winning, peer-reviewed publication PRISM: An Interdisciplinary Journal for Holocaust Educators, now in its 11th year.

Dr. Shawn taught Holocaust education in the Yad Vashem Summer Seminar for Educators From Abroad for a decade, and served for 10 years also as the educational consultant for the American Friends of the Ghetto Fighters’ House. She is a Fellow at the Holocaust Museum Houston (TX), where she has conducted workshops three times yearly for the past nine years. She has presented at conferences and gatherings across America and in other countries including Canada, Israel, Serbia, Poland, and, most recently, Chile, where she was invited to serve on the board of Santiago’s Fundacion Memoria Viva. She has written extensively on Holocaust education, authored the widely used text The End of Innocence: Anne Frank and the Holocaust (1993), and is co-editor, with Dr. Keren Goldfrad of Bar-Ilan University, of the anthology The Call of Memory: Learning about the Holocaust Through Narrative (2008) and its companion teacher’s guide. Her most recent research is focused on potential alternatives to traditional Holocaust curricula in American schools.