Teaching the Holocaust: the American academic setting

How do American students too young to have lived through World War II perceive the Holocaust as taught in schools and universities? And how, as Americans, do they repond to such populist phenomena as the film "Schindler's List", the television mini-series "Holocaust" and Daniel Goldhagen's "Hitler's Willing Executioners"? These works, it is argued, tend to soften the horror of the Holocaust in order to make the subject more acceptable to Americans. Yet often educational courses and works of popular culture do succeed in inculcating students with a genuine sense of the nature of the Holocaust.