"Defining a Jew" and "Hangman"

The first reading talks about how Hitler slowly and subtly took away all the rights of the Jews in Germany. This reading also talks about how Hitler defined what a Jew was.

• Do you think that they correctly defined how a person could be Jewish? Do you think that this is fair?
• "Being a Jew was no longer a matter of self definition or self identification. Now a person was considered a Jew because what his or her grandparents had chosen to believe. Who you were no longer depended upon you." How do you think Hitler validated this and made it seem ok and good? Or do you think that he didn't even bother to cover up how unfair this was?
• How do you go about defining a person, a religion or a race?
• What does it mean to lose the right to define yourself?
• What does having the right to define yourself mean to you? How important is it to you? How important is it personally compared to trying to define bigger groups around the world?

The second reading was a poem about a hangman and his slow killing of a towns occupants. In this poem the Hangman kills people in search for the "real victim," when the narrator comes to help him clean up all the dead people at the end he/she is killed because she or he, in fact, is the perfect victim because they did nothing when everyone else was being killed.

Think of Nazi Germany:

• What do you think the deeper meaning of this poem was?
• Who was the hangman referring to? Who was the bystander referring to?
• What did this poem mean to you?
• Do you think that there is a way to stop the hangman?
• What was the responsibility of the townspeople?