Oregon lawmakers require schools to teach about the Holocaust.

14-year-old helped make it happen.

This is Dr. Jim Denison's The Daily Article Podcast for Friday, May 31st, 2019.

Alter Weiner was imprisoned in five different concentration camps during the Holocaust.

Most of his family was killed, including his father.

He weighed 80 pounds when he was liberated in 1945. Weiner moved to the U.S. after the war and eventually made his home in Oregon.

High school freshman Claire Sarnowski first met Weiner at one of his talks about the Holocaust

when she was a fourth grader. The two became friends. According to Claire, it was

Weiner'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. Weiner and Claire testified at a hearing last September.

Learning about the Holocaust is not just a chapter in recent history, but have derived a lesson

how to be more tolerant, more loving, and that hatred is eventually self-destructive,

Weiner told lawmakers, remember, be better rather than bitter. Weiner died last December. The Oregon Senate passed

Wagner's legislation last March. The House passed the bill unanimously last week. If Governor

Kate Brown signs it, Oregon will begin providing such instruction in the 2020-2020-21 school year.

The world will be better because a 14-year-old did what she could to make it so.

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, quote,

the world will get better when we show where things have gone wrong, end quote. As a result, Brooks notes, much of what journalists do is expose error, cover problems, and

identify conflict.

Here's the problem, quote.

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