After we finished reading Night in today's class, we came back to the brainstorm/ tracking sheet that we'd kept throughout this unit. This sheet has the word "night" on it in the center of the page. In the top section, we wrote words and images that we connect to the word "night". In the bottom section, we kept track of images, experiences, and emotions that Elie Weisel experienced over the course of the book. After we completed our reading of this text, you all used dry erase markers to answer the question: Why is this book titled Night? After you all had an opportunity to weigh in on this question, we discussed your answers as a class. I've included pictures of this activity in this blog post.
We had some time before the bell rang, so we moved on to taking notes about our next text, The Merchant of Venice, which also involves discrimination against Jews (anti-semitism), though this play is a fictional imagination rather than a memoir. We will bridge between the two texts to create some generalized ideas about the persecution and stereotypes that Jews have experienced not just as a result of the Holocaust, but throughout a variety of time periods.
