Today, in class we talked about genocide. Evidently, genocide is an international issue. The “ethnic cleansing” of a specific group of people based on who they are, obviously raises international conflict. A few of the specific genocide incidents we talked about were: Serbia-Bosnia, Darfur, Rwanda, and the Holocaust. There is steps that lead up to genocide, one does not simply just say a group of people is ‘bad’ and get everyone on their side ready to exterminate a race. One of the final steps on the path towards genocide is segregation. As common knowledge, we are aware that the Jews were segregated from the rest of the population during the control of Adolf Hitler. Not only were the quarantined in concentration camps, but they were also sent to a small area of a land called a “ghetto.”

In Rome, there is a small area that once was a Jewish Ghetto housing thousands of Jews. Today, we visited that area along with the Synagogue. The oppression Jews all over the world felt is incomprehensible to someone like myself who has never faced something even close to the extremity of the Jewish peoples situation. However, being in the area where this all took place inscribed immense empathy within me, more than I ever had before – which was a lot. Being there, seeing, and hearing about it makes it all the more personal and easier to connect to what they went through on a daily basis. I think the Ghetto and Synagogue was one of the most interesting places we went because it isn’t just reading about what it was like living as a Jew, but to actually see how they lived offers a connection on a much deeper level.