Before Tim Walz became a politician, he was a high school teacher. One of his passions as a teacher was the subject of the Holocaust.

Walz wrote his masters’ thesis on “Improving Human Rights and Genocide Studies in the American High School Classroom.” It argued that the way we teach the Holocaust and genocide in school was mistaken. Walz pushed for an approach that didn’t separate the Holocaust from other genocides and human rights abuses. He also insisted that it was a mistake to focus on the maniacal character of Hitler and the Nazis. Instead he argued for a more integrated, comparative, and historicist approach, incorporating factors such as colonialism, economics, and civil war, and connecting the Holocaust to the Cambodian and Armenian genocides.

This is standard stuff now, but this was back in the early 1990s, when, as Walz says, teachers were teaching the Holocaust by having students wear yellow stars and stand at the back of the lunch line. (In 2008, the great New York Times journalist, Samuel G. Freedman, wrote a great profile on Walz as a teacher of the Holocaust.)

In 2020, when Walz was already governor of Minnesota, he did an interview with a Jewish podcast. He spoke there about how he had his students read Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, even though “it seemed a little deep for them.” (See episode 44.)

On that podcast, Walz connected his interest in the Holocaust to an experience he had as a fourth grader growing up in Nebraska. His father was the superintendent of schools, and it was 1973. That was the year that members of the Oglala Lakota tribe and the American Indian Movement took over the town of Wounded Knee, which had been the site of the 1890 massacre of native Americans.

The town Walz lived in was not far from Wounded Knee. Walz remembers organized militias of men standing guard on top of the building in his town. He also remembers—actually he only discovered this later—that there had been a movement in the town to prevent Native American students from going to school during the occupation at Wounded Knee. Things were that tense.

Walz’s father opposed that effort and made sure that all students were able to attend school.