“I won’t debate geography as destiny,” Minnesota Governor Tim Walz told an audience of geographers at the San Diego Convention Center on July 15. “But where you are has a lot to do with who you are.”
Six days later, President Biden would announce he was dropping out of the 2024 U.S. presidential race, Vice President Kamala Harris would quickly become the nominee of choice, and 16 days after that, Walz would be named her running mate. (Believe it or not, that was just last week.)
Since then, Americans have gotten a crash course on the many hats the former teacher, coach and congressman has worn. (Speaking of hats, do you know the popstar connection to that camo-and-orange-lettered baseball cap Walz donned the night he joined the ticket?)
Back to that Monday in mid-July, before the Harris-Walz waltz got into full swing, the governor was on stage at the afternoon plenary on day one of the 2024 Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI) conference in Southern California. A theme was how geography, or more specifically what’s known as GIS (geography information systems), can help build a better world, including how such tools can be used in genocide studies.
“Just as antisemitism is spanning the political spectrum, decency and humanity can too,” Walz said at the Temple Israel synagogue in Minneapolis.
Walz talked about growing up in a small town in western Nebraska, working summers as a ranch hand “about 60 miles from anywhere.” At 14, he recalled, he’d go back to the bunkhouse with the other ranch hands after a full day’s work moving cattle and building fences. While the others played cards and exchanged profanities he hadn’t heard before, Walz would pore through boxes full of old National Geographic magazines and dream of exotic places, “having no concept that others were probably dreaming of the exotic landscape I was in.”
He went on to become a geography teacher, and in 1993 he was picked to represent Nebraska at the inaugural Belfer National Conference for educators, held at the soon-to-open U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. The previous year, while on summer break from teaching at Alliance High School in Nebraska, Walz had attended a National Geographic summer institute and recalls grabbing all the free stuff he could. This included a stack of GIS floppy disks and a thick instruction manual on the geographical analysis tool. During the 1993 school year Walz had seniors in his global geography class at Alliance High School use GIS to predict where the next genocide would occur in the world. They incorporated layers of data relating to food insecurity, potential for drought, colonialism and so on. They predicted the landlocked country of Rwanda in East Africa, which, a year later, would prove to be correct.
In 1996, Walz and his wife Gwen, a fellow teacher, moved to Minnesota and began teaching at Mankato West High School in southern Minnesota. “Students could tell you when the Holocaust happened, but for them it was a historical anomaly in time,” Walz said in his talk at the ESRI conference. He stressed the importance of teaching about the Holocaust not in a historical vacuum but in a way that helped students recognize the signs that lead to genocide.
Minnesota Governor Tim Walz ceremonial bill signing for Student Data Privacy Act, June 2022
Walz later earned a master’s degree in educational leadership. His 2001 thesis, arguing for a more intentional and expansive approach to teaching about the Holocaust, was titled “Improving Human Rights and Genocide Studies in the American High School Classroom.”
Walz left teaching for politics, serving in the U.S. House of Representatives from 2007-2019 and since then as Minnesota’s governor. He supported the “Holocaust and Genocide of Indigenous Peoples and Other Genocide Education” bill, passed by the state legislature in May 2023 and scheduled to go into effect for the 2025-2026 school year.
Echoes & Reflections, a resource website for Holocaust education materials, offers an interactive map tracking state-by-state mandates; currently, they report that 28 states mandate Holocaust education (although with Iowa passing a bill in May, that number is now 29), while three other states have legislation pending. According to an article published in The Forward last fall, Illinois, Oregon and Minnesota are the only states with mandates that include the genocide of Indigenous people.
The wider approach to Holocaust education situates Walz firmly within a view that has long been the mainstream philosophy of Holocaust education. As Dan Freedman noted in a 2022 Moment cover story on the history of U.S. Holocaust education, Elie Wiesel raised the alarm about “ethnic cleansing” in the former Yugoslavia in his remarks at the 1993 dedication ceremony of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, “sending a signal to the world that the lessons of the Holocaust have a universal dimension.”
Still, Freedman wrote, “there are others who fear that with broad-based curricula, students are losing the sense of the Holocaust as a uniquely horrific event, rather than just one in a parade of horrors or injustices.” More recently, Freedman explored antisemitic acts in K-12 schools and delved into criticisms of Holocaust education—not that putting it in the context of genocide studies is too broad but that giving Jewish history short shrift in teaching the Holocaust may play a role in rising antisemitism.
For his part, Walz has issued strong words recognizing and condemning antisemitism. “Just as antisemitism is spanning the political spectrum, decency and humanity can too,” he said at the “Minnesota: No Hate. No Fear” rally held at the Temple Israel synagogue in Minneapolis in 2020. “Our children are watching.” Meanwhile, his past associations with a leader of the Muslim American Society of Minnesota are being portrayed as highly problematic in a Washington Examiner piece circulated by the Republican Jewish Coalition.
Walz, who once dreamed of exotic places, now occupies that rarified space in the limelight, where public interest and scrutiny shine bright and hot. Which is as it should be for someone running to be second in command of the country.
Opening Image: Gage Skidmore