An eighth-grade English assignment at Pittsfield Middle High School last week asked students to make and wear the yellow star that Jews were required to have on their clothing during the Holocaust.

The graded assignment, intended to teach students empathy in conjunction with a unit about Anne Frank, sparked protest from students who said it violated their religious freedom, English teacher Harry Mitchell said.

Students were given an A-plus if they wore the star to class and a B-plus if they made the star but didn't wear it - as well as extra credit if Mitchell saw them in other classes or the hallway with the symbol on.

But several students railed against the exercise on the grounds that "because we weren't Jewish it wasn't right to wear the Jewish symbol," as Samantha Gage, 13, said. Instead of the yellow star, Gage said that she and several friends wore white Post-It notes with the words, "We're not Jewish."

Mitchell said the protesting students missed the point of the exercise.

"My intention with the star was to get them to have some empathy and the feeling of what it was like to have to identify yourself with a symbol," Mitchell said. "If you're not wearing it, you're not getting the full awareness of Anne and her family."

The students, including Gage, who protested that they did not want to wear the star due to religious reasons were granted a B-plus, Mitchell said.

However a student in another section of Mitchell class was granted permission to wear a Nazi swastika instead of a yellow Jewish star because Mitchell said the student's desire to make and wear the swastika symbol demonstrated creativity and "outside-the-box" thinking. Mitchell said making and wearing a swastika still got across the concept of symbols.

"We were talking about symbols and there were two symbols from that time period: a Nazi symbol and the Star of David," he said.

Mitchell said he has used the yellow-star assignment successfully before, when teaching a play based on Anne Frank's The Diary of a Young Girl. He also said he ran the idea by a Jewish teacher at the school to see what she thought. In his mind, having students wear a yellow star is all part of an effort to get eighth graders to start to comprehend what the Holocaust was.

This year, for example, he said he tried to help students understand the Holocaust by relating it to what's going on in Iraq.

"I brought up how America is trying to help the people in Iraq, and how America was hesitant to help the Jewish people in the Holocaust," Mitchell said. "One of the reasons we're fighting there now is to eliminate the same kind of prejudice and the same kind of treatment of minorities."

Mitchell said he didn't think there were any Jewish students in his classes this year, but he has taught Jewish students in the past. In general, he said eighth-graders tend to relate well to Anne Frank and come to see the Holocaust as "wrong," an understanding that becomes reinforced when he shows them a documentary on the concentration camps.

"When they see the horror of the camps, it's like, 'Why did that happen?' I can't really explain why, but I think it's good that they question why people do such terrible things in the world," he said.

Gage, who identifies herself as a Protestant and sometimes wears a cross, said the yellow-star assignment implied that Judaism was superior to other religions.

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