The Causes and Effects of Violence - Essay

The Causes and Effects of Violence Did you know that almost 6 million Jews were estimated killed in the Holocaust? The Holocaust was when men, children, and women alike were massacred just because of their religion, which was Judaism. This is not the first human tragedy that the world has endured this century. Another violent tragedy was when African American’s were being mistreated and persecuted in the United States. This was during the Jim Crow South when black people could not eat at the same restaurant as whites. Protesting led to extreme violence and many people were killed. Another tragedy was gang violence in America. This violence was caused by race and ethnic differences. In The Diary of Anne Frank by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett and I Promised I Would Tell by Sonia Weitz, the reader sees how hatred and ignorance can lead to violence can and substantial deaths among people. The reason the Holocaust happened was because of anti-Semitism, which is the hatred of the Jewish people. Anti-Semitism is an example of a way that caused violence between two different groups of people. A quote from I Promised I Would Tell explains how Jewish people felt during World War II and explains the violence occurring. “The world was anything but safe for a Jew” (Weitz 1). This is when Sonia is describing how the world was to be a Jew when she was eleven years old. Sonia is being very grown up for her age and being realistic when she explains how she felt during this period of
Jones, 2 the war. This was when the Germans were beginning to invade Poland. The hatred of someone’s religion is only one way that violence can massacre many people.
Another way to start violence is to judge someone based on their race. In the Freedom Writers and in real life a person could be shot for waving the wrong gang banner or saying something bad about someone else’s race or gang. A good quote that describes this is from the Freedom Writers, “My brother taught me what the

Cited: Freedom Writers. Screenplay by Richard LaGravanese. Dir. Richard LaGravanese. Perf. Hilary Swank, Imelda Staunton, Patrick Dempsey, April L. Hernandez, and Mario. Paramount Pictures, 2007. Goodrich, Frances, and Albert Hackett. The Diary of Anne Frank. The Language Of Literature. Eds. Arthur N. Applebee and Andrea B. Bermudez, et.al. Illinois: McDougal Littell, 2006. 448-512. Weitz, Sonia. I Promised I Would Tell. Brookline: Facing History and Ourselves, 2004.