Teaching About the Holocaust Will Not End Antisemitism

Auschwitz Death Camp

 

By Alan Singer 

Tuesday April 14, the 27th day of Nisan in the Hebrew lunar calendar, is the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. In Hebrew, Holocaust Remembrance Day is called Yom Hashoah. The U.S. Congress established the Days of Remembrance as the nation’s annual commemoration of the European Holocaust. Each year across the United States, state and local government organizations, workplaces, schools, and religious and community centers host remembrance activities to reaffirm our nation’s commitment to keeping the memory of the Holocaust alive. The Days of Remembrance run for eight days from the Sunday before Holocaust Remembrance Day, this year it will be April 12th, through the following Sunday.

Currently thirty states require that the events of the European Holocaust be part of the public school curriculum. Many of the requirements were recently enacted. Since 1996, a New York State law amended in 2022 “provides specific requirements for a course of instruction relating to the Holocaust and genocide” in grades 8-12. In 2025, the state’s Department of Education unveiled a new online resource for “Teaching the Holocaust and Other Genocides.” It includes information about ghettos where Jews were congregated before being shipped to concentration camps, the 1936 Olympics, the Kristallnacht, eugenics, resistance movements, and other significant events and ideas.

As a former high school social studies teacher and a teacher educator, I welcome expanded Holocaust education, especially comparative lessons that have students examine similarities and differences between different genocides. But I do not pretend that in the current political climate studying about the extermination of European Jewry over eighty years ago addresses antisemitism today.

Click here for the full article.

Source: Daily Kos

Image source: publicdomainpictures.net

Alan Singer is the director of Secondary Education Social Studies Teaching Learning Technology at Hofstra University and the author of Class-Conscious Coal Miners. Blogs, tweets, essays, and interviews present his views and not those of the university.