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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section History of the Holocaust

Introduction, general overviews.

• Jewish Responses in Germany to Persecution during the Prewar Period, 1933–1941
• The Third Reich, the German Public, and Nazi Anti-Semitism
• Racial Science
• Other Victims
• Final Solution: Decision-Making Process
• Killing by Shooting: Einsatzgruppen and Their Compatriots
• Concentration Camps / Forced Labor
• Extermination Centers
• Perpetrators
• Women in the Holocaust
• Economic Aspects of the Holocaust
• Punishment/Trials
• Church Responses
• Memoirs, Diaries, and Oral Histories as Historical Sources
• Holocaust Historiography

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• The Holocaust in the Soviet Union

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History of the Holocaust by Deborah Lipstadt LAST REVIEWED: 18 August 2021 LAST MODIFIED: 26 May 2016 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199840731-0127

Many historians consider the Holocaust, the systematic murder of approximately six million Jews during 1941–1945, as one of the defining moments, if not a touchstone, of the political, ethical, and religious discourse of the 20th century. It is the only time that a state, as opposed to an insurgent entity or a group of independent actors, determined to murder every member of a particular group, irrespective of their age, gender, education, location, political or religious outlook, or national identity. Any Jew across the European continent and beyond (e.g., Libya, Crete, and Rhodes) whom the Germans could lay their hands on became a potential victim. As a result of this program, which the Germans called the Final Solution, nearly two-thirds of world Jewry was murdered. The Nazis considered killing the Jews such an urgent and necessary act that even when they were losing the war they pursued this goal. From the earliest history of the Nazi Party in the 1920s, the party cast the Jew as an existential threat to the German nation. While the Nazis made the threat posed by the Jews a cornerstone of their ideology and were intent on murdering all Jews they could find, they also targeted other groups. The first to be mass murdered were those inhabitants of the Reich—“Aryans” and Jews—whom the Nazis deemed to be physically or mentally disabled and consequently “unworthy of life.” German authorities also severely persecuted German homosexuals and murdered many eastern European (particularly Slav and Polish) intellectuals and religious leaders. They also killed two to three million Soviet prisoners of war. Millions of slave laborers, particularly from eastern Europe, served in horrendous conditions, and many died as a result. The mass killings of Jews took part in two phases. The first one started in June 1941, after the invasion of the Soviet Union. Conducted by special German units called the Einsatzgruppen and Ordnungspolizei (Order Police) with extensive aid of the Wehrmacht (German army) and non-German local militia, police, and civilians, these mass shootings resulted in the murder of over a million Jews. By the end of 1941, German authorities, concerned about the emotional toll the shooting was taking on the shooters, introduced gas buses and then gas chambers.

The vast geographic reach of the Holocaust presents a challenge to historians who want to address its broadest contours. There is an immense body of research on a myriad of aspects of the topic. This makes the need for syntheses all the more crucial. Hilberg 1985 is one of the earliest comprehensive studies of the bureaucratic structure of the Final Solution. It is highly detailed and remains a standard. More-readable volumes include Friedländer 1997 and Friedländer 2007 , which take a broader perspective and focus on the victims as well as the perpetrators. Dwork and van Pelt 2002 and Bergen 2009 were written as textbooks for college use, while Longerich 2010 is more recent and includes new archival information. Berenbaum and Peck 2002 and Friedman 2011 are particularly useful in that they each contain a range of articles by leading scholars in the field. Hayes 2015 is a most useful teaching tool with long selections on most of the topics that would be included in an introductory history of the Holocaust. Hayes and Roth 2010 contains articles by leading scholars who both review a particular aspect of the Holocaust and assess the state of the current research on that aspect.

Berenbaum, Michael, and Abraham J. Peck, eds. The Holocaust and History: The Known, the Unknown, the Disputed, and the Reexamined . Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002.

This edited volume contains articles by experts in the field on many of the issues central to the history of the Holocaust, including anti-Semitism within Nazi ideology, the bureaucracy of the Nazi state, the background and motivation of the killers, the concentration camp system, Jewish leadership and resistance, rescuers, onlookers, and the survivor experience.

Bergen, Doris L. War & Genocide: A Concise History of the Holocaust . 2d ed. Critical Issues in World and International History. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009.

A concise history of the period that also asks some of the broader and more-theoretical questions. An excellent starting point for those with little background or who want an overview of the history and the underlying theoretical issues.

Dwork, Debórah, and Robert Jan van Pelt. Holocaust: A History . London: John Murray, 2002.

This comprehensive textbook artfully weaves together historical data with memoirs and other firsthand sources. Currently, this is one of the best texts for classroom use or to introduce someone to this vast topic.

Friedländer, Saul. Nazi Germany and the Jews . Vol. 1, The Years of Persecution, 1933–1939 . New York: HarperCollins, 1997.

This is a sweeping, authoritative, and exceptionally readable account of the initial years of Nazi rule. Friedländer weaves together evidence from the perpetrators as well as the victims.

Friedländer, Saul. The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945 . 1st ed. New York: HarperCollins, 2007.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in history, this volume elegantly melds the story of the persecution with the experience of the victims.

Friedman, Jonathan C., ed. The Routledge History of the Holocaust . Routledge Histories. New York: Routledge, 2011.

An exceptionally useful edited volume on an array of aspects of the history of the Holocaust, by leading figures in the field. Many of the authors pay particular attention to the evolution of their historical field. The volume serves, therefore, both as a historical and historiographical tool.

Hayes, Peter, ed. How Was It Possible? A Holocaust Reader . Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015.

Hayes believes the title’s question is answerable. This compendium of highly readable selections from participants, witnesses, and scholars addresses the fundamental issues that ultimately “explain” the Holocaust. It can be a text for a Holocaust history course as well as of interest to those already familiar with the topic.

Hayes, Peter, and John K. Roth, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Holocaust Studies . Oxford Handbooks. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.

This profoundly useful book recognizes that study of Holocaust history crosses traditional boundaries of academic disciplines. The forty-seven essays in the book summarize the state of the field at the time of publication and delineate future challenges. Each essay is an excellent starting point for someone interested in exploring a particular topic in depth.

Hilberg, Raul. The Destruction of the European Jews . New York: Holmes & Meier, 1985.

Considered one of the most authoritative texts on the destruction process, this book eschews victims’ testimony and relies only on German documents. Though Hilberg addresses the destruction process, not the Jewish response, in a few places he attributes to Jews an ingrained pattern of anticipatory compliance. These observations remain quite controversial.

Longerich, Peter. Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews . New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.

In this expanded version of his German-language Politik der Vernichtung (Munich: Piper, 1998), Longerich analyzes the ideological, political, and personal sources of the genocide. Relying on a wide range of documents, including some that were released only after the unification of Germany, Longerich argues that the Nazi policy concerning the Jews was a central, not an ancillary, aspect of their other policies.

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The Holocaust

By: History.com Editors

Updated: April 11, 2023 | Original: October 14, 2009

The Holocaust was the state-sponsored persecution and mass murder of millions of European Jews, Romani people, the intellectually disabled, political dissidents and homosexuals by the German Nazi regime between 1933 and 1945. The word “holocaust,” from the Greek words “holos” (whole) and “kaustos” (burned), was historically used to describe a sacrificial offering burned on an altar.

After years of Nazi rule in Germany, dictator Adolf Hitler’s “Final Solution”—now known as the Holocaust—came to fruition during World War II, with mass killing centers in concentration camps. About six million Jews and some five million others, targeted for racial, political, ideological and behavioral reasons, died in the Holocaust—more than one million of those who perished were children.

Historical Anti-Semitism

Anti-Semitism in Europe did not begin with Adolf Hitler . Though use of the term itself dates only to the 1870s, there is evidence of hostility toward Jews long before the Holocaust—even as far back as the ancient world, when Roman authorities destroyed the Jewish temple in Jerusalem and forced Jews to leave Palestine .

The Enlightenment , during the 17th and 18th centuries, emphasized religious tolerance, and in the 19th century Napoleon Bonaparte and other European rulers enacted legislation that ended long-standing restrictions on Jews. Anti-Semitic feeling endured, however, in many cases taking on a racial character rather than a religious one.

Did you know? Even in the early 21st century, the legacy of the Holocaust endures. Swiss government and banking institutions have in recent years acknowledged their complicity with the Nazis and established funds to aid Holocaust survivors and other victims of human rights abuses, genocide or other catastrophes.

Hitler's Rise to Power

The roots of Adolf Hitler’s particularly virulent brand of anti-Semitism are unclear. Born in Austria in 1889, he served in the German army during World War I . Like many anti-Semites in Germany, he blamed the Jews for the country’s defeat in 1918.

Soon after World War I ended, Hitler joined the National German Workers’ Party, which became the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP), known to English speakers as the Nazis. While imprisoned for treason for his role in the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923, Hitler wrote the memoir and propaganda tract “ Mein Kampf ” (or “my struggle”), in which he predicted a general European war that would result in “the extermination of the Jewish race in Germany.”

Hitler was obsessed with the idea of the superiority of the “pure” German race, which he called “Aryan,” and with the need for “Lebensraum,” or living space, for that race to expand. In the decade after he was released from prison, Hitler took advantage of the weakness of his rivals to enhance his party’s status and rise from obscurity to power.

On January 30, 1933, he was named chancellor of Germany. After the death of President Paul von Hindenburg in 1934, Hitler anointed himself Fuhrer , becoming Germany’s supreme ruler.

Concentration Camps

The twin goals of racial purity and territorial expansion were the core of Hitler’s worldview, and from 1933 onward they would combine to form the driving force behind his foreign and domestic policy.

At first, the Nazis reserved their harshest persecution for political opponents such as Communists or Social Democrats. The first official concentration camp opened at Dachau (near Munich) in March 1933, and many of the first prisoners sent there were Communists.

Like the network of concentration camps that followed, becoming the killing grounds of the Holocaust, Dachau was under the control of Heinrich Himmler , head of the elite Nazi guard, the Schutzstaffel (SS) and later chief of the German police.

By July 1933, German concentration camps ( Konzentrationslager in German, or KZ) held some 27,000 people in “protective custody.” Huge Nazi rallies and symbolic acts such as the public burning of books by Jews, Communists, liberals and foreigners helped drive home the desired message of party strength and unity.

In 1933, Jews in Germany numbered around 525,000—just one percent of the total German population. During the next six years, Nazis undertook an “Aryanization” of Germany, dismissing non-Aryans from civil service, liquidating Jewish-owned businesses and stripping Jewish lawyers and doctors of their clients. 

Nuremberg Laws

Under the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, anyone with three or four Jewish grandparents was considered a Jew, while those with two Jewish grandparents were designated Mischlinge (half-breeds).

Under the Nuremberg Laws, Jews became routine targets for stigmatization and persecution. This culminated in Kristallnacht , or the “Night of Broken Glass” in November 1938, when German synagogues were burned and windows in Jewish home and shops were smashed; some 100 Jews were killed and thousands more arrested.

From 1933 to 1939, hundreds of thousands of Jews who were able to leave Germany did, while those who remained lived in a constant state of uncertainty and fear.

HISTORY Vault: Third Reich: The Rise

Rare and never-before-seen amateur films offer a unique perspective on the rise of Nazi Germany from Germans who experienced it. How were millions of people so vulnerable to fascism?

Euthanasia Program

In September 1939, Germany invaded the western half of Poland , starting World War II . German police soon forced tens of thousands of Polish Jews from their homes and into ghettoes, giving their confiscated properties to ethnic Germans (non-Jews outside Germany who identified as German), Germans from the Reich or Polish gentiles.

Surrounded by high walls and barbed wire, the Jewish ghettoes in Poland functioned like captive city-states, governed by Jewish Councils. In addition to widespread unemployment, poverty and hunger, overpopulation and poor sanitation made the ghettoes breeding grounds for disease such as typhus.

Meanwhile, beginning in the fall of 1939, Nazi officials selected around 70,000 Germans institutionalized for mental illness or physical disabilities to be gassed to death in the so-called Euthanasia Program.

After prominent German religious leaders protested, Hitler put an end to the program in August 1941, though killings of the disabled continued in secrecy, and by 1945 some 275,000 people deemed handicapped from all over Europe had been killed. In hindsight, it seems clear that the Euthanasia Program functioned as a pilot for the Holocaust.

'Final Solution'

Throughout the spring and summer of 1940, the German army expanded Hitler’s empire in Europe, conquering Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg and France. Beginning in 1941, Jews from all over the continent, as well as hundreds of thousands of European Romani people, were transported to Polish ghettoes.

The German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 marked a new level of brutality in warfare. Mobile killing units of Himmler’s SS called Einsatzgruppen would murder more than 500,000 Soviet Jews and others (usually by shooting) over the course of the German occupation.

A memorandum dated July 31, 1941, from Hitler’s top commander Hermann Goering to Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the SD (the security service of the SS), referred to the need for an Endlösung ( Final Solution ) to “the Jewish question.”

Yellow Stars

Beginning in September 1941, every person designated as a Jew in German-held territory was marked with a yellow, six-pointed star, making them open targets. Tens of thousands were soon being deported to the Polish ghettoes and German-occupied cities in the USSR.

Since June 1941, experiments with mass killing methods had been ongoing at the concentration camp of Auschwitz , near Krakow, Poland. That August, 500 officials gassed 500 Soviet POWs to death with the pesticide Zyklon-B. The SS soon placed a huge order for the gas with a German pest-control firm, an ominous indicator of the coming Holocaust.

Holocaust Death Camps

Beginning in late 1941, the Germans began mass transports from the ghettoes in Poland to the concentration camps, starting with those people viewed as the least useful: the sick, old and weak and the very young.

The first mass gassings began at the camp of Belzec, near Lublin, on March 17, 1942. Five more mass killing centers were built at camps in occupied Poland, including Chelmno, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek and the largest of all, Auschwitz.

From 1942 to 1945, Jews were deported to the camps from all over Europe, including German-controlled territory as well as those countries allied with Germany. The heaviest deportations took place during the summer and fall of 1942, when more than 300,000 people were deported from the Warsaw ghetto alone.

Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

Amid the deportations, disease and constant hunger, incarcerated people in the Warsaw Ghetto rose up in armed revolt.

The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising from April 19-May 16, 1943, ended in the death of 7,000 Jews, with 50,000 survivors sent to extermination camps. But the resistance fighters had held off the Nazis for almost a month, and their revolt inspired revolts at camps and ghettos across German-occupied Europe.

Though the Nazis tried to keep operation of the camps secret, the scale of the killing made this virtually impossible. Eyewitnesses brought reports of Nazi atrocities in Poland to the Allied governments, who were harshly criticized after the war for their failure to respond, or to publicize news of the mass slaughter.

This lack of action was likely mostly due to the Allied focus on winning the war at hand, but was also partly a result of the general incomprehension with which news of the Holocaust was met and the denial and disbelief that such atrocities could be occurring on such a scale.

'Angel of Death'

At Auschwitz alone, more than 2 million people were murdered in a process resembling a large-scale industrial operation. A large population of Jewish and non-Jewish inmates worked in the labor camp there; though only Jews were gassed, thousands of others died of starvation or disease.

In 1943, eugenics advocate Josef Mengele arrived in Auschwitz to begin his infamous experiments on Jewish prisoners. His special area of focus was conducting medical experiments on twins , injecting them with everything from petrol to chloroform under the guise of giving them medical treatment. His actions earned him the nickname “the Angel of Death.”

Nazi Rule Ends

By the spring of 1945, German leadership was dissolving amid internal dissent, with Goering and Himmler both seeking to distance themselves from Hitler and take power.

In his last will and political testament, dictated in a German bunker that April 29, Hitler blamed the war on “International Jewry and its helpers” and urged the German leaders and people to follow “the strict observance of the racial laws and with merciless resistance against the universal poisoners of all peoples”—the Jews.

The following day, Hitler died by suicide . Germany’s formal surrender in World War II came barely a week later, on May 8, 1945.

German forces had begun evacuating many of the death camps in the fall of 1944, sending inmates under guard to march further from the advancing enemy’s front line. These so-called “death marches” continued all the way up to the German surrender, resulting in the deaths of some 250,000 to 375,000 people.

In his classic book Survival in Auschwitz , the Italian-Jewish author Primo Levi described his own state of mind, as well as that of his fellow inmates in Auschwitz on the day before Soviet troops liberated the camp in January 1945: “We lay in a world of death and phantoms. The last trace of civilization had vanished around and inside us. The work of bestial degradation, begun by the victorious Germans, had been carried to conclusion by the Germans in defeat.”

Legacy of the Holocaust

The wounds of the Holocaust—known in Hebrew as “Shoah,” or catastrophe—were slow to heal. Survivors of the camps found it nearly impossible to return home, as in many cases they had lost their entire family and been denounced by their non-Jewish neighbors. As a result, the late 1940s saw an unprecedented number of refugees, POWs and other displaced populations moving across Europe.

In an effort to punish the villains of the Holocaust, the Allies held the Nuremberg Trials of 1945-46, which brought Nazi atrocities to horrifying light. Increasing pressure on the Allied powers to create a homeland for Jewish survivors of the Holocaust would lead to a mandate for the creation of Israel in 1948.

Over the decades that followed, ordinary Germans struggled with the Holocaust’s bitter legacy, as survivors and the families of victims sought restitution of wealth and property confiscated during the Nazi years.

Beginning in 1953, the German government made payments to individual Jews and to the Jewish people as a way of acknowledging the German people’s responsibility for the crimes committed in their name.

The Holocaust. The National WWII Museum . What Was The Holocaust? Imperial War Museums . Introduction to the Holocaust. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum . Holocaust Remembrance. Council of Europe . Outreach Programme on the Holocaust. United Nations .

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HIST B323 History of the Holocaust

• Finding Books
• Sources for Researching the Holocaust
• Develop a Research Question
• Primary Sources
• Cite Sources
• Scholarly vs Popular
• Thesis Statements

What Is a Thesis?

A  thesis  is the main point or argument of an information source. (Many, but not all, writing assignments, require a thesis.)

A strong thesis is:  

• Arguable:  Can be supported by evidence and analysis, and can be disagreed with.
• Unique:  Says something new and interesting.
• Concise and clear:  Explained as simply as possible, but not at the expense of clarity.
• Unified:  All parts are clearly connected.
• Focused and specific:  Can be adequately and convincingly argued within the the paper, scope is not overly broad.
• Significant:  Has importance to readers, answers the question "so what?"

Crafting a Thesis

Research is usually vital to developing a strong thesis. Exploring sources can help you develop and refine your central point.

1. Conduct Background Research.

A strong thesis is specific and unique, so you first need knowledge of the general research topic. Background research will help you narrow your research focus and contextualize your argument in relation to other research. 

2. Narrow the Research Topic. 

Ask questions as you review sources:

• What aspect(s) of the topic interest you most?
• What questions or concerns does the topic raise for you?   Example of a general research topic:  Climate change and carbon emissions Example of more narrow topic:  U.S. government policies on carbon emissions

3. Formulate and explore a relevant research question.  

Before committing yourself to a single viewpoint, formulate a specific question to explore.  Consider different perspectives on the issue, and find sources that represent these varying views. Reflect on strengths and weaknesses in the sources' arguments. Consider sources that challenge these viewpoints.

Example:  What role does and should the U.S. government play in regulating carbon emissions?

4. Develop a working thesis. 

• A working thesis has a clear focus but is not yet be fully formed. It is a good foundation for further developing a more refined argument.   Example:  The U.S. government has the responsibility to help reduce carbon emissions through public policy and regulation.  This thesis has a clear focus but leaves some major questions unanswered. For example, why is regulation of carbon emissions important? Why should the government be held accountable for such regulation?

5. Continue research on the more focused topic.

Is the topic:

• broad enough to yield sufficient sources and supporting evidence?
• narrow enough for in-depth and focused research?
• original enough to offer a new and meaningful perspective that will interest readers? 

6. Fine-tune the thesis.

Your thesis will probably evolve as you gather sources and ideas. If your research focus changes, you may need to re-evaluate your search strategy and to conduct additional research. This is usually a good sign of the careful thought you are putting into your work!

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Is Holocaust Education Making Anti-Semitism Worse?

Using dead Jews as symbols isn’t helping living ones.

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When the 40-something reader in the kippah at my book event in Michigan approached the signing table, I already knew what he was going to say, if not the humiliating specifics. Readers like him always tell me these things. He hovered until most people had dispersed, and then described his supermarket trip that morning. Another shopper had rammed him with a cart, hard. Maybe it had been an accident, except the shopper had shouted, “The kosher bagels are in the next aisle!” He’d considered saying something to the store manager, but to what end? Besides, it wasn’t much worse than the baseball game the day before, when other fans had thrown popcorn at him and his kids.

Explore the May 2023 Issue

Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read.

The recent rise in American anti-Semitism is well documented. I could fill pages with FBI hate-crime statistics, or with a list of violent attacks from the past six years or even the past six months, or with the growing gallery of American public figures saying vile things about Jews. Or I could share stories you probably haven’t heard, such as one about a threatened attack on a Jewish school in Ohio in March 2022—where the would-be perpetrator was the school’s own security guard. But none of that would capture the vague sense of dread one encounters these days in the Jewish community, a dread unprecedented in my lifetime.

I published a book in late 2021 about exploitations of Jewish history, with the deliberately provocative title People Love Dead Jews . The anti-Semitic hate mail arrived on cue. What I didn’t expect was the torrent of private stories I received from American Jews—online, in letters, but mostly in person, in places where I’ve spoken across America.

These people talked about bosses and colleagues who repeatedly ridiculed them with anti-Semitic “jokes,” friends who turned on them when they mentioned a son’s bar mitzvah or a trip to Israel, romantic partners who openly mocked their traditions, classmates who defaced their dorm rooms and pilloried them online, teachers and neighbors who parroted conspiratorial lies. I was surprised to learn how many people were getting pennies thrown at them in 21st-century America, an anti-Semitic taunt that I thought had died around 1952. These casual stories sickened me in their volume and their similarity, a catalog of small degradations. At a time when many people in other minority groups have become bold in publicizing the tiniest of slights, these American Jews instead expressed deep shame in sharing these stories with me, feeling that they had no right to complain. After all, as many of them told me, it wasn’t the Holocaust.

This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic , Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here.       

But well-meaning people everywhere from statehouses to your local middle school have responded to this surging anti-Semitism by doubling down on Holocaust education. Before 2016, only seven states required Holocaust education in schools. In the past seven years, 18 more have passed Holocaust-education mandates. Public figures who make anti-Semitic statements are invited to tour Holocaust museums; schools respond to anti-Semitic incidents by hosting Holocaust speakers and implementing Holocaust lesson plans.

Dara Horn: Auschwitz is not a metaphor

The bedrock assumption that has endured for nearly half a century is that learning about the Holocaust inoculates people against anti-Semitism. But it doesn’t.

Holocaust education remains essential for teaching historical facts in the face of denial and distortions. Yet over the past year, as I’ve visited Holocaust museums and spoken with educators around the country, I have come to the disturbing conclusion that Holocaust education is incapable of addressing contemporary anti-Semitism. In fact, in the total absence of any education about Jews alive today, teaching about the Holocaust might even be making anti-Semitism worse.

I. The Museum Makers

You could divide the story of Skokie, Illinois, “into two periods,” Howard Reich told me: “ Before the attempted Nazi march and after .” Reich grew up in Skokie and is a former Chicago Tribune writer. His parents survived the Holocaust. When Reich was a kid in the Chicago suburb in the 1960s, they discussed their experiences only with other survivors—which back then was typical. “They didn’t want to burden us children,” Reich explained. “They didn’t want to relive the worst part of their life.” But the pain was ever present. Skokie’s Jewish community included a large survivor population; Reich remembers one neighbor whose recurring nightmares about Nazi dogs led him to kick a wall so hard that he broke his toe.

In 1977, the National Socialist Party of America wanted to march in uniform in Skokie. When the town attempted to block the march, the Nazis, represented by a Jewish ACLU lawyer committed to free speech, went to court. The case reached the Supreme Court; in the end, the law favored the Nazis, although—perhaps because they were sufficiently spooked by the public backlash—they didn’t march in Skokie at all.

The incident inspired many Skokie survivors to speak out about their experiences. They created a Holocaust museum in a small storefront and later successfully lobbied the state for one of America’s earliest Holocaust-education mandates. If American law couldn’t directly protect people from anti-Semitism, they hoped education could.

Last year, I met Skokie’s mayor, George Van Dusen, and a retired Skokie village manager named Al Rigoni in Van Dusen’s office. Both men were involved in local politics during the Nazi incident.

Like most people I spoke with who remembered that time, the men saw the outcome of the threatened march as positive. “The priests and rabbis—they never met and talked to each other until this happened,” Van Dusen said. “Out of that came our interfaith council.” Rigoni described how the town created a Human Relations Commission, investing money in police sensitivity training long before that was popular. Today Skokie holds an annual festival celebrating the 100 or so national origins of its residents. The storefront museum has been replaced with the Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center, which opened in 2009 as one of the largest Holocaust museums in the country. The old storefront is now a mosque. “Only in Skokie,” Van Dusen said, laughing.

It all seemed like a happy American story—hatred vanquished, multiculturalism triumphant. But Van Dusen and Rigoni had no answers for me when I asked why we were seeing rising anti-Semitism, despite decades of Holocaust education. Not long before I visited Skokie, anti-Semitic flyers blaming Jews for the pandemic had been left on people’s lawns there and in surrounding towns. The adjacent Chicago neighborhood of West Rogers Park, home to a large Orthodox Jewish community, saw a spree of anti-Semitic attacks in 2022 in which multiple synagogues and kosher businesses were vandalized and a congregant’s car window was smashed. A few weeks after my visit, a gunman would kill seven people and wound dozens more at a parade in the nearby town of Highland Park, which has a large Jewish population. Although authorities have said there is no indication that the suspect was motivated by racism or religious hate, anti-Semitic and racist comments had reportedly been posted under a username believed to be associated with him, including one suggesting that Jews be used as “fire retardant” and another questioning whether the Holocaust happened. The suspect was allegedly thrown out of a local synagogue months before the shooting.

“There’s a tremor in the country. People are unsettled,” Van Dusen admitted. He stirred uncomfortably in his seat. “We ask ourselves, ‘Has all of this work that we’ve all done to educate people—has it gotten through? If it hasn’t, why?’ ”

The Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center is a victim of its own success. When I arrived on a weekday morning to join a field trip from a local Catholic middle school, the museum was having a light day, with only 160 students visiting (typically, closer to 400 students visit the museum daily, alongside others). It was still so packed that the students strained to see the displays. The crowding also meant that most school groups did not explore the museum in chronological order; ours was assigned to start in the gallery describing the liberation of the concentration camps, making the history hard to follow.

“Tell me what we call a person who just watches something going on,” our docent, a local volunteer, prompted.

The students were slouchy and disengaged. But the docent pushed, and someone finally answered.

“A bystander,” a boy said.

“What would be the opposite of a bystander?” the docent asked.

The kids looked puzzled. “Activist?” one tried.

“Here at the museum, we call that person an ‘upstander,’ ” the docent said, using a term that has become ubiquitous in Holocaust education. “That’s what we’re hoping your generation will become.”

She introduced the word propaganda , prompting the kids to define it. In the 1930s, she asked, “was it possible to watch the news?”

The students all shook their head no.

“Okay,” she said with a sigh. “Have you ever heard the words movie theater  ?”

With a few more pointed questions, the docent established that the ’30s featured media beyond town criers, and that one-party control over such media helped spread propaganda. “If radio’s controlled by a certain party, you have to question that,” she said. “Back then, they didn’t.”

As we wandered through the post-liberation galleries, I wondered about that premise. Historians have pointed out that it doesn’t make sense to assume that people in previous eras were simply stupider than we are, and I doubted that 2020s Americans could outsmart 1930s Germans in detecting media bias. Propaganda has been used to incite violent anti-Semitism since ancient times, and only rarely because of one-party control. After the invention of the printing press, a rash of books appeared in Italy and Germany about Jews butchering a Christian child named Simon of Trent—an example of the lie known as the blood libel, which would later be repurposed as a key part of the QAnon conspiracy theory. This craze wasn’t caused by one-party control over printing presses, but by the lie’s popularity. I was starting to see how isolating the Holocaust from the rest of Jewish history made it hard for even the best educators to upload this irrational reality into seventh-grade brains.

We finally moved to the museum’s opening gallery, featuring pictures of smiling prewar Jews. Here the docent began by saying, “Let’s establish facts. Is Judaism a religion or a nationality?”

My stomach sank. The question betrayed a fundamental misunderstanding of Jewish identity—Jews predate the concepts of both religion and nationality. Jews are members of a type of social group that was common in the ancient Near East but is uncommon in the West today: a joinable tribal group with a shared history, homeland, and culture, of which a nonuniversalizing religion is but one feature. Millions of Jews identify as secular, which would be illogical if Judaism were merely a religion. But every non-Jewish society has tried to force Jews into whatever identity boxes it knows best—which is itself a quiet act of domination.

“A religion,” one kid answered.

“Religion, right,” the docent affirmed. (Later, in the gallery about Kristallnacht, she pointed out how Jews had been persecuted for having the “wrong religion,” which would have surprised the many Jewish converts to Christianity who wound up murdered. I know the docent knew this; she later told me she had abbreviated things to hustle our group to the museum’s boxcar.)

The docent motioned toward the prewar gallery’s photos showing Jewish school groups and family outings, and asked how the students would describe their subjects’ lives, based on the pictures.

“Normal,” a girl said.

“Normal, perfect,” the docent said. “They paid taxes, they fought in the wars—all of a sudden, things changed.”

All of a sudden, things changed. Kelley Szany, the museum’s senior vice president of education and exhibitions, had told me that the museum had made a conscious decision not to focus on the long history of anti-Semitism that preceded the Holocaust, and made it possible. To be fair, adequately covering this topic would have required an additional museum. But the idea of sudden change—referring to not merely the Nazi takeover, but the shift from a welcoming society to an unwelcoming one—was also reinforced by survivors in videos around the museum. No wonder: Survivors who had lived long enough to tell their stories to contemporary audiences were young before the war, many of them younger than the middle schoolers in my tour group. They did not have a lifetime of memories of anti-Semitic harassment and social isolation prior to the Holocaust. For 6-year-olds who saw their synagogue burn—unlike their parents and grandparents, who might have survived various pogroms, or endured pre-Nazi anti-Semitic boycotts and other campaigns that ostracized Jews politically and socially—everything really did “suddenly” change.

Then there was the word normal . More than 80 percent of Jewish Holocaust victims spoke Yiddish, a 1,000-year-old European Jewish language spoken around the world, with its own schools, books, newspapers, theaters, political organizations, advertising, and film industry. On a continent where language was tightly tied to territory, this was hardly “normal.” Traditional Jewish practices—which include extremely detailed rules governing food and clothing and 100 gratitude blessings recited each day—were not “normal” either.

The Nazi project was about murdering Jews, but also about erasing Jewish civilization. The museum’s valiant effort to teach students that Jews were “just like everyone else,” after Jews have spent 3,000 years deliberately not being like everyone else, felt like another erasure. Teaching children that one shouldn’t hate Jews, because Jews are “normal,” only underlines the problem: If someone doesn’t meet your version of “normal,” then it’s fine to hate them. This framing perhaps explains why many victims of today’s American anti-Semitic street violence are visibly religious Jews—as were many Holocaust victims.

Like most Holocaust educators I encountered across the country, Szany is not Jewish. And also like most Holocaust educators I encountered, she is exactly the sort of person everyone should want educating their children: intelligent, intentional, empathetic.

When I asked about worst practices in Holocaust education, Szany had many to share, which turned out to be widely agreed-upon among American Holocaust educators. First on the list: “simulations.” Apparently some teachers need to be told not to make students role-play Nazis versus Jews in class, or not to put masking tape on the floor in the exact dimensions of a boxcar in order to cram 200 students into it. Like many educators I spoke with, Szany also condemned Holocaust fiction such as the international best seller The Boy in the Striped Pajamas , an exceedingly popular work of ahistorical Christian-savior schlock. She didn’t feel that Anne Frank’s diary was a good choice either, because it’s “not a story of the Holocaust”—it offers little information about most Jews’ experiences of persecution, and ends before the author’s capture and murder.

From the December 2022 issue: Monuments to the Unthinkable

Other officially failed techniques include showing students gruesome images, and prompting self-flattery by asking “What would you have done?” Yet another bad idea is counting objects. This was the conceit of a widely viewed 2004 documentary called Paper Clips , in which non-Jewish Tennessee schoolchildren, struggling to grasp the magnitude of 6 million murdered Jews, represented those Jews by collecting millions of paper clips. The film won numerous awards and an Emmy nomination before anyone noticed that it is demeaning to represent Jewish people as office supplies.

Best practices, Szany explained, are the opposite: focusing on individual stories, hearing from survivors and victims in their own words. The Illinois museum tries to “rescue the individuals from the violence,” Szany said, “to remind people that this happened to everyday people.” This is why survivors have long been a fixture of museum education programs. But survivors are aging. Soon, none will be left. To address this looming reality, the museum went big: It sent survivors to Los Angeles to become holograms.

Aaron Elster and Fritzie Fritzshall were among the Skokie survivors inspired by the 1970s Nazi incident to share their stories; both spoke frequently at the museum. In 2015, at the University of Southern California Shoah Foundation, a Holocaust-testimony archive and resource center founded by Steven Spielberg, they and a handful of others were each filmed for 40 hours in order to be turned into holograms. Now, in Skokie, keyword-driven artificial intelligence allows the holograms to respond to questions from the audience in a 60-seat theater. As Szany ran a private demo of the technology for me, I asked how visitors react to it. “They’re more comfortable with the holograms than the real survivors,” Szany said. “Because they know they won’t be judged.”

We watched a brief film about Elster’s life in Nazi-occupied Poland: how his family starved in a ghetto from which he eventually escaped; how his mother found a Catholic woman to shelter his older sister; how that woman initially rejected him, then finally hid him in her barn’s attic; how he didn’t leave the attic for two years. Then Szany summoned the holographic Elster (the real Elster died in 2018). He spoke from a red armchair, perky and animated as he answered a softball question she asked about how he’d entertained himself while hiding alone: “I was able to take myself away, to pretend. I drew things in my mind. I wrote whole novels in my mind.”

I asked him why the woman who took in his sister had hesitated to hide him too.

He looked startled. “I really don’t know why Irene wasn’t with me.”

I tried rephrasing my question, then simplifying it. Elster, with a warm smile, said something irrelevant. Soon I felt as I often had with actual Holocaust survivors I’d known when I was younger: frustrated as they answered questions I hadn’t asked, and vaguely insulted as they treated me like an annoyance to be managed. (I bridged this divide once I learned Yiddish in my 20s, and came to share with them a vast vocabulary of not only words, but people, places, stories, ideas—a way of thinking and being that contained not a few horrific years but centuries of hard-won vitality and resilience.)

Szany at last explained to me what the dead Elster couldn’t: The woman who sheltered his sister took only girls because it was too easy for people to confirm that the boys were Jews.

I realized that I wouldn’t have wanted to hear this answer from Elster. I did not want to make this thoughtful man sit onstage and discuss his own circumcision with an audience of non-Jewish teenagers. The idea felt just as dehumanizing as pulling down a boy’s pants to reveal a reality of embodied Judaism that, both here and in that barn, had been drained of any meaning beyond persecution. I looked at the dead man smiling in front of me and felt a wave of nauseating relief. At least the real Elster didn’t have to deal with these stupid questions anymore.

The holograms weren’t the only elaborate attempt to capture the past. In an equally uncomfortable mashup of cool tech and dead Jews, the museum offers virtual-reality tours of Auschwitz, which have also been piloted in three schools. Fritzie Fritzshall, who died in 2021, was my guide from beyond the grave.

In a small room, I put on a headset. Soon I was outside Fritzshall’s grandparents’ home, in Hungary (now Ukraine), and then I was in a boxcar bound for Auschwitz, with silhouetted animated figures dropped in around me and a soundtrack of babies screaming as Fritzshall described how her grandfather had died during the suffocating trip.

Here I am in a boxcar , I thought, and tried to make it feel real. I spun my head to take in the immersive scene, which swung around me as though I were on a rocking ship. I felt dizzy and disoriented, purely physical feelings that distracted me. Did this not count as a simulation?

I regained my bearings and joined Fritzshall beside the train tracks at Auschwitz— Here I am at Auschwitz , I thought—and later followed her to the exterior of the camp’s remaining crematorium, where she described the last time she saw her mother, and then into the gas chamber. I spun my head around again. Here I am in a gas chamber.

I had visited Auschwitz in actual reality, years ago. With my headset on, I tried to summon the emotional intensity I remembered feeling then. But I couldn’t, because all of the things that had made it powerful were missing. When I was there, I was touching things, smelling things, sifting soil between my fingers that the guide said contained human bone ash, feeling comforted as I recited the mourner’s prayer, the kaddish, with others, the ancient words an undertow of paradox and praise: May the great Name be blessed, forever and ever and ever. Now I was just watching a movie that stretched around to the back of my head. It felt less like reality than like a sophisticated video game.

Read: Teaching the Holocaust in Germany as a resurgent far right questions it

Ironically, the program’s most moving moment was when the VR gave way to a two-dimensional, animated version of one of Fritzshall’s memories. She was the youngest person forced to do slave labor in a factory packed with 600 women. When the other women realized how young she was, they collected crumbs of their bread ration for her, which she rolled into a nub no bigger than a tooth. They gave her these specks on the condition that, if she survived, she would remember them and share their stories.

The moment stayed with me. Only later did I notice that the program had told me absolutely nothing about these other women. The artistic animation rendered them as black-and-white forms with indistinct faces, a revealing choice. I knew how this faceless crowd had suffered and died. But did that count as remembering them?

Students at the Skokie museum can visit an area called the Take a Stand Center , which opens with a bright display of modern and contemporary “upstanders,” including activists such as the Nobel laureate Malala Yousafzai and the athlete Carli Lloyd. Szany had told me that educators “wanted more resources” to connect “the history of the Holocaust to lessons of today.” (I heard this again and again elsewhere too.) As far as I could discern, almost nobody in this gallery was Jewish.

In the language I often encountered in Holocaust-education resources, people who lived through the Holocaust were neatly categorized as “perpetrators,” “victims,” “bystanders,” or “upstanders.” Jewish resisters, though, were rarely classified as “upstanders.” (Zivia Lubetkin, a Jewish resistance leader who was mentioned in the Take a Stand Center, was a notable exception.) But the post-Holocaust activists featured in this gallery were nearly all people who had stood up for their own group. Only Jews, the unspoken assumption went, were not supposed to stand up for themselves.

Visitors were asked to “take the pledge” by posting notes on a wall (“I pledge to protect the Earth!” “I pledge to be KIND!”). Screens near the exit provided me with a menu of “action plans” to email myself to help fulfill my pledge: how to fundraise, how to contact my representatives, how to start an organization. It was all so earnest that for the first time since entering the museum, I felt something like hope. Then I noticed it: “Steps for Organizing a Demonstration.” The Nazis in Skokie, like their predecessors, had known how to organize a demonstration. They hadn’t been afraid to be unpopular. They’d taken a stand.

I left the museum haunted by the uncomfortable truth that the structures of a democratic society could not really prevent, and could even empower, dangerous, irrational rage. Something of that rage haunted me too.

The effort to transform the Holocaust into a lesson, coupled with the imperative to “connect it to today,” had at first seemed straightforward and obvious. After all, why learn about these horrible events if they aren’t relevant now? But the more I thought about it, the less obvious it seemed. What were students being taught to “take a stand” for? How could anyone, especially young people with little sense of proportion, connect the murder of 6 million Jews to today without landing in a swamp of Holocaust trivialization, like the COVID-protocol protesters who’d pinned Jewish stars to their shirt and carried posters of Anne Frank? Despite the protesters’ clear anti-Semitism (because, yes, it is anti-Semitic to use the mass murder of Jews as a prop), weren’t they and others like them doing exactly what Holocaust educators claimed they wanted people to do?

II. The Curriculum Creators

In May 2022 , I traveled to Seattle to give a paid lecture at the Holocaust Center for Humanity about my work on Jewish memory. There I met Paul Regelbrugge, the center’s director of education; Ilana Cone Kennedy, its chief operating officer; and Richard Greene, its museum and technology director. They eagerly agreed to give me an inside look at their work, no matter what I might say about it.

The Seattle center is far more typical of American Holocaust museums than the Skokie one is. Its exhibition is barely more than a storefront—“the Holocaust in 1,400 square feet,” Greene joked—with a display built around artifacts from local survivors. The center mainly focuses on outside programming, running a speakers’ bureau of local survivors and “legacy speakers” (mostly survivors’ children and grandchildren), inviting guest lecturers like me, and supplying schools with “teaching trunks” filled with classroom materials. Since 2019, when Washington passed a law recommending (though not mandating) Holocaust education, the center has built its own curriculum and trained teachers across the state.

The 2019 law was inspired by a changing reality in Washington and around the country. In recent years, Kennedy said, she’s received more and more messages about anti-Semitic vandalism and harassment in schools. For example, she told me, “someone calls and says, ‘There’s a swastika drawn in the bathroom.’ ”

Can she fix it? I asked. By teaching about the Holocaust? (It seemed to me that the kid who drew the swastika had heard about the Holocaust.)

Maybe not, Kennedy admitted. “What frightens me is that small acts of anti-Semitism are becoming very normalized,” she said. “We’re getting used to it. That keeps me up at night.”

“Sadly, I don’t think we can fix this,” Regelbrugge said. “But we’re gonna die trying.”

What disturbed me most about this comment was that Kennedy almost did die trying.

On July 28, 2006, Kennedy, who is Jewish, was seven months pregnant and in her third year of working at the Holocaust Center, which at the time was in an office one floor below the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle, a nonprofit serving Jewish and community needs. That day, a man held the 14-year-old niece of a Federation employee at gunpoint and forced her to buzz him into the building. (The Federation’s doors, like those of most Jewish institutions in America, are perpetually locked for exactly this reason.) Once inside, he ranted about Israel and began shooting people at their desks. He murdered 58-year-old Pamela Waechter and wounded five others. After injuring Dayna Klein, 37 years old and four months pregnant, he held her hostage with a gun to her head as Klein persuaded him to speak with a 911 dispatcher. He eventually surrendered. Kennedy had stopped by the Federation’s office moments before the attack. After hearing gunshots, she placed one of the incident’s first 911 calls, and later saw a woman she’d just spoken with drenched in blood. Her 911 call made her a witness at the attacker’s trial, at which point she was pregnant with her second child. The irony of experiencing this attack while working at a Holocaust-education center was not lost on Kennedy. “There were Holocaust survivors calling me to see if I was okay!” she said.

Talking with Kennedy, I realized, with a jolt of unexpected horror, that there was an entirely unplanned pattern in my Holocaust tour across America. Almost every city where I spoke with Holocaust-museum educators, whether by phone or in person, had also been the site of a violent anti-Semitic attack in the years since these museums had opened: a murdered museum guard in Washington, D.C.; a synagogue hostage-taking in a Dallas-area suburb; young children shot at a Jewish summer camp in Los Angeles. I was struck by how minimally these attacks were discussed in the educational materials shared by the museums.

The Skokie museum was built because of a Nazi march that never happened. But this more recent, actual anti-Semitic violence, which happened near or even inside these museums, rarely came up in my conversations with educators about the Holocaust’s contemporary relevance. In fact, with the exception of Kennedy and Regelbrugge, no one I spoke with mentioned these anti-Semitic attacks at all.

The failure to address contemporary anti-Semitism in most of American Holocaust education is, in a sense, by design. In his article “The Origins of Holocaust Education in American Public Schools,” the education historian Thomas D. Fallace recounts the story of the (mostly non-Jewish) teachers in Massachusetts and New Jersey who created the country’s first Holocaust curricula, in the ’70s. The point was to teach morality in a secular society. “Everyone in education, regardless of ethnicity, could agree that Nazism was evil and that the Jews were innocent victims,” Fallace wrote, explaining the topic’s appeal. “Thus, teachers used the Holocaust to activate the moral reasoning of their students”—to teach them to be good people.

Dara Horn: Why democracies are so slow to respond to evil

The idea that Holocaust education can somehow serve as a stand-in for public moral education has not left us. And because of its obviously laudable goals, objecting to it feels like clubbing a baby seal. Who wouldn’t want to teach kids to be empathetic? And by this logic, shouldn’t Holocaust education, because of its moral content alone, automatically inoculate people against anti-Semitism?

Apparently not. “Essentially the moral lessons that the Holocaust is often used to teach reflect much the same values that were being taught in schools before the Holocaust,” the British Holocaust educator Paul Salmons has written . (Germans in the ’30s, after all, were familiar with the Torah’s commandment, repeated in the Christian Bible, to love their neighbors.) This fact undermines nearly everything Holocaust education is trying to accomplish, and reveals the roots of its failure.

One problem with using the Holocaust as a morality play is exactly its appeal: It flatters everyone. We can all congratulate ourselves for not committing mass murder. This approach excuses current anti-Semitism by defining anti-Semitism as genocide in the past. When anti-Semitism is reduced to the Holocaust, anything short of murdering 6 million Jews—like, say, ramming somebody with a shopping cart, or taunting kids at school, or shooting up a Jewish nonprofit, or hounding Jews out of entire countries—seems minor by comparison.

But a larger problem emerges when we ignore the realities of how anti-Semitism works. If we teach that the Holocaust happened because people weren’t nice enough—that they failed to appreciate that humans are all the same, for instance, or to build a just society—we create the self-congratulatory space where anti-Semitism grows. One can believe that humans are all the same while being virulently anti-Semitic, because according to anti-Semites, Jews, with their millennia-old insistence on being different from their neighbors, are the obstacle to humans all being the same. One can believe in creating a just society while being virulently anti-Semitic, because according to anti-Semites, Jews, with their imagined power and privilege, are the obstacle to a just society. To inoculate people against the myth that humans have to erase their differences in order to get along, and the related myth that Jews, because they have refused to erase their differences, are supervillains, one would have to acknowledge that these myths exist. To really shatter them, one would have to actually explain the content of Jewish identity, instead of lazily claiming that Jews are just like everyone else.

Many Holocaust educators have begun to notice this problem. Jen Goss, who taught high-school history for 19 years and is now the program manager for Echoes & Reflections, one of several major Holocaust-curriculum providers, told me about the “terrible Jew jokes” she’d heard from her own students in Virginia. “They don’t necessarily know where they come from or even really why they’re saying them,” Goss said. “Many kids understand not to say the N-word, but they would say, ‘Don’t be such a Jew.’ ”

“There’s a decline in history education at the same time that there’s a rise in social media,” Gretchen Skidmore, the director of education initiatives at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, in Washington, D.C., told me. “We’ve done studies with our partners at Holocaust centers that show that students are coming in with questions about whether the Holocaust was an actual event. That wasn’t true 20 years ago.”

Goss believes that one of the reasons for the lack of stigma around anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and jokes is baked into the universal-morality approach to Holocaust education. “The Holocaust is not a good way to teach about ‘bullying,’ ” Goss told me, with obvious frustration.

Echoes & Reflections’ lesson plans do address newer versions of anti-Semitism, including the contemporary demonization of Israel’s existence—as opposed to criticism of Israeli policies—and its manifestation in aggression against Jews. Other Holocaust-curriculum providers also have material on contemporary anti-Semitism. The Museum of Tolerance, in Los Angeles, whose core exhibition is about Holocaust history, recently opened a new gallery on this topic. Still, these providers rarely explain or explore who Jews are today—and their raison d’être remains Holocaust education.

“I worked as an administrator of a college Holocaust-resource center, and I can’t tell you how many kids would come in and be like, ‘I love the Holocaust!’ ” Goss said.

This observation reminded me of what I’d heard from other educators. Many teachers had told me that their classrooms “come alive” when they teach about the Holocaust. Some had attributed students’ interest to the subject matter itself: Its titillating gruesomeness makes students feel sophisticated for tackling a “difficult” topic, and superior for seeing the evil that their predecessors apparently ignored. But one underappreciated reason for Holocaust education’s classroom “success” is that after decades of development, Holocaust-education materials are just plain better than those on most other historical topics. All of the major Holocaust-education providers offer lessons that teachers can easily adapt for different grade levels and subject areas. Instead of lecturing and memorization, they use participation-based methods such as group work, hands-on activities, and “learner driven” projects.

But is there any evidence that Holocaust education reduces anti-Semitism, other than fending off Holocaust denial? A 2019 Pew Research Center survey found a correlation between “warm” feelings about Jews and knowledge about the Holocaust—but the respondents who said they knew a Jewish person also tended to be more knowledgeable about the Holocaust, providing a more obvious source for their feelings. In 2020, Echoes & Reflections published a commissioned study of 1,500 college students, comparing students who had been exposed to Holocaust education in high school with those who hadn’t. The published summary shows that those who had studied the Holocaust were more likely to tolerate diverse viewpoints, and more likely to privately support victims of bullying scenarios, which is undoubtedly good news. It did not, however, show a significant difference in respondents’ willingness to defend victims publicly, and students who’d received Holocaust education were less likely to be civically engaged—in other words, to be an “upstander.”

These studies puzzled me. As Goss told me, the Holocaust was not about bullying—so why was the Echoes study measuring that? More important, why were none of these studies examining awareness of anti-Semitism, whether past or present?

One major study addressing this topic was conducted in England, where a national Holocaust-education mandate has been in place for more than 20 years. In 2016, researchers at University College London’s Centre for Holocaust Education published a survey of more than 8,000 English secondary-school students, including 244 whom they interviewed at length. The study’s most disturbing finding was that even among those who studied the Holocaust, there was “a very common struggle among many students to credibly explain why Jews were targeted” in the Holocaust—that is, to cite anti-Semitism. When researchers interviewed students to press this question, “many students appeared to regard [Jews’] existence as problematic and a key cause of Nazi victimisation.” In other words, students blamed the Holocaust on the Jews . (This result resembles that of a large 2020 survey of American Millennials and Gen Zers, in which 11 percent of respondents believed that Jews caused the Holocaust. The state with the highest percentage of respondents believing this—an eye-popping 19 percent—was New York, which has mandated Holocaust education since the 1990s.)

Worse, in the English study, “a significant number of students appeared to tacitly accept some of the egregious claims once circulated by Nazi propaganda,” instead of recognizing them as anti-Semitic myths. One typical student told researchers, “Is it because like they were kind of rich, so maybe they thought that that was kind of in some way evil, like the money didn’t belong to them[;] it belonged to the Germans and the Jewish people had kind of taken that away from them?” Another was even more blunt: “The Germans, when they saw the Jews were better off than them, kind of, I don’t know, it kind of pissed them off a bit.” Hitler’s speeches were more eloquent in making similar points.

III. The Teachers

The Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum, which opened in 2019, takes up an entire city block in the downtown historic district. I was there to attend the annual Candy Brown Holocaust and Human Rights Educator Conference, where more than 60 teachers from Texas, Arkansas, and Oklahoma gathered for professional-development workshops last July. The “upstander” branding I’d encountered in Skokie and elsewhere was even more intense in Dallas. The museum’s lobby featured a giant red wall painted with the word UPSTANDER . Each teacher at the conference received a tote bag labeled UPSTANDER , a wristband emblazoned with UPSTANDER , and a book titled The Upstander .

One of the teachers I met was Benjamin Vollmer, a veteran conference participant who has spent years building his school’s Holocaust-education program. He teaches eighth-grade English in Venus, Texas, a rural community with 5,700 residents; his school is majority Hispanic, and most students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. When I asked him why he focuses on the Holocaust, his initial answer was simple: “It meets the TEKS.”

The TEKS are the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills, an elaborate list of state educational requirements that drive standardized testing. But as I spoke more with Vollmer, it became apparent that Holocaust education was something much bigger for his students: a rare access point to a wider world. Venus is about 30 miles from Dallas, but Vollmer’s annual Holocaust-museum field trip is the first time that many of his students ever leave their town.

“It’s become part of the school culture,” Vollmer said. “In eighth grade, they walk in, and the first thing they ask is, ‘When are we going to learn about the Holocaust?’ ”

Vollmer is not Jewish—and, as is common for Holocaust educators, he has never had a Jewish student. (Jews are 2.4 percent of the U.S. adult population, according to a 2020 Pew survey.) Why not focus on something more relevant to his students, I asked him, like the history of immigration or the civil-rights movement?

I hadn’t yet appreciated that the absence of Jews was precisely the appeal.

“Some topics have been so politicized that it’s too hard to teach them,” Vollmer told me. “Making it more historical takes away some of the barriers to talking about it.”

Wouldn’t the civil-rights movement, I asked, be just as historical for his students?

He paused, thinking it through. “You have to build a level of rapport in your class before you have the trust to explore your own history,” he finally said.

Another Texas teacher, who wouldn’t share her name, put it more bluntly. “The Holocaust happened long ago, and we’re not responsible for it,” she said. “Anything happening in our world today, the wool comes down over our eyes.” Her colleague attending the conference with her, a high-school teacher who also wouldn’t share her name, had tried to take her mostly Hispanic students to a virtual-reality experience called Carne y Arena, which follows migrants attempting to illegally cross the U.S.-Mexico border. Her administrators refused, claiming that it would traumatize students. But they still learn about the Holocaust.

Student discomfort has been a legal issue in Texas. The state’s House Bill 3979, passed in 2021, is one of many “anti-critical-race-theory” laws that conservative state legislators have introduced since 2020. The bill forbade teachers from causing students “discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of the individual’s race or sex,” and also demanded that teachers introduce “diverse and contending perspectives” when teaching “controversial” topics, “without giving deference to any one perspective.” (The “discomfort” language was removed in later legislation; the modified law now requires teaching “currently controversial” topics “objectively” and forbids schools from teaching that any student “bears responsibility, blame, or guilt for actions committed by other members of the same race or sex.”)

These vaguely worded laws stand awkwardly beside a 2019 state law mandating Holocaust education for Texas students at all grade levels during an annual Holocaust Remembrance Week. In October 2021, a school administrator in Southlake, Texas, made national news after clumsily suggesting that teachers might need to present “other perspectives” on the Holocaust. (The district quickly apologized, but the remarks brought public attention to the chilling effect these kinds of bills can have on teaching about bigotry of any kind.)

Texas teachers are also legally required to excuse students from reading assignments if the students’ parents object to them. The Dallas museum’s president and CEO, Mary Pat Higgins, told me that the administrator who’d made the viral remarks in Southlake is a strong proponent of Holocaust education, but was acknowledging a reality in that school district. Every year, the administrator had told Higgins, some parents in her district object to their children reading the Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel’s memoir Night —because it isn’t their “belief” that the Holocaust happened.

In one model lesson at the conference, participants examined a speech by the Nazi official Heinrich Himmler about the need to murder Jews, alongside a speech by the Hebrew poet and ghetto fighter Abba Kovner encouraging a ghetto uprising. I only later realized that this lesson plan quite elegantly satisfied the House bill’s requirement of providing “contending perspectives.”

The next day, I asked the instructor if that was an unspoken goal of her lesson plan. With visible hesitation, she said that teaching in Texas can be like “walking the tightrope.” This way, she added, “you’re basing your perspectives on primary texts and not debating with Holocaust deniers.” Less than an hour later, a senior museum employee pulled me aside to tell me that I wasn’t allowed to interview the staff.

Many of the visiting educators at the conference declined to talk with me, even anonymously; nearly all who did spoke guardedly. The teachers I met, most of whom were white Christian women, did not seem to be of any uniform political bent. But virtually all of them were frustrated by what administrators and parents were demanding of them.

Two local middle-school teachers told me that many parents insist on seeing reading lists. Parents “wanting to keep their kid in a bubble,” one of them said, has been “the huge stumbling block.” Choosing her words carefully as she described teaching the Holocaust, her colleague said, “It is healthy to begin this study by talking about anti-Semitism, humanizing the victims, sticking to primary sources, and remaining as neutral as possible.”

I glanced down at my conference-issued wristband. Wasn’t “remaining as neutral as possible” exactly the opposite of being an upstander?

In trying to remain neutral, some teachers seemed to want to seek out the Holocaust’s bright side—and ask dead Jews about it. In the museum, the teachers and I met another hologram, the Dallas resident Max Glauben, who had died several months earlier. We watched a brief introduction about Glauben’s childhood and early adolescence in the Warsaw Ghetto and in numerous camps. When the dead man appeared, one teacher asked, “Was there any joy or happiness in this ordeal? Moments of joy in the camps?”

Holographic Glauben shifted uncomfortably in his armchair. “In the Warsaw Ghetto in the early days,” he said, “there was theater, there was plays, dancing shows. There were musicians at the beginning, but as food became scarce, many disappeared.” This did not answer the teacher’s question about joy in the camps.

Later I read The Upstander , Glauben’s biography—the book the museum distributed to conference participants. (This was another of the few instances I encountered of someone Jewish being called an “upstander.”) Glauben’s experiences during the Holocaust included watching Nazis disembowel Jewish prisoners. He saw one German officer torture Jews by riding over them with his motorcycle. The Upstander also mentions a room in one camp where Jewish boys were routinely raped. Glauben’s memory, he told his biographer, had blocked what happened to him when a Nazi took him to that room. But after learning decades later about what went on there, he says in the book, “I think he abused me.” These experiences, hardly unusual for Jewish victims, were not the work of a faceless killing machine. Instead they reveal a gleeful and imaginative sadism. For perpetrators, this was fun. Asking this dead man about “joy” seemed like a fundamental misunderstanding of the Holocaust. There was plenty of joy, just on the Nazi side.

In the educational resources I explored, I did not encounter any discussions of sadism—the joy derived from humiliating people, the dopamine hit from landing a laugh at someone else’s expense, the self-righteous high from blaming one’s problems on others—even though this, rather than the fragility of democracy or the passivity of bystanders, is a major origin point of all anti-Semitism. To anyone who has spent 10 seconds online, that sadism is familiar, and its source is familiar too: the fear of being small, and the desire to feel big by making others feel small instead.

The countless Holocaust educational materials I’d perused generally presented Nazis as joylessly efficient. But it is highly inefficient to interrupt mass murder by, say, forcing Jews to dance naked with Torah scrolls, as the Yiddish poet Avrom Sutzkever testified about at the Nuremberg trials, or forcing Jews to make pornographic films, as the educator Chaim A. Kaplan documented in his Warsaw Ghetto diary. Nazis were, among other things, edgelords, in it for the laughs. So, for that matter, were the rest of history’s anti-Semites, then and now. For Americans today, isn’t this the most relevant insight of all?

“People say we’ve learned from the Holocaust. No, we didn’t learn a damn thing,” Kim Klett told me one evening during the conference, over bright-blue margaritas. Klett is a longtime teacher in Mesa, Arizona, and a facilitator for Echoes & Reflections. An instructor at the Dallas conference, she also trains Holocaust educators across the U.S.

“People glom on to this idea of the upstander,” she said. “Kids walk away with the sense that there were a lot of upstanders, and they think, Yes, I can do it too .” The problem with presenting the less inspiring reality, she suggested, is how parents or administrators might react. “If you teach historical anti-Semitism, you have to teach contemporary anti-Semitism. A lot of teachers are fearful, because if you try to connect it to today, parents are going to call, or administrators are going to call, and say you’re pushing an agenda.”

But weren’t teachers supposed to “push an agenda” to stop hatred? Wasn’t that the entire hope of those survivors who built museums and lobbied for mandates and turned themselves into holograms?

I asked Klett why no one seemed to be teaching anything about Jewish culture. If the whole point of Holocaust education is to “humanize” those who were “dehumanized,” why do most teachers introduce students to Jews only when Jews are headed for a mass grave? “There’s a real fear of teaching about Judaism,” she confided. “Especially if the teacher is Jewish.”

I was baffled. Teachers who taught about industrialized mass murder were scared of teaching about … Judaism? Why?

“Because the teachers are afraid that the parents are going to say that they’re pushing their religion on the kids.”

But Jews don’t do that, I said. Judaism isn’t a proselytizing religion like Christianity or Islam; Jews don’t believe that anyone needs to become Jewish in order to be a good person, or to enjoy an afterlife, or to be “saved.” This seemed to be yet another basic fact of Jewish identity that no one had bothered to teach or learn.

Klett shrugged. “Survivors have told me, ‘Thank you for teaching this. They’ll listen to you because you’re not Jewish,’ ” she said. “Which is weird.”

“Weird” is one way to put it. Another might be “enraging,” or “devastating,” or perhaps we could be honest and just say “There is no point in teaching any of this”—because anti-Semitism is so ingrained in our world that even when discussing the murders of 6 million Jews, it would be “pushing an agenda” to tell people not to hate them, or to tell anyone what it actually means to be Jewish. Better to keep the VR headset on and stay on the track. Jews have one job in this story, which is to die.

This made me, in the language of Texas House Bill 3979, uncomfortable.

The Dallas Museum was the only one I visited that opened with an explanation of who Jews are. Its exhibition began with brief videos about Abraham and Moses—limiting Jewish identity to a “religion” familiar to non-Jews, but it was better than nothing. The museum also debunked the false charge that the Jews—rather than the Romans—killed Jesus, and explained the Jews’ refusal to convert to other faiths. It even had a panel or two about contemporary Dallas Jewish life. Even so, a docent there told me that one question students ask is “Are any Jews still alive today?”

I couldn’t blame the kids for asking. American Holocaust education, in this museum and nearly everywhere else, never ends with Jews alive today. Instead it ends by segueing to other genocides, or to other minorities’ suffering. (In Dallas, these subjects took up most of two museum wings.) This erasure feels completely normal. Better than normal, even: noble, humane.

But when one reaches the end of the exhibition on American slavery at the National Museum of African American History and Culture, in Washington, D.C., one does not then enter an exhibition highlighting the enslavement of other groups throughout world history, or a room full of interactive touchscreens about human trafficking today, asking that visitors become “upstanders” in fighting it. That approach would be an insult to Black history, ignoring Black people’s current experiences while turning their past oppression into nothing but a symbol for something else, something that actually matters. It is dehumanizing to be treated as a symbol. It is even more dehumanizing to be treated as a warning.

IV. A Way Forward

How should we teach children about anti-Semitism? Listening to Charlotte Decoster, the Dallas museum’s director of education, I glimpsed a possible path. Decoster began her conference workshop by introducing “vocabulary must-knows.” At the top of her list: anti-Semitism .

“If you don’t explain the ism,” she cautioned the teachers in the room, “you will need to explain to the kids ‘Why the Jews?’ Students are going to see Nazis as aliens who bring with them anti-Semitism when they come to power in ’33, and they take it back away at the end of the Holocaust in 1945.”

She asked the teachers, “What’s the first example of the persecution of the Jews in history?”

The teachers looked at her blankly until one raised a hand. “I once read something about Jews getting blamed and killed for the Black Death,” the teacher said. “That was a big eye-opener for me.”

Decoster looked unimpressed. “Can you think of anything earlier than that?”

More blank stares. Finally, one woman said, “Are you talking about the Old Testament?”

“Think ancient Egypt,” Decoster said. “Does this sound familiar to any of you?”

“They’re enslaved by the Egyptian pharaoh,” a teacher said.

I wasn’t sure that the biblical Exodus narrative exactly qualified as “history,” but it quickly became clear that wasn’t Decoster’s point. “Why does the pharaoh pick on the Jews?” she asked. “Because they had one God.”

I was stunned. Rarely in my journey through American Holocaust education did I hear anyone mention a Jewish belief.

“The Jews worship one God, and that’s their moral structure. Egyptian society has multiple gods whose authority goes to the pharaoh. When things go wrong, you can see how Jews as outsiders were perceived by the pharaoh as the threat.”

This unexpected understanding of Jewish belief revealed a profound insight about Judaism: Its rejection of idolatry is identical to its rejection of tyranny. I could see how that might make people uncomfortable.

Decoster moved on to a snazzy infographic of a wheel divided in thirds, each explaining a component of anti-Semitism: “Racial Antisemitism = False belief that Jews are a race and a threat to other races,” then “Anti-Judaism = Hatred of Jews as a religious group,” and then “Anti-Jewish Conspiracy Theory = False belief that Jews want to control and overtake the world.” The third part, the conspiracy theory, was what distinguished anti-Semitism from other bigotries. It allowed closed-minded people to congratulate themselves for being open-minded—for “doing their own research,” for “punching up,” for “speaking truth to power,” while actually just spreading lies.

This, she announced, “aligns with the TEKS.”

The teachers wrote down the information.

The next day, the teachers listened in silence to J. E. Wolfson of the Texas Holocaust, Genocide, and Antisemitism Advisory Commission as he walked them through a history of anti-Semitism in excruciating detail, sharing medieval propaganda images of Jews eating pig feces and draining blood from Christian children. Wolfson clarified for his audience what this centuries-long demonization of Jews actually means, citing the scholar David Patterson, who has written : “In the end, the antisemite’s claim is not that all Jews are evil, but rather that all evil is Jewish.”

Wolfson told the teachers that it was important that “anti-Semitism should not be your students’ first introduction to Jews and Judaism.” He said this almost as an aside, just before presenting the pig-excrement image. “If you’re teaching about anti-Semitism before you teach about the content of Jewish identity, you’re doing it wrong.”

I thought about the caring, devoted educators in the room, all committed to stamping out bigotry, and knew from my conversations with them that this—introducing students to Judaism by way of anti-Semitism—was exactly what they were doing. The same could be said, I realized, for nearly all of American Holocaust education.

The Holocaust educators I met across America were all obsessed with building empathy, a quality that relies on finding commonalities between ourselves and others. But I wondered if a more effective way to address anti-Semitism might lie in cultivating a completely different quality, one that happens to be the key to education itself: curiosity. Why use Jews as a means to teach people that we’re all the same, when the demand that Jews be just like their neighbors is exactly what embedded the mental virus of anti-Semitism in the Western mind in the first place? Why not instead encourage inquiry about the diversity, to borrow a de rigueur word, of the human experience?

Back at home, I thought again about the Holocaust holograms and the Auschwitz VR, and realized what I wanted. I want a VR experience of the Strashun Library in Vilna, the now-destroyed research center full of Yiddish writers and historians documenting centuries of Jewish life. I want a VR of a night at the Yiddish theater in Warsaw—and a VR of a Yiddish theater in New York. I want holograms of the modern writers and scholars who revived the Hebrew language from the dead—and I definitely want an AI component, so I can ask them how they did it. I want a VR of the writing of a Torah scroll in 2023, and then of people chanting aloud from it through the year, until the year is out and it’s read all over again—because the book never changes, but its readers do. I want a VR about Jewish literacy: the letters, the languages, the paradoxical stories, the methods of education, the encouragement of questions. I want a VR tour of Jerusalem, and another of Tel Aviv. I want holograms of Hebrew poets and Ladino singers and Israeli artists and American Jewish chefs. I want a VR for the conclusion of Daf Yomi, the massive worldwide celebration for those who study a page a day of the Talmud and finally finish it after seven and a half years. I want a VR of Sabbath dinners. I want a VR of bar mitzvah kids in synagogues being showered with candy, and a VR of weddings with flying circles of dancers, and a VR of mourning rituals for Jews who died natural deaths—the washing and guarding of the dead, the requisite comforting of the living. I want a hologram of the late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks telling people about what he called “the dignity of difference.”

I want to mandate this for every student in this fractured and siloed America, even if it makes them much, much more uncomfortable than seeing piles of dead Jews does. There is no empathy without curiosity, no respect without knowledge, no other way to learn what Jews first taught the world: love your neighbor. Until then, we will remain trapped in our sealed virtual boxcars, following unseen tracks into the future.

This article appears in the May 2023 print edition with the headline “Is Holocaust Education Making Anti-Semitism Worse?”

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The Reader, a movie directed by Stephen Daldry and starring Ralph Fiennes as Michael Berg, David Kross as young Michael Berg, and Kate Winslet as Hanna Schmitz, is an unusual film because unlike most pieces that tackle the shocking subject of the Holocaust, it deals with the lives of ordinary Germans at the time. Additionally, it brings the film into the modern day, showing the effects of the war on German lives almost half a century after the time of the atrocities.

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Vampires of Disasters: A Commentary on the American Love for History in Lev Raphael’s The Tanteh

Free night by elie wiesel essay example.

Review of the award-winning novel by Elie Wiesel called “Night” for academic reflection and consideration allows focusing on specific parts of this account of the Holocaust. The interaction between the arrays of characters provides the dramatic intensions of the author in creating the human perspectives of the victims among his characters. Understanding the message of hatred and forlorn suffering of Jews in Elie Wiesel’s novel “The Night” requires understanding that victims are also present in the guise of the tormentors and bystanders.

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» Annual Holocaust Art & Writing Contest

View winning entries from the 25th annual holocaust art & writing contest and all previous years on our previous contests page., 25th annual holocaust art & writing contest, answering the call of memory: choosing to act.

Students will be eligible to win a first prize award of $400 in each category. Educators and schools will also be eligible to win a first prize of $200 each.

First-place student winners in the United States, their parents/ guardians, and teachers will be invited to participate in an expense-paid study trip June 24-28, 2024, to visit the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust, the Japanese American National Museum, and other sites in Los Angeles, as well as to meet with members of The 1939 Society, a community of Holocaust survivors, descendants, and friends.

Funding permitting, this year’s U.S. winning participants will be joined by first-place students living outside of the United States. In addition, first-place student entries will be posted on Chapman University’s contest website. 

Students awarded second prize in each category will receive $200 and their sponsoring educator and school will receive $100 each.

Inspiration

For many survivors of the Holocaust, speaking of their experiences was exceedingly difficult, even gut-wrenching. It meant reliving their own suffering and even more painfully, experiencing anew the loss of those they loved. After the war, most survivors were determined to focus on the present and the future, not on the past. If they had children, they often felt it would be wrong to burden them with the painful memories of their own youth. The past couldn’t be changed—although Holocaust deniers would try to do so—but the future could.

In time, as survivors thought about the future, they realized that their memories could play a role in shaping the future. Perhaps their memories could educate people to the danger of remaining silent in the face of bigotry, racism, and antisemitism. Perhaps sharing the stories of the courageous few who had chosen to stand with those persecuted would inspire people now to do the same. Perhaps their memories could teach people that standing up for justice and human rights is what we should expect of ourselves and others, rather than be the exception.

When Miep Gies was asked why she risked her life to hide the Otto Frank family in the secret attic in Amsterdam, she replied that she only did what any other good Dutch person would do. She didn’t see anything remarkable or heroic about her actions. Some people became rescuers as a result of a spontaneous decision. Others surprised even themselves by their actions. Oskar Schindler was a Nazi businessman who sought to make his fortune from the misfortune of Jews in Poland. Yet, over time, he came to see his Jewish workers as individuals whose well-being was entrusted to him. What might have once been unthinkable to him—spending his entire fortune to save his 1200 Jewish workers—became what he expected of himself.

Survivors also shared memories of how they helped one another, refusing to allow the inhumanity of their persecutors to dehumanize them. They told of words and actions that brought hope in the most desperate of times. They came to see that sharing their memories could give them strength and help them heal from trauma and do even more—their memories could inspire us today to engage in acts of tikkun olam , healing the world not by grand gestures but by even the smallest of actions wherever we see need and know we can make a difference. As the words of the Talmud inscribed on the ring given to Oskar Schindler by his workers said, “whoever saves one life, saves the world entire.”

How will Holocaust memory inspire you to act?

• Chapman University’s Holocaust Art & Writing Contest website, featuring video testimonies from the collection of the USC Shoah Foundation — The Institute for Visual History and Education at Chapman.edu/contest-testimonies
• South Carolina Council on the Holocaust website at scholocaustcouncil.org/survivor.php
• The 1939 Society website at the1939society.org
• USC Shoah Foundation - The Institute for Visual History and Education’s YouTube channel at Youtube.com/uscshoahfoundation (“Full-Length Testimonies” playlists only )
• USC Shoah Foundation's iWitness site at iwitness.usc.edu

* Lists of testimonies that are one to two hours in length are available on the last page of the Educator Guide.

2. As you listen to the survivor’s or rescuer's testimony about their experiences, choose one specific memory that inspires you to action as a witness to a witness. How does this memory move you to answer the call of memory?

Please note the timestamp from the video testimony where the specific word, phrase, or sentence occurs.

3. Write down a specific word, phrase, or sentence from the memory you have chosen that is the catalyst for your reflection and action. Through your creativity in art, poetry, prose, or film, explore this word, phrase, or sentence as central to both the survivor's or rescuer's specific Holocaust memory and to the action you will take as a itness to a witness in answering this call of memory.

We encourage teachers to consult the Educator Guide for rubrics, specific criteria and other information.

General Criteria

• Regardless of delivery method (digital or hard copy), all entrants must complete the online submission form
• Entries must reflect genuine engagement with the survivor's testimony in its historical context and constitute a thoughtful and creative response.
• USC Foundation's iWitness site at iwitness.usc.edu
• Entries must include a time stamp (timecode) from the video testimony. This is the moment in the testimony that the student chooses that references the theme of the contest prompt.
• Entries that do not follow the criteria will be disqualified.

Art Criteria

• Title of the work
• Name of survivor to whose testimony this work is a response
• Statement of how the work addresses the prompt
• Statement must not include student or school name and must not exceed 100 words.
• Acknowledgement of sources – to protect copyright holders, proper citation of all sources is required. Permission for sources that are not public domain must be obtained in writing from copyright holder and submitted with entry.
• Please do not staple, tape, or otherwise attach the artist statement to the artwork
• Submissions must be two-dimensional only, on medium no thicker than ¾”, and must not exceed 12” x 18.”
• Artwork must not be matted or framed.
• Fixative spray must be applied to charcoal, pencil, pastel, and chalk art.
• Submissions can include photography and computer-generated images.
• Artists can use charcoal, pencil, pastel, chalk, watercolors, acrylics, or oils.
• Renderings of another’s work will be disqualified.
• Please note that AI-generated works are not permitted. All images, whether created by hand or digitally, must be the original creation of the student artist.

Film Criteria

• Content viewing time (without credits) may be no longer than three (3) minutes.
• File size must not exceed 600 MB.
• Films are to be submitted without credits for blind judging. A completed film with credits should be prepared in the event the film is selected for screening.
• Films may be submitted using WeTransfer.com, Google Drive, or other free file transfer websites.
• To ensure compatibility with MAC and PC, please use either QuickTime or MPEG format.

Poetry Criteria

• Entries must be titled.
• Entries must be typed.
• Entries must not include graphics, drawings, or other images. It must be clear that the entry is a poem and not artwork.
• Entries must be created by students. AI-generated works are not permitted.
• Entries must not include reference to student or school name.
• Students should include the name of the survivor about whom the entry is written. If the name doesn’t appear in the work, it should appear under the title.
• Entries may be no more than 30 lines .

Prose Criteria

• Entries may be no more than 500 words .
• Holocaust Art & Writing Contest
• Previous Art & Writing Contests

The Holocaust Art & Writing Contest

Sponsored by.

Chapman University The 1939 Society The Irving and Nancy Chase Endowment for Holocaust Education The Samueli Foundation Yossie and Dana Hollander

With support from

USC Shoah Foundation – The Institute for Visual History and Education The Isidore and Penny Myers Foundation The Jerry and Sally Schwartz Endowment for Holocaust Education The Liner Family Foundation

In partnership with

Catholic Schools, Diocese of Orange David Labkovski Project Echoes & Reflections Facing History and Ourselves Holocaust Museum Los Angeles Orange County Department of Education South Carolina Council on the Holocaust

In collaboration with

Museum of Tolerance United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Wilkinson College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences, Chapman University

International Partners

Forum for Dialogue, Poland Foundation for Genocide Education, Canada Johannesburg Holocaust and Genocide Centre, South Africa Memoria Viva Fundación, Chile Museo del Holocausto, Guatemala Sarah and Chaim Neuberger Holocaust Centre, Canada

Important Dates

Educator Workshops VIRTUAL December 5 @ 4:00 PM Register Entry Postmark Date: February 2, 2024

Digital Submission due date: February 5, 2024

Awards Ceremony March 15, 2024

23-24 Contest

Download the 23-24 contest brochure with inspiration, prompt and submission information.

Download the 23-24 Educator's Guide with judging rubrics, common core connections and frequently asked questions about the contest.

Music for Films!

We are grateful to the Orange County Klezmers for making available at no cost to registered participants musical selections from their album Echoes of Vilna . These tracks may only be used for projects created for the Holocaust Art and Writing Contest.

Request link to preview or download songs

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Guernica editor who published Israeli writer’s coexistence essay resigns, saying she disagreed with retraction

( JTA ) – The editor-in-chief of the prestigious literary magazine Guernica whose decision to publish an Israeli writer’s essay about the war in Gaza last month led to the mass resignation of the magazine’s staff has herself resigned from the publication, saying she disagreed with the decision to retract the essay.

Jina Moore announced her resignation in a blog post on Friday , nearly a month after Guernica retracted the essay by the British-Israeli writer and translator Joanna Chen.

“The magazine stands by its retraction of the work; I do not,” Moore wrote in the post.

On the social network X, Moore issued a more pointed critique of the Guernica staffers who objected to Chen’s piece . “After weeks of difficult conversation, it is clear to me that Guernica’s space for writing on war, injustice, and oppression has evolved away from commitments I consider essential,” she wrote.

Chen’s essay, “From the Edges of a Broken World,” ignited a firestorm at the heart of the literary world’s deeply polarized reaction to the war. After the piece was published in early March, Guernica’s co-publisher called it an “apologia for Zionism and the ongoing genocide in Palestine,” and more than 15 members of the all-volunteer staff resigned in protest. The journal also removed Chen’s essay, appending a note online promising “a more fulsome explanation” for the decision, though none has appeared to date.

For some Jews who have questioned their place in progressive and literary spaces since Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel, Guernica’s retraction offered new evidence of a toxic discourse in which no Israeli or Jew can pass muster. “The problem, when it really comes down to it, is that it presents an Israeli as human,” the Jewish writer Emily Fox Kaplan tweeted at the time.

Moore said she disagreed with the criticism of the essay.

“Many critics have said the essay normalized the violence Israel has unleashed in Gaza. I disagree,” Moore wrote in her Friday post. “I saw the piece as an example of the difficult work that Guernica is known for: capturing, with complexity and nuance, how such violence is normalized, and how a violent state extracts complicity from its citizens.”

Moore had served as Guernica’s top editor for three years and its co-publisher since 2003. A former East Africa bureau chief for The New York Times who has worked to support journalists in the aftermath of violence, Moore is managing editor of the Harvard Public Health Magazine. Moore was a Truman Scholar at Boston University, where she led a Holocaust education club, studied with Elie Wiesel and conducted research into the Holocaust. “I want to address genocide — why it happens, and what it means for those of us living secure lives as it occurs,” she told the university newspaper as an undergraduate in 2001.

Moore previously spearheaded a women’s rights reporting initiative at Buzzfeed. In her Guernica resignation announcement, she wrote, “A personal essay by a woman writer about the political nature of caregiving also struck me as aligned with a long tradition of feminist writing in Guernica’s pages.” In the essay, Chen, a peace activist who volunteers as a medical transport driver for Palestinians, describes her conflicted emotions after Oct.7.

Moore’s resignation was itself pilloried by some progressive writers. “There was nothing feminist about that essay,” Palestinian-American novelist Susan Muaddi Darraj wrote on X. “I am shocked by people who cannot see how harmful it was.”

“Good riddance!” added anti-Zionist Jewish writer Joshua Gutterman Trannen.

After being retracted, Chen’s piece was later re-published by The Washington Monthly , a center-left publication.

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2024 Ethics Essay Contest winners announced

Claire Martino , a junior from New Berlin, Wis., majoring in applied mathematics and data science, is the winner of the 2024 Ethics Essay Contest for the essay "Artificial Intelligence Could Probably Write This Essay Better than Me."

The second place entry was from Morgan J. Janes , a junior from Rock Island, Ill., majoring in biology, for the essay "The Relevant History and Medical and Ethical Future Viability of Xenotransplantation."

Third place went to Alyssa Scudder , a senior from Lee, Ill., majoring in biology, for the essay "The Ethicality of Gene Alteration in Human Embryos."

Dr. Dan Lee announced the winners on behalf of the board of directors of the Augustana Center for the Study of Ethics, sponsor of the contest. The winner will receive an award of $100, the second-place winner an award of $50, and the third-place winner an award of $25.

Honorable mentions went to Grace Palmer , a senior art and accounting double major from Galesburg, Ill., for the essay "The Ethiopian Coffee Trade: Is Positive Change Brewing?" and Sarah Marrs , a sophomore from Carpentersville, Ill., majoring in political science and women, gender and sexuality studies, for the essay "Dating Apps as an Outlet to Promote Sexual Autonomy among Disabled Individuals: an Intersectional Approach to Change."

The winning essays will be published in Augustana Digital Commons .

The Augustana Center for the Study of Ethics was established to enrich the teaching-learning experiences for students by providing greater opportunities for them to meet and interact with community leaders and to encourage discussions of issues of ethical significance through campus programs and community outreach.

Dr. Lee, whose teaching responsibilities since joining the Augustana faculty in 1974 have included courses in ethics, serves as the center's director.

If you have news, send it to [email protected] ! We love hearing about the achievements of our alumni, students and faculty.

Elgin Courier-News | With the competition now down to six, ECC’s…

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Elgin Courier-News

Elgin courier-news | with the competition now down to six, ecc’s laidlaw still in the mix for ‘next level chef’.

Elgin Community College culinary arts graduate Zach Laidlaw made it through the bento box challenge on Thursday’s “Next Level Chef” episode and is now one of just six contestants remaining in the TV competition.

As the Fox show enters its last rounds, the finalists no longer compete in groups but as individuals and Laidlaw was required to surrender his “immunity pin,” which he could have used to keep himself out of an elimination round.

The week’s 30-minute face-off had the contestants creating bento boxes, a Japanese-style lunch, in which they were required to make sushi rolls, a protein and something with a tempura batter to be judged by celebrity chefs Gordon Ramsay, Nyesha Arrington and Richard Blais.

Based on past performances, Laidlaw and three other competitors were assigned to the mid- level kitchen while the other three chefs were sent to the basement kitchen to use its inferior equipment.

Laidlaw, a Burlington native who now works as a professional chef in Maui, chose chicken strips for both his sushi dish and Hawaiian-style satay skewers. His tempura vegetables were complemented by a yakitori dipping sauce.

While Arrington lauded his sauce as incredible and the judges found his flavors generally favorable, they deemed the chicken to be overcooked and questioned why he chose chicken for his sushi when better proteins were available. They also suggested he was being too complicated with his presentations.

Named best of the bunch were the ahi tuna box prepared by Christina Miros, a home chef from New Jersey, and a shrimp box prepared by Mada Abdelhamid, a home chef from Los Angeles. Both will be moved to the top level kitchen for next week’s competition.

Because Abdelhamid’s box was named best of the night, he was given a coin to be used for 10 extra seconds in selecting ingredients in a future competition or to take away 10 seconds from a competitor’s selection time.

For the first time in this season’s show, three people were chosen for the elimination round instead of two. Those vying to remain in the game had the boxes declared most inferior: the lobster box prepared by Izahya Thomas, a social media chef from Miami; the salmon box prepared by Gabi Chappel, a social media chef from Brooklyn; and the black cod box prepared by Nicole Renard, a social media chef from Washington state.

In the cook-off in which the three made dishes featuring Japanese wagyu beef, the least impressive was the steak and tempura meal produced by Renard, who was sent packing.

In the next episode, the competitors will be asked to make “picture perfect” dishes. Each will be shown a photo of a dish that they will have to reproduce as closely as they can.

Mike Danahey is a freelance reporter for The Courier-News.

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Guest Essay

Anxious Parents Are the Ones Who Need Help

By Mathilde Ross

Dr. Ross is a senior staff psychiatrist at Boston University Health Services.

This month, across the country, a new cohort of students is being accepted into colleges. And if recent trends continue, the start of the school year will kick off another record-breaking season for anxiety on campus.

I’m talking about the parents. The kids are mostly fine.

Let me explain. Most emotions, even unpleasant ones, are normal. But the word is out about increasing rates of mental health problems on campus, and that’s got parents worrying. Fair enough. The statistics are startling — in 2022, nearly 14 percent of 18-to-25-year-olds reported having serious thoughts about suicide.

But parents are allowing their anxiety to take over, and it’s not helping anyone, least of all their children. If a child calls home too much, there must be a crisis! And if a child calls too little, there must be a crisis! Either way, the panicked parent picks up the phone and calls the college counseling center to talk to someone like me.

I am a psychiatrist who has worked at a major university’s mental health clinic for 16 years. Much of next year’s freshman class was born the year before I started working here. Technically, my job is to keep my door open and help students through crises, big and small. But I have also developed a comprehensive approach to the assessment and treatment of anxious parents.

The typical call from a parent begins like this: “I think my son/daughter is suffering from anxiety.” My typical reply is: “Anxiety in this setting is usually normal, because major life transitions like living away from home for the first time are commonly associated with elevated anxiety.” Parents used to be satisfied with this kind of answer, thanked me, hung up, called their children and encouraged them to think long-term: “This too shall pass.” And most everyone carried on.

But these days this kind of thinking just convinces parents that I don’t know what I’m talking about. In the circular logic of mental health awareness, a clinician’s reassurance that situational anxiety is most likely normal and time-limited leads a parent to believe that the clinician may be missing a serious mental health condition.

Today’s parents are suffering from anxiety about anxiety, which is actually much more serious than anxiety. It’s self-fulfilling and not easily soothed by logic or evidence, such as the knowledge that most everyone adjusts to college just fine.

Anxiety about anxiety has gotten so bad that some parents actually worry if their student isn’t anxious. This puts a lot of pressure on unanxious students — it creates anxiety about anxiety about anxiety. (This happens all the time. Well-meaning parents tell their kid to make an appointment with our office to make sure their adjustment to college is going OK.) If the student says she’s fine, the parents worry that she isn’t being forthright. This is the conundrum of anxiety about anxiety — there’s really no easy way to combat it.

But I do have some advice for parents. The first thing I’d like to say, and I mean it in the kindest possible way, is: Get a grip.

As for your kids, I would like to help you with some age-appropriate remedies. If your child calls during the first weeks of college feeling anxious, consider saying any of the following: You’ll get through this; this is normal; we’ll laugh about this phone call at Thanksgiving. Or, say anything that was helpful to you the last time you started something new. Alternatively, you could say nothing. Just listening really helps. It’s the entire basis of my profession.

If the anxiety is connected to academic performance — for instance, if your child is having difficulty following the professor and thinks everyone in class is smarter — consider saying, “Do the reading.” Several times a semester, a student I’ve counseled tells me he or she discovered the secret to college: Show up for class prepared! This is often whispered rather sheepishly, even though my office is private.

Anxiety about oral presentations is also quite common. You know what I tell students? “Rehearse your speech.” Parents, you can say things like this, too. Practice it: “Son, you wouldn’t believe how helpful practice is.”

I can prepare you for advanced topics, too. Let’s say your child is exhausted and having trouble waking up for class; he thinks he has a medical problem or maybe a sleep disorder. Consider telling him to go to bed earlier. Common sense is still allowed.

What if a roommate is too loud or too quiet, too messy or too neat? Advise your kid to talk to the roommate, to take the conversation to the problem’s source.

If your child is worrying about something more serious, like failing out of college: This is quite common in the first few weeks on campus. Truth be told, failing all of one’s classes and being expelled as a result, all within the first semester, is essentially impossible and is particularly rare among those students who are worrying about it. The administrative process simply doesn’t happen that fast. Besides, you haven’t paid enough tuition yet.

I’m making my job sound easy, and it’s not. I’m making kids sound simple, and they’re not. They are my life’s work. Some kids walk through my door in serious pain. But most don’t. Most just need a responsible adult to show them the way. And most of what I do can be handled by any adult who has been through a thing or two, which is to say, any parent.

I worry that the current obsession with mental health awareness is disempowering parents from helping their adult children handle ordinary things. People are increasingly fearful that any normal emotion is a sign of something serious. But if you send your adult children to a mental health professional at the first sign of distress, you deprive yourself of the opportunity to strengthen your relationship with them. This is the beginning of their adult relationship with you. Show them the way.

The transition to college is full of excitement and its cousin, anxiety. I enjoy shepherding young people through this rite of passage. Parents should try enjoying it, too.

Mathilde Ross is a senior staff psychiatrist at Boston University Health Services.

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Timeline of Events

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Discussion Questions

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Organized by theme, these discussion questions examine how and why the Holocaust happened. They are designed to help teachers, students, and all citizens create discussion and encourage reflection about the Holocaust.

Browse all Discussion Questions

What made it possible.

Discussion Question How and why did ordinary people across Europe contribute to the persecution of their Jewish neighbors?

Discussion Question How did German professionals and civil leaders contribute to the persecution of Jews and other groups?

Discussion Question What conditions, ideologies, and ideas made the Holocaust possible?

Discussion Question How did the Nazis and their collaborators implement the Holocaust?

Discussion Question What does war make possible?

Discussion Question Which organizations and individuals aided and protected Jews from persecution between 1933 and 1945?

Discussion Question How did leaders, diplomats, and citizens around the world respond to the events of the Holocaust?

Discussion Question How did the United States government and American people respond to Nazism?

After the war.

Discussion Question What have we learned about the risk factors and warning signs of genocide?

Discussion Question How did postwar trials shape approaches to international justice?

Other topics.

Discussion Question How did the shared foundational element of eugenics contribute to the growth of racism in Europe and the United States?

Discussion Question What were some similarities between racism in Nazi Germany and in the United States, 1920s-1940s?

Discussion Question How did different goals and political systems shape racism in Nazi Germany and the United States?

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