How Holocaust Education Has Changed in America’s Schools

There have been great strides in educational advancements in teaching the Holocaust— though teachers must remain vigilant in how they address the topic amid a period of unlimited information and reemerged antisemitism, multiple experts tell Newsweek.

January 27 is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, which marks the anniversary of the Allied liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest Nazi death camp, 77 years ago. It is also viewed as a stark reminder of the six million Jewish victims, millions of others persecuted, and a worldwide surge in antisemitism, according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

A surge in antisemitism is attributed in part to the events of October 7, 2023, in which Hamas and Islamic Jihad militants attacked and killed approximately 1,200 Israelis while kidnapping about 250 hostages. As of Friday, over 26,000 Palestinians have died since the war began, according to the Associated Press, citing the Gaza Health Ministry.

That day’s events have led to tension-filled discussions and protests regarding Israel’s military response in Gaza amid claims of genocide against Palestinians.

It follows events in recent years, including the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, that resulted in one death, numerous injuries and footage that sparked a national conversation due to various racial and nationalistic overtones.

More material than ever

Steven Goldberg, director of education at the Holocaust & Human Rights Education Center in White Plains, New York, began teaching Holocaust-related education in New York suburban school districts in the early 1980s.

He told Newsweek via phone that it was a unique time in the teaching of Holocaust history, considering the proximity between the end of World War II and the decades that preceded the Internet Age.

“That’s kind of in the dark ages because prior to that, you would find very few [Holocaust] courses per se, and even in integrated regular world history courses. There wasn’t a lot going on because one of the things you have to understand—the closer you are to the event, the less likely it’s gonna be taught.”

He said that information was relatively limited even four decades removed from war, adding that the trickle-down effect from college academics into secondary schools was the opposite of rapid. And aside from the graphic 1965 French film Night and Fog and basic course material like Anne Frank’s diary or other older literature and anthologies, high schoolers were not made available to a complete retelling of that era.

“It gives you a very jaundiced view of the Holocaust…And if that’s your only exposure to the Holocaust, which is what it was for a lot of kids in the 60’s into the 70’s, you’re getting a very, very, somewhat limited view of what it is,” he said.

Current Holocaust teaching across American school systems depends on which grades the material is presented in and is largely driven by the requirements of state standards, the state curriculum for each grade level, and state legislative mandates, said Tyler Reed, spokesperson for McGraw Hill, one of the largest U.S. publishers of materials presented in pre-K through postgraduate education.

He told Newsweek via email that it would be difficult to provide a comprehensive response on Holocaust-related materials due to not having an easy way to readily access retired programs and conduct detailed comparisons. McGraw Hill employs historians and educator reviewers to review materials before publication.

“In general, we think it would be accurate to say that requirements for Holocaust education have increased over the last couple of decades—coming both from details in state standards, and also requests from educators,” Reed said. “Additionally, there are now many states that have legislative mandates requiring Holocaust education in K-12, in addition to the state standards that have required instruction on it for many years.”

Andreas Daum, a history professor at the University of Buffalo, told Newsweek via phone that the institutional infrastructure has changed, citing centers devoted to drafting curricula and assigning textbooks to teach school-aged youth.

“It is very different from the 1950s and 60’s, when the Holocaust was basically embedded in, let’s call it Cold War history or Nazi history, and it was singled out as the culmination of Nazi terror,” Daum said, adding that educators like himself have a responsibility to properly disseminate complex information and relay it to younger generations.

“We have learned that non-Germans were involved in killing people in the Holocaust, so it’s no longer an anonymous apparatus. It’s now the multitude of actors on the ground.”

Age of information requires responsibility

Danny M. Cohen, a professor at Northwestern University and member of the Illinois Holocaust and Genocide Commission, said that the U.S. is currently experiencing a resurgence of old testimonies related to the Holocaust—even subjects once considered taboo, such as women’s experiences in the Nazi camps, abortions in concentration camps due to sexual violence, and trading sex for food.

“There was a lot of content out there but folks just didn’t know what to do with it and didn’t know how to teach it and didn’t want to teach it…We have survivors visiting schools and classrooms very informally. Some teachers were war survivors themselves,” he told Newsweek via phone. “Some of them chose to tell their stories, but then some chose to stay silent and not tell their stories.”

Cohen, who trains teachers on how to teach about the Holocaust and also runs public programs and student workshops nationwide, said that teaching of the Holocaust should go beyond the traditional graphic images and videos—some of which can have reverse effects by being too overwhelming for students of a certain age.

There’s also the question of how to begin teaching the topic, such as historically chronological or to emphasize the general dangers of Nazism—or to even invoke survivors, their families and their stories to provide a personal context.

“We know that if we show graphic images to children—even middle school students can experience what we might call vicarious trauma, which can actually get in the way of learning,” Cohen said. “We see sometimes students shutting down and falling into what we might call a state of shock with these images, which actually then leads them to not be able to ask the questions we want them to ask and to and almost putting up a barrier for the discussions that we want to have, about humanity, about resilience, about perpetrators and bystanders, about survivors.”

He added: “And so if we force young people to see these images before they’re ready, and if we have not prepared them sufficiently, we actually get in the way of their learning. And we actually undermine the goals of Holocaust education, which is to explore and examine violence and how genocide happens and the warning signs of atrocity.”

Goldberg said information has come a long way seeing he had to personally conduct his own tremendous amount of investigation and research into putting a course together.

“Contrasting that today, we have almost the opposite situation where there’s a plethora of materials out there pedagogic materials, resources, teachers guides, films,” he said. “If a teacher is going to have the opportunity to teach a course like this, where do you begin? How do you take your materials? Those are the extremes for most people.

“Teaching the Holocaust has to be integrated into existing world history, or very often American history, usually world history classes. And then you have the problem of how do you teach something when you have a very, very limited finite amount of days in which to do it? It might be one day, it could be the luxury of a week…We’ve gone from one extreme to the other.”

Daum said he has seen firsthand how teaching at higher levels is reflective of all these trends—of an institutional landscape away from totalitarianism predecessors and towards genocide studies, more original materials, and studies into victim groups.

“We—historians and installers and teachers—have given a face to both the victims and the perpetrators in a way that we simply couldn’t do in the 1950s and 60s, because we were all thinking, ‘This was the big machine.’ We didn’t even know that so many people were beginning to write down their memoirs.

“This is really a fundamental change that both groups at both ends of the spectrum has gained a new profile and so, in that sense, maybe I wouldn’t call it pragmatic but diversified. Broad education made us sensible, sensitive towards the multitude of experiences.”