Holocaust Education for Today
Daniel Greene is Adjunct Professor of History at Northwestern University and co-editor (with Edward Phillips) of Americans and the Holocaust: A Reader.
THE NEW ENGLAND HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL, BOSTON (CAROL M. HIGHSMITH/LIBRARY OF CONGRESS)
Holocaust education is in the midst of an existential crisis. Recent surveys report that American high school students and young adults lack basic knowledge of Holocaust history. They do not know how many Jews were murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators. They cannot name a single concentration camp, not even Auschwitz, and they do not know what happened there. This lack of knowledge of Holocaust history is not occurring in a vacuum. National surveys also report worrisome declines in general historical literacy among American middle school and high school students. In the current political climate, however, which has seen assaults on democratic norms and a rise in violent antisemitism, Holocaust education has been a subject of particular controversy.
Some critics insist that the resurgence of antisemitism, including violent antisemitic incidents, prove that Holocaust education has failed, not only in communicating historical facts but also in conveying larger moral messages about empathy, prejudice, and civic responsibility. Novelist Dara Horn’s May 2023 Atlantic article, “Is Holocaust Education Making Anti-Semitism Worse?” is a potent expression of a related strain of criticism. Horn rejects the notion that Holocaust education should strive to promote empathy among students and provocatively claims that, even though Holocaust educators are well-intentioned, they are, as her title suggests, probably making antisemitism worse.
But judging the effectiveness of Holocaust education by asking whether it solves the problem of contemporary antisemitism is an unfair burden, both to teachers and to students. And concluding that Holocaust educators have failed because antisemitism is on the rise, or that Holocaust education is making antisemitism worse, sorely misses the mark.
To grasp how we have reached this moment of such profound doubts about Holocaust education, we need to understand its history. It is especially important to recognize that the ways we teach this subject continue to be shaped in large measure by the optimism of the 1990s, when many American Jews thought the lessons of the Holocaust had been communicated clearly and the risk of violent antisemitism in the United States had passed.
Reflecting on how we got here might help us untangle the complex mess of political and moral burdens that have been placed on Holocaust education today. It will also allow us to chart a path forward that recognizes contemporary challenges and responds to them in sensible ways. And then, rather than accusing Holocaust educators of failure because antisemitism is on the rise, we should be encouraging them to find ways to help students understand what happened during the Holocaust, reflect on why it happened, and consider its relevance today.
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Although Holocaust education existed in the United States well before the 1990s, the developments of that decade have had a lasting impact on the field. During the nineties, many American Jews assumed that both rates of antisemitism and violent incidents against Jews would always remain low in the United States. Simultaneously, an abundance of Holocaust consciousness arose in American culture. Schindler’s List, released in 1993, won the Oscar for Best Picture. In February 1993, the Museum of Tolerance opened in Los Angeles. Two months later, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum opened on the National Mall in Washington, DC. Many more museums and memorials followed across the country. Legislation about teaching Holocaust history was also initiated, as measures mandating Holocaust education passed for the first time in Illinois (1990), New Jersey (1994), and Florida (1994). An imperative to remember the Holocaust was becoming a fixture on the cultural landscape of the United States.
The assumptions of that decade were wrapped in American exceptionalism—the belief that Jews in the United States faced different, better conditions than Jews anywhere else in the world. Jewish organizational leaders, casual observers, and critics alike contended that Jews were safer and more at home in the United States than at any time or place in modern history.
As historian Pierre Birnbaum explains in his 2023 book, Tears of History: The Rise of Political Antisemitism in the United States, it is true that Jews in the United States before the late twentieth century did not face physical violence to the same extent as many other minorities. But there was always social antisemitism that relied on deeply held prejudices against Jews. As Birnbaum writes,
People saw in the Jews dangerous exploiters, threatening Shylocks, malevolent characters eager to dominate the world through their conspiracies, revolutionaries who advocated anarchism, strangers unable to assimilate, immoral beings whose customs could only degrade American society and must be opposed.
This antisemitism was real and serious. Sometimes, it led to physical danger. But the United States didn’t (and doesn’t) have a history of pogroms like those that occurred in nineteenth- and twentieth- century Russia and Europe, much less the catastrophe of the Holocaust. American Jews assured themselves that violence like that happened only to Jews who lived elsewhere.
The collective perception of violent antisemitism in the United States, however, is now changing, as what Birnbaum calls “a supremacist hatred of Jews” is becoming endemic to American society. In the past decade, we’ve seen Nazi symbols and Hitler salutes at the Unite the Right march in Charlottesville (2017); a murderous rampage at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh by a shooter who blamed Jews for replacing white Americans with immigrants (2018); and attacks on Jews in the streets of Washington, DC, and Boulder, Colorado (2025). These are just some of the most memorable incidents—there have been many more.
Political antisemitism has also taken hold here. The many deadly attacks against American Jews may, according to Birnbaum, “tip all of American society toward a racist national populism that can only weaken the place of the Jews in what was for a long time a golden America.” Belief in American exceptionalism for Jews may soon become a remnant of the past, if it is not already. Birnbaum confronts readers with a haunting question for Jewish people in the United States: “Faced with these fears, subjective though they may be, is American happiness a thing of the past?”
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Holocaust education must be refashioned to meet this new reality. Answers will not come easily. It will be even more difficult, however, if we don’t wrestle with how we arrived at this moment and recognize how the narratives of the 1990s are incapable of meeting the conditions we face in 2026.
In the 1990s, American Jewish historians largely agreed with the common understanding of antisemitism held by most American Jews. Consider historian Leonard Dinnerstein’s influential book, Anti-Semitism in America, published in 1994.After carefully surveying the history of antisemitism since the colonial period, Dinnerstein reassured readers about the promise of this golden land. He emphasized both that antisemitism in the United States was no longer the problem it had once been and that it paled in comparison to the same problem elsewhere in the world. Here is Dinnerstein’s closing paragraph:
There is no reason to suspect that antisemitism will not continue to decline in the United States even though there will always be sporadic outbursts and temporary flareups…. However, the nation is too strongly committed to cultural pluralism for long-term trends toward greater tolerance and acceptance of diversity in the United States to reverse themselves sharply. By comparing the strength of antisemitism in the United States today with what it had been in previous decades or centuries, the obvious conclusion is that it has declined in potency and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.
In other words: Dear American Jewish readers: Be cautious, but do not worry too much.
Dinnerstein did not have his head buried in the sand. Far from it. Before sharing this reassuring conclusion, he marched readers through the heightened antisemitism in the United States during the 1920s and 1930s, including the Ku Klux Klan, immigration restriction, Father Charles E. Coughlin, Charles Lindbergh and the America First Committee, and more. Dinnerstein noted that this “high tide” of antisemitism, which lasted through the World War II era, declined relatively quickly in mainstream American culture after the war.
What had happened that allowed the United States to move from a period of such significant antisemitism to an era where the tide had ebbed? Perhaps not surprisingly—from the perspective of that mid-nineties moment of burgeoning Holocaust memory—Dinnerstein described how confronting its atrocities led to a bold reckoning with antisemitism in postwar America. He explained that American Jews played a central role in this development: “American Jewish groups were ready, as they had never been before, to deal aggressively and forthrightly with the problem of antisemitism in the United States. The sober recognition of the Holocaust galvanized them. They were not only scared but determined.” Moreover, Hitler and the Nazis had given antisemitism a bad name. “After 1945,” Dinnerstein wrote, “millions of Christian Americans became more cautious in expressing negative reactions to Jews.” At least in respectable public settings, this seems generally to have been true.
Dinnerstein assured his readers in 1994 that antisemitism was “neither virulent nor growing” socially or politically. To emphasize his point that hatred of Jews had become marginal and outside the mainstream, Dinnerstein noted that it remained present only “among lunatics who deny that the Holocaust ever occurred.” But he did not linger on that concern. Neither Holocaust deniers nor pseudo-scholarly institutions that peddled such denial merited significant attention in Anti-Semitism in America, reflecting the widely held opinion that those “lunatics” were not worth anyone’s time. The best way to counter denial was to cut off its oxygen. Don’t give Holocaust deniers the satisfaction of engaging with their nonsense.
Fast forward to 2025, three decades after the publication of Dinnerstein’s book. Last year, in a very different political, social, and cultural climate, historian Pamela S. Nadell published Antisemitism: An American Tradition. The goal of her book resembles Dinnerstein’s: to tell a long history of antisemitism in the United States. But what a different story it is, three decades on.
For Dinnerstein, antisemitism was a vestige of the American past. Nadell’s title alone points to antisemitism as a tradition in the United States. More than that, she argues, it is an urgent problem in the present. The contrasting chapter titles bear out this point. Whereas Dinnerstein’s final chapter, covering 1969 to 1992, is called “At Home in America,” Nadell’s chapter covering similar years is “No Age Is Golden.” The title of her chapter on twenty-first century antisemitism is “A New Litany.” The return of antisemitism has caused Nadell—like many American Jews—to reconsider the very trajectory of American Jewish history.
How should Holocaust education respond to this new, distinctly less optimistic reckoning with American antisemitism?
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It is tempting to point to the rapid decline in antisemitism in the late twentieth century as the result of successful Holocaust education. But rejection of antisemitism was likely not the product of Holocaust education alone. More important may have been the relative proximity in time to the events of the Holocaust. As former US Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel said recently: “In the ’50s, everybody in the town was a World War II veteran…. Every kid in that era had a sense of what happened and why.” Even if Hagel may be overstating the case, he makes a valid point.
Between the 1950s and the 1980s, while Holocaust education tended to be sporadic and inconsistent, students had access to generations of family members whose lives had been shaped by wartime experiences and memories. Even if close relationships with Holocaust survivors or Jewish people were not common, Americans in the postwar era lived in a society defined in many ways by its encounter with Nazism and the legacies of that encounter.
During the decades after the war, many Americans carried living memories of a significant reordering of the world defined by an encounter with a totalitarian regime. As a September 2, 2025, Washington Post article reflecting on the eightieth anniversary of the war’s end noted, during the twentieth century, the “lessons” of World War II “seemed self-evident: Isolationism, nationalism and authoritarianism lead to disaster. Alliances, free trade and democracy are the only way forward. And the U.S. has to take the lead.” We could add another lesson, too: that democratic societies must be vigilant about combatting antisemitism.
There are two ironies to note here. First, by the time Holocaust education was mandated in the 1990s, antisemitism had largely already declined for other reasons. Second, even as the Holocaust as a touchstone has become embedded in Jewish and American memory, the actual history of the Holocaust has become less well understood. Although students lack this historical literacy, American political culture and social media feeds are saturated with references to Nazism. As Shaul Kelner pointed out in a recent article in Sources, the only “conceptual language for thinking about the Othering of Jews” that most Americans have is grounded in a language of antisemitism that rests on a foundation of “Nazi and racist referents.”
This is a troubling muddle to address: As we move further away temporally from the Holocaust, casual, even careless references to Nazism are proliferating. And as antisemitism rises, our ability to understand the complexities of how it operates is flattened by facile comparisons with Nazism. The fact that all of this is occurring alongside the declining understanding of Holocaust history among most students compounds the problem significantly. Thoughtful education about this history will not solve these problems alone. Untangling the knots will require multiple approaches. But knowledge of Holocaust history, which depends on careful teaching, certainly matters for countering sloppy thinking and misappropriation of the Holocaust for political ends, as well as for recognizing and combatting misinformation and disinformation. *
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There is another important factor to call out in this equation. Amid these challenging realities, Holocaust denial and distortion are also on the rise, in ways that feed and depend upon contemporary antisemitic tropes. Social media has accelerated the availability of misinformation and disinformation about multiple topics, including the Holocaust. National political figures who deny or distort the subject have easy access to platforms and podcasts where they can spread their lies to millions of followers and listeners who hear no counterbalancing truths.
Holocaust denial is an assault on truth that relies on conspiratorial thinking. Today, deniers will avow that the Holocaust never happened while simultaneously celebrating the murder of Jews. Some even will claim that “the Jews” helped to orchestrate the Holocaust in order to get money (reparations) and a Jewish homeland. This perverted conspiracy theory about Jewish control for selfish ends is a primary driver of antisemitism today. Many Holocaust educators are concerned that denial will thrive in environments where truth and expertise are increasingly under assault and where conspiratorial thinking proliferates. Significant concerns have arisen in the past decade that social media provides a megaphone for those who seek to engage in such distortion or denial. The days of dismissing deniers as “lunatics” who can be ignored have long passed.
Yet many of the current conversations about the efficacy of Holocaust education fail to ask whether teaching this history can effectively counter denial. Consider again Horn’s claim that Holocaust education might be making antisemitism worse. Even as she levels this criticism against educators, Horn only offhandedly mentions denial. She asks, for example: “But is there any evidence that Holocaust education reduces anti-Semitism, other than fending off Holocaust denial?” The evidence she cites to claim that Holocaust education fends off denial is from a 2019 Pew Research Center study called “What Americans Know About the Holocaust.” But that study does not address denial. Instead, it says that survey respondents who know Jewish people personally tend to be more knowledgeable about the Holocaust and explains that college students who have studied the Holocaust are more likely to “tolerate diverse viewpoints” than those who have not. Perhaps these findings give us some hope about the value of such education, but they do not have much to do with countering Holocaust denial.
Some surveys have started to pay attention to the intersection of denial and social media. For example, one 2020 report from the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany (or “Claims Conference”) noted that nearly half of Millennials (born between 1981 and 1996) and Gen Z (born between 1997 and 2012) have encountered Holocaust denial or distortion online. According to the same survey, more than one-quarter of adults in multiple countries—including the United States, Hungary, France, and Germany—report that denial is common in their countries.
Yet the reality is that educators do not know enough about how students are encountering denial or about how to shape Holocaust education in ways that could combat it. As the director of education initiatives at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum told Horn: “Students are coming in with questions about whether the Holocaust was an actual event. That wasn’t true 20 years ago.” This claim even further reinforces the point that the assumptions of the mid-1990s that have shaped Holocaust education are not as well-suited to the 2020s as we need them to be.
Despite the fact that teaching the Holocaust is now mandated in more than half of the states in the country, many teachers report that they do not have enough guidance about best practices for teaching this history. Some assumptions about educational outcomes still rest on vaguely expressed notions of using Holocaust history to teach tolerance or combat bullying. Conveying lessons about tolerance and the dangers of bullying is important, but communicating these lessons does not require Holocaust history—and they should not be the main purpose or purview of Holocaust education.
Claims that Holocaust education has failed are leaving out the most basic, yet essential, goal of this work: teaching students that the Holocaust happened. While it may sound like an absurdly elementary or reductive goal, the reality—in a climate where more and more students report doubts about whether it was a real event—is that educators must ensure that students understand the historical facts. This goal should not be underestimated. Disturbing though it may be, simply conveying that it happened matters, especially in a landscape so saturated with misinformation and disinformation. Students can then be guided toward higher level thinking about the conditions that made the Holocaust possible.
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As Holocaust educators attempt to meet these challenges, they are operating under significant constraints in many American states, including the polarization and anger that shape the political climate today. There is far too much bickering in American public culture about whether antisemitism is more dangerous on the far left or the far right. Pundits and organizations often seem more intent on scoring points against their perceived enemies than on combatting antisemitism in ways that address Jewish peoples’ safety. None of this will help Holocaust educators achieve their goals.
There are other challenges for educators on the ground as well. In classrooms, lack of time is one of the most significant barriers to education. A 2025 RAND survey called “Public School Instruction on the Holocaust and Topics Related to Jewish People” showed, for example, that nearly half of middle school and high school social studies teachers spend less than two hours per year teaching the Holocaust. One third of middle school English and Language Arts (ELA) educators who teach this topic also spend less than two hours per year on it, as do close to one half of high school ELA teachers. Burdening these teachers with combatting contemporary antisemitism and teaching tolerance in two hours or less, while also expecting that their students learn the facts of the Holocaust, is the wrong approach.
We have to acknowledge, instead, that most students enter classrooms today with almost no knowledge or understanding of what happened during the Holocaust. Getting students to move to higher-order thinking is crucially important, but it needs to come through helping them understand the narrative history. Teaching what happened, layering in how and why it happened, and understanding its consequences should be at the center of Holocaust education. Students should be encouraged to reflect on the dangers of unchecked antisemitism as they learn this history. They should be prompted to ask about the wide range of responses to Nazism among individuals in Germany and elsewhere. And they should think about the ways that the international order changed—and did not change—after the Holocaust.
Engaging with Holocaust history can also help students think about the complexity of human behavior, for example, or about the power of hate to inspire violence and mass murder. But this must stem from teaching grounded in stories of victims, survivors, and others. Expecting that two hours of classroom instruction on the Holocaust will lead students to be inoculated against hatred throughout their lifetimes is nonsensical. Doing so in ways that aim to advance vague outcomes about being civically engaged or being better citizens will not succeed. In other words, while it might be woefully naive to expect that teaching the Holocaust will solve all the problems of hate in the world, we can expect it to raise important questions that emerge from this history.
This is not to suggest that Holocaust educators can ignore the enduring questions or contemporary relevance of this history. In a post-October 7 world, however, there is also a danger that the realities of contemporary antisemitism combined with the atrocities committed in Gaza may lead Holocaust educators to take a very particularist approach to their teaching. Many institutions in the United States dedicated to Holocaust education have assumed that serving a general, non-Jewish audience is paramount. Indeed, reaching a non-Jewish audience has been an explicit, sometimes celebrated, goal. But in an environment of heightened political scrutiny, these institutions will be pressed to address more clearly whether the most often-cited lesson of the Holocaust, “never again,” means “never again for anyone” or “never again for Jews.” If Holocaust educational institutions are perceived to be leaning into the latter approach, they might risk losing trust and being accused of hypocrisy, not only by teachers, but also by students.
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Despite the fact that the educational environment and the nature of American antisemitism have changed so significantly in the past 30 years, it is useful to consider one more historian’s take from the late 1990s as we think about the future of Holocaust education. Although it caused some consternation at the time of its release in 1999, Peter Novick’s The Holocaust in American Life asks important questions about the centrality of Holocaust memory to American Jewish identity. Novick was dubious about drawing lessons from Holocaust history. He wrote that the Holocaust had become a “moral and ideological Rorschach test,” used to argue that “tolerance and diversity were good, hate was bad.” Being for tolerance and against hate is hardly a groundbreaking idea, or one that requires that students know this history, Novick counseled. He brazenly pointed out that even though everyone agreed that the lessons of the Holocaust were “urgent,” no one agreed on what those lessons actually were. He did float a few trial balloons at the end of his book, suggesting some possible lessons that might be drawn from study of the Holocaust. Notably, however, the danger of unchecked antisemitism is absent from his list of potential lessons. This absence is yet another sign of how much American Jews played down antisemitism at the end of the twentieth century. Writing in 1999, Novick confidently stated that, in the decades since the Holocaust, “any hint of anti-Semitism from a figure in public life was immediately and roundly reprobated.” How times have changed.
Novick astutely advised that the only way to teach the Holocaust effectively is to teach it “in all its messiness,” rather than to instrumentalize it for contemporary political purposes or use it to promote unspecific lessons about tolerance. This is what good history teaching does—it helps students think more deeply about choice, contingency, and complexity. The ultimate purpose of Holocaust education should not be quizzing students about the number of Jews murdered or asking them if they recognize the names of concentration camps. Students in history classrooms should hear from many voices of the past while confronting facts that might cause discomfort. To meet this moment, students will need more help learning how to recognize misinformation and disinformation that saturates our political culture and our social media feeds. Countering ignorance and lies with facts and evidence will always be an uphill battle, and a critically important one. In the end, Holocaust educators’ first responsibility is to get this history right. It’s an enormous responsibility, one that should not be minimized to win arguments about contemporary political concerns.
