Teaching about the Holocaust will Not End Antisemitism
By Alan Singer
Tuesday April 14, the 27th day of Nisan in the Hebrew lunar calendar, is the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. In Hebrew, Holocaust Remembrance Day is called Yom Hashoah. The U.S. Congress established the Days of Remembrance as the nation’s annual commemoration of the European Holocaust. Each year across the United States, state and local government organizations, workplaces, schools, and religious and community centers host remembrance activities to reaffirm our nation’s commitment to keeping the memory of the Holocaust alive. The Days of Remembrance run for eight days from the Sunday before Holocaust Remembrance Day, this year it will be April 12th, through the following Sunday.
Currently thirty states require that the events of the European Holocaust be part of the public school curriculum. Many of the requirements were recently enacted. Since 1996, a New York State law amended in 2022 “provides specific requirements for a course of instruction relating to the Holocaust and genocide” in grades 8-12. In 2025, the state’s Department of Education unveiled a new online resource for “Teaching the Holocaust and Other Genocides.” It includes information about ghettos where Jews were congregated before being shipped to concentration camps, the 1936 Olympics, the Kristallnacht, eugenics, resistance movements, and other significant events and ideas.
New Jersey’s Commission on Holocaust Education surveys the status of Holocaust/Genocide Education in public schools; designs, encourages and promotes the implementation of Holocaust and genocide education and awareness; sponsors programs and coordinates events that memorialization the Holocaust. Its website includes curriculum guides for grades K-4, 5-8, and 9-8 that are aligned with the Universal Design for Learning and links to other Holocaust education groups. It has videoed interviews with Holocaust survivors appropriate for classroom use.
As a former high school social studies teacher and a teacher educator, I welcome expanded Holocaust education, especially comparative lessons that have students examine similarities and differences between different genocides. But I do not pretend that in the current political climate studying about the extermination of European Jewry over eighty years ago addresses antisemitism today.
There have been an upsurge in antisemitic language and attacks in the United States and in other countries since Israeli responded to the October 7, 2023 attack by Hamas with the near total destruction of Gaza and the murder of thousands of Palestinian civilians.
Antisemitism today is promoted by many rightwing nationalist movements, including elements of the MAGA movement in this country, and it is tolerated by segments within the Republican Party where rightwing influencers and organizers like Candice Owens, Nick Fuentes, and James Fishback have been welcomed as part of the party’s conservative wing. Owens and Fuentes were defended at the last conference of Turning Point USA where prominent activists including Tucker Carlson and Erika Kirk urged the assembled to be tolerant of the views of movement allies they might not be in complete agreement with. The connection between Republicans and antisemitism is broad. Leading young Republicans in New York and Florida were caught participating in antisemitic and racist group chats.
While Donald Trump told a 2024 campaign rally, “Antisemitic bigotry has no place in a civilized society,” National Public Radio identified three Trump officials with close ties to antisemitic extremists including Paul Ingrassia, formerly the White House liaison to the Department of Homeland Security and current deputy general counsel at the General Services Administration, Rachel Cauley, communications director for the White House Office of Management and Budget, and Ed Martin, the pardon attorney in the Justice Department. Trump himself had dinner with Christian nationalist podcaster Nicholas Fuentes and Kanye West at his Mar-a-Lago resort in 2022.
The second problem that I see feeding into antisemitism is the behavior of the State of Israel in Gaza, the occupied West Bank, Lebanon, and Iran. While Israel declared war against Hamas and Hezbollah, it launched aerial bombardments on civilians in Gaza and Lebanon. At the same time leading Israeli government officials and the Israeli military support and protect an illegal Jewish settler movement on the West Bank that is determined to drive Palestinians out of their homeland and annex the territory as part of a Jewish State.
Many Americans believe that Israel manipulated the United States into a war with Iran that did not have to happen. United States Secretary of State Marco Rubio fed into those suspicions when he told reporters “We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action. … We knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces, and we knew that if we didn’t preemptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties.”
Joe Kent, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center and a key advisor in the Trump administration resigned because of opposition to the Iran war and what he charged was Israel’s influence over the Trump’s policies. In his resignation letter, Kent wrote “Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.” He charged that “high ranking Israeli officials . . . sowed pro-war sentiments to encourage a war with Iran.” In a March 2026 Quinnipiac poll, a majority of American voters agreed with Kent and said they did not believe Iran posed an “imminent military threat” to the United States.
Israeli actions have also led to a sharp decline in American support for Israel overall. According to a February 2026 Gallup poll, 41% of Americans sympathize more with the Palestinians in the Middle East situation, while only 36% sympathize with Israel, a major reversal over the last two decades. Sixty-five percent of Democrats report their sympathies lie more with the Palestinians, which means that pro-Israel Democratic Party leaders like Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer are out of step with party voters.
Jewish organizational support for Israel, including lobby campaigns and efforts to oust critics of Israel from public office, may be having a boomerang effect. I believe the more pro-Israel groups in the United States label opposition to Israeli policies as antisemitic and accuse those who challenge Zionism, which proclaims Israel as an exclusively Jewish State, the more there will be opposition to Israel that will spill over into anti-Jewish sentiments and actions.
Focusing on the European Holocaust under Nazi Germany in the global history curriculum, while it may increase sympathy for Jews as a people, may also lead to more anti-Israeli sentiment because of Israeli actions in Gaza and on the West Bank that much of the world community label as genocide.
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