Why – and How – to Teach About the Holocaust
A Teacher-to-Teacher Guide
An Op-ed by Chris Murray

2025-2026 Tanenbaum Network of Inclusive Educators member Chris Murray shares a reflection on Dara Horn’s 2023 article titled “Is Holocaust Education Making Antisemitism Worse?” Murray teaches a high school elective on Holocaust Studies in Montgomery County, Maryland. He earned his Master’s in Holocaust and Genocide Studies from Gratz College; previously, he taught a course under the same name in 2018 at Stone Ridge School of the Sacred Heart, a private all-girls Catholic school in Bethesda, MD. He recommends anyone interested in Jewish Studies read Horn’s work.

Can Holocaust education help address antisemitism? As a high school social studies teacher, I would like to think it can. As I’ve witnessed incidents of antisemitism rise in my school district, I have questioned how to combat discrimination in and outside the classroom, and how to teach my students to do the same. Education departments across the country have considered Holocaust education a vital component of American education, as almost 29 states have mandated some form of Holocaust education in classrooms statewide (New Jersey passed the first mandate in 1994). Having taught a similar course almost ten years ago, I successfully proposed a new Holocaust Studies elective at my school, and I taught the elective to 30 juniors and seniors in the spring of 2024.

While I was lesson planning in anticipation of the course, I came across an article by Dara Horn that challenged my perspective on teaching about the Holocaust. Author of the book People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunting Present (2021), Horn wrote a striking article for the Atlantic titled “Is Holocaust Education Making Antisemitism Worse?” In her article, she argues that Holocaust education often fails to reduce antisemitism because it tends to package the Holocaust as a broad, feel-good lesson about tolerance rather than helping students understand Jews, Jewish history, and enduring antisemitism. She narrates her experience visiting Holocaust museums and interviewing educators, weaving common pitfalls of such education throughout the essay. Her work moved me to reflect on new strategies to overcome the inadequacy of using Holocaust education alone to address antisemitism.

Having just pitched the Holocaust Studies elective to do exactly what Horn cautions against, the last thing that I wanted to do was make antisemitism worse. I brainstormed how to include additional content to teach my students the gravity of the 20th Century genocide while also equipping them with tools to combat discrimination today. Through collaboration with fellow teachers, museum experts, and the families of Holocaust survivors, I tried to craft my course to address three common errors in Holocaust education that Horn identified in her article. Through my own learning journey, here are three takeaways that I think any educator teaching about the Holocaust should know:

1. Start with the Jewish people – Holocaust education often lacks sufficient instruction on Jewish history, identity, and religion, making it inadequate to address antisemitism.
2. Explain the history of antisemitism – Students are often left with an incomplete understanding of antisemitism if it is only taught in relation to genocide. Discrimination against Jewish people has taken many forms over the course of history.
3. Incorporate modern bias training – If the goal of Holocaust Studies is to address antisemitism, then the course must include modern bias training of 21st Century discrimination.

There are several resources available to support a well-rounded Jewish Studies program. For each of these takeaways, I will include resources on my bookshelf that I’ve found helpful over the years in understanding and teaching Jewish history. I hope these resources will facilitate discussion in your classrooms too!

Start with the Jewish people

One of Horn’s chief concerns is that many teachers introduce Jews only through a lesson on the Holocaust, which can lead to “a fundamental misunderstanding of Jewish identity.” Horn calls educators to explore the diversity of the Jewish people as context for rather than an afterthought of Holocaust education.

In my classroom too, I’ve noticed that students do not always have a basic understanding of the Jewish people. Are Jews a religious tradition or an ethnic group? How has the Jewish community changed over time? How internally diverse is the Jewish diaspora? If you were to walk into my classroom at the beginning of the course, it would feel more like a Religious Studies or Sociology class rather than a class on genocide. Before even approaching the 1940s, I spent the first few classes on Jewish Studies 101. While not every instructor has the luxury of time to spend multiple sessions on Jewish Studies, I hope that future Holocaust education will include more context on the complexity of the Jewish community. If students’ only interaction with Jews is through The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank or Night by Elie Wiesel (both of which my two children read this spring in their English classes), then we must also explain that the Franks and the Wiesels represent just two examples of a much larger, diverse, and always evolving tradition.

On Chris’s Bookshelf

• The American Academy of Religion’s Guidelines for Teaching About Religion in K-12 Public Schools in the United States offers a great starting place for teaching about religion in a K-12 classroom.
• The Institute of Curriculum Services (ICS) has wonderful free materials on Judaism and Jewish history. Their lessons on Ancient Israel, Jewish Immigration to the US, and a History of European Antisemitism were helpful after establishing a basic foundation of Jewish identity.
• The ICS also offers a ready-to-go Teaching about Judaism slide deck. It served as a great introduction to Judaism’s tenets and culture.

Explain the History of Antisemitism

Horn notes in her article that there’s a misleading assumption within schools that learning about the Holocaust “inoculates people against antisemitism.” She argues that an exclusive focus on the Holocaust is incapable of addressing modern antisemitism because it sets the bar for antisemitism at the level of genocide.

For high school students who may have limited exposure to Jewish communities, it is important to contextualize the Holocaust in the broader history of discrimination. Discrimination against Jewish people has unfortunately existed for centuries—before, during, and after the Holocaust. Antisemitism has taken many forms over time, from casual prejudice to exclusionary housing policies to physical persecution. Explaining that antisemitism is not just limited to the 1940s is crucial to helping students understand the harm of discrimination today. I agree with Horn that when people believe the Holocaust is the only form of anti-Jewish discrimination, they believe that they are incapable of antisemitism. On the other hand, I’ve noticed among my students that when antisemitism is framed only as genocide, it fosters an unhealthy daily fear whenever modern antisemitism is mentioned.

As an instructor, the first step to equipping students to combat antisemitism is to define it as accurately as possible.

On Chris’s Bookshelf

• The Echoes and Reflections “Antisemitism After the Holocaust” module provides lesson plans, primary sources, and multimedia testimonies on the persistence of antisemitism after WW2, challenging the misconception that discrimination ended with the War.
• The Tanenbaum Center for Interreligious Understanding’s Anti-Semitism: What, Where, and Why white paper provides a clear framework for identifying contemporary anti-Jewish bias in secular and religious environments.

Incorporate Modern Bias Training

Horn rightfully argues that teaching about the Holocaust and antisemitism as a problem of the past excuses antisemitism today. If we “congratulate ourselves for not committing mass murder,” then we fail to teach our students how ignorance or complicity can contribute to modern forms of discrimination.

My hope with this course is to help students understand antisemitism as a modern threat while equipping them to be thoughtful allies rather than passive bystanders. As a class, we worked through how the ideas that fueled the Holocaust, such as nationalism, white supremacy, and fascism, show up in micro- and macro- scales in our world today. As educators, we can use this as an opportunity to show how these harmful ideologies often intersect with other forms of hate such as racism and sexism. One of the most engaging weeks of the course is our lesson on digital literacy: the students compare hateful media from the 1930s and 40s with media from the 2000s, showing the persistence of prejudice today. Since my students are often on TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat, the lesson encourages them to be critical consumers as they scroll through content that may impact how they view the world.

In a broader sense, as much as we are taught to embrace differences, many are taught to hate them. Holocaust Studies alone may be insufficient to stop hate, but if we can incorporate more bias training lessons into our classrooms, we can help support a more socially aware generation of learners.

On Chris’s Bookshelf

• The Gringlas Unit on Antisemitism After the Holocaust explores the Jewish community after the Holocaust and modern day antisemitism.
• The TELL Institute (Teacher Education for Lifelong Learning) focuses on professional development for educators, specializing in how to approach sensitive, complex historical topics like genocide, human rights, and systemic bias in the classroom.

Additional resources to support Holocaust education

• In Why? Explaining the Holocaust, historian Peter Hayes tackles eight of the most common and complex questions surrounding the Holocaust (e.g., “Why the Jews?”, “Why the Germans?”, and “Why didn’t more escape?”). Hayes dismantles long-held myths and offers a grounded, evidence-based synthesis of how political, economic, and social factors converged to allow the catastrophe to happen.
• On the Institute for Curriculum Services website, there are specialized, vetted curricula detailing the history, beliefs, and practices of Judaism, alongside a comprehensive exploration of the deep historical roots of antisemitism. The materials trace anti-Jewish prejudice from ancient theological roots through medieval economic scapegoating to modern racial theories.
• Living Links is a platform with hundreds of Holocaust survivors’ descendants trained to share their families stories, discuss the ramifications of the genocide, and connect the history with the current concerns of the Jewish community.
• The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum offers fully structured, age-appropriate lesson plans backed by an immense archive of primary documents, photographs, artifacts, and maps. The lessons emphasize historical accuracy, critical thinking, and the human decisions that shaped historical events.