Memory Is Not a Vaccine Against Antisemitism

For the past few days, a sentence has been circulating in my inbox: If we want Holocaust education to fight antisemitism today, we must invest in teachers.

I have read it several times. And each time, I find myself stopping not at the end of the sentence, but at the beginning. Do we? Do we actually expect Holocaust education to fight contemporary antisemitism?

I ask this as the granddaughter of four Holocaust survivors, as someone who has spent years interviewing survivors around the world, and as someone whose work now brings their testimonies into classrooms across the country.

For much of my life, I instinctively believed the answer was yes. Teach young people where antisemitism can lead, and surely they will recognize it when it begins again. Show them what happened when Jews were dehumanized, isolated and eventually murdered, and surely they will be less susceptible to the same hatred.

It is a comforting equation. History + memory = prevention. But I am no longer sure it is that simple.

I have sat across from Holocaust survivors who still remember the names of the classmates who suddenly stopped speaking to them because they were Jews — “Christ killers,” they were told. I have listened to people in their 90s and even over 100 describe not only deportations and camps, but the smaller moments that came first: a slur in the hallway, spit in the street, an insult, a teacher who looked away, a neighbor who stopped saying hello, a friend who decided that being seen with a Jew had suddenly become inconvenient.

And then I go into schools today. I meet wonderful students. Curious students. Compassionate students. Young people genuinely moved by what they hear. But something has become increasingly clear to me: a student can know exactly what happened to Jews in the 1940s and still have absolutely no idea how to recognize antisemitism in 2026.

That gap should trouble us. We have become very good at teaching antisemitism in the past tense. We teach yellow stars, ghettos, cattle cars, Auschwitz. We teach what hatred looks like once history has already rendered its verdict.

That is essential. But it is also, in some ways, the easy part. Because we are very good at recognizing and teaching antisemitism once history has already told us what antisemitism looks like. A swastika on a synagogue? Easy. A Nazi screaming at a Jewish child? Easy. A yellow star, a shattered storefront, a cattle car, a gas chamber? We know what to call those things. History has already given us the answer.

The much harder question is whether a 15-year-old who can identify Kristallnacht can identify an antisemitic conspiracy theory on TikTok. Can a student who knows what happened at Auschwitz recognize the ancient idea that Jews secretly control governments, banks or the media when that idea arrives repackaged in contemporary language? Can someone be deeply moved by the testimony of a Jewish child persecuted in 1942 and then, eighty-four years later, participate in the collective demonization of Jews without understanding the contradiction?

Of course they can. That is the problem. The harder educational challenge is teaching young people to identify antisemitism before society has agreed that it is antisemitism, when it comes wrapped in the language of politics, social justice, humor, conspiracy, activism or belonging.

Holocaust education and antisemitism education overlap. But they are not the same thing. And pretending they are may actually prevent us from doing either as well as we should.

There is another reason this distinction matters. The Holocaust deserves to be taught on its own terms. Six million murdered Jews should never become merely an educational instrument for solving a contemporary problem. Survivors are not props in an anti-hate curriculum, and their stories are not valuable only because of what they might teach us about today.

We teach the Holocaust because it happened. Because the victims deserve memory. Because history deserves truth. But if we also claim, as institutions, governments and Jewish organizations frequently do, that Holocaust education is one of our weapons against contemporary antisemitism, then we have to be willing to ask whether the way we are teaching it actually accomplishes that goal. Right now, too often, it does not.

And this is where teachers matter enormously. I have watched extraordinary educators take a survivor testimony and turn it into something much larger than a history lesson. They stop the video. They ask why a neighbor behaved a certain way. They ask what propaganda was circulating. They examine how language changed before laws changed. They ask students where responsibility begins. Those teachers build the bridge between then and now.

But I have also met teachers who desperately want to do the right thing and are terrified of getting it wrong. And can we blame them? Look at what we ask them to do. Teach the Holocaust. Explain two thousand years of antisemitism. Discuss Nazi ideology, propaganda, bystanders, perpetrators, victims and rescuers. Then make the leap to today.

Navigate October 7 and Israel. Distinguish criticism of Israeli policy from antisemitic tropes. Explain why conspiracy theories about Jewish power that are centuries old are suddenly resurfacing through TikTok algorithms. Understand Holocaust distortion. Recognize coded language. Navigate social media misinformation.

Do all of this in a politically polarized classroom where almost any conversation involving Jews or Israel can suddenly become explosive. And please finish before the bell rings!

Then we give many of them a few hours of professional development and call them prepared. They are not failing us. We are failing them.

A 2026 UNESCO survey of more than 2,000 European educators found that 70 percent had received no professional training on how to recognize and address contemporary antisemitism.

That statistic stopped me. Because perhaps we have been asking the wrong question. Instead of asking why Holocaust education has failed to eradicate antisemitism, perhaps we should ask: Did we ever actually teach teachers how to teach antisemitism?

I see just how important that bridge is every time I work with survivor testimony, and I also see its limits. When students encounter survivors not simply as historical witnesses but as human beings, something happens. A survivor stops being “a Holocaust survivor.” She becomes Tova. He becomes Laszlo. Someone who loved music. Someone who remembers her mother’s cooking. Someone who was playful as a child. Someone who survived and then built a life.

Recently in Texas, I sat across from Walter, 104 years old and still astonishingly sharp, funny and full of life. Watching him tell his story reminded me why testimony matters so much. It makes history personal. A teenager may forget a date. They rarely forget a face.

But I have also come to understand the limits of emotion. A student can cry listening to a survivor on Tuesday and encounter, or even share, an antisemitic conspiracy theory online on Thursday without recognizing the connection. That is precisely the gap we are asking teachers to bridge.

Emotion opens the door. Education has to take them through it.

If we truly want Holocaust education to help fight antisemitism, I believe we need to stop treating that outcome as automatic. It requires intentionality.

Teachers need the historical knowledge to teach what happened. They need survivor testimony that makes that history human. But they also need the tools to connect mechanisms of the past to manifestations of the present, without collapsing the two or pretending that 2026 is 1938.

Students should understand not only what antisemitism did, but how antisemitism works. How conspiracy theories turn Jews into an explanation for complex problems. How language makes exclusion acceptable before violence becomes imaginable. How a minority can simultaneously be portrayed as weak and dangerously powerful. How old accusations mutate rather than disappear. How social pressure can turn ordinary people into bystanders. And perhaps most importantly, how to recognize all of this when there is no swastika attached to it.

That is a very different educational ambition from simply teaching the chronology of the Holocaust. And it requires much more from us than asking teachers to “do more.” It requires investing in them — in serious training, contemporary resources, access to testimony, historical expertise and the confidence to lead difficult conversations.

I began this work believing memory itself could protect us. Perhaps that is the most personal evolution for me. As a granddaughter of survivors, I grew up believing in Never Again almost as a promise. If people knew. If they saw. If they listened. Surely they would understand.

I still believe deeply in the power of those voices. In fact, as the survivor generation disappears, I feel more urgency than ever to preserve them. But the survivors I interview have also taught me something else.

Memory is not a vaccine.

A society can know what happened yesterday and still fail to recognize what is happening today. A student can know Auschwitz and still not recognize antisemitism.

That is not an argument against Holocaust education. Quite the opposite. It is an argument for taking Holocaust education seriously enough not to ask it to accomplish something we have not equipped it to do.

So yes, invest in teachers. But first, let us be honest about what we are asking them to do. Teaching the Holocaust preserves memory. Fighting antisemitism requires something more: teaching the next generation to recognize the machinery of hatred before history tells them what to call it.

If we want Holocaust education to do both, we have to build the bridge between them. And we cannot expect teachers to build it alone.