Why Holocaust education in the US failed

I was born on a frosted November morning on Manhattan’s Upper East Side with a silver spoon in my mouth. Just before my first birthday, my family moved to the promised land of white suburbia, also known as southwest Connecticut. I was raised in the Reform movement, which any Jew from my hometown will admit is essentially agnosticism with a side of pickles. And yet, life was good for the Jews. 

It seemed that my entire elementary school was packed into my Hebrew school classroom with me on Sunday mornings. During 7th grade, there was a Bar or Bat Mitzvah every weekend— with parents disseminating a town-wide spreadsheet so that schedule conflicts between parties might be limited. Our public schools canceled classes for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. Local restaurants adorned with Christmas decorations also displayed a chanukiah of equal stature. Being Jewish wasn’t strange or curious or weird in my hometown— it was the norm. And thus was laid the fertile ground for what very well may have been the most robust, comprehensive Holocaust education programming ever taught in an American public school.

My middle school pulled out all the stops for our three-month long Holocaust education unit. The humanities classes— social studies, language arts— worked in tandem to provide an analysis of first-hand account Holocaust literature. As a class, we read Night and Ann Frank’s Diary, then formed book clubs under teacher supervision. A Holocaust survivor came to speak with us and answer questions. Our idiosyncratic, anxiously Jewish social studies teacher facilitated discussions about the damage done by the inaction of the international community. We were tested on the names and locations of several different labor and extermination camps. Our final essay prompt was the question: what is the danger of being a bystander in a crisis? In light of the state of the public school system in America, my middle school, well, kind of nailed it. So my question now is, why didn’t any of it work?

When I say that our Holocaust education failed, I mean that since Oct. 7, our gentile classmates have disproportionately managed to fall victim to the antisemitic conspiracy theories surrounding the world’s only Jewish state, and to the terrorist propaganda claiming Israel is a “white colonialist state” that doesn’t deserve to exist. My peers on college campuses across America are unable to think critically and see through the masterful lies being promulgated, and are not strong enough to stand with the Jewish community during our darkest days. Instead, they largely became radicalized on leftist social media, and turned into Hamas’ useful idiots. The Holocaust education unit from our middle school days was designed to make non-Jewish students recognize signs of antisemitism at its genesis instead of its zenith, but it only succeeded in producing college students who donned Hamas headbands, chanted for the slaughter of 9.8 million Jews, aligned themselves with a bloodthirsty terrorist organization, accommodated themselves to living in plastic tents on their university’s quadrangles, and ultimately failed miserably at the intellectual task of first recognizing and then denouncing antisemitic falsehoods.

When the anti-Israel protests first began on campuses, I waited for my non-Jewish middle school friends— the ones who attended my Bat Mitzvah, ate Shabbat dinner at my grandmother’s house, and sat through the Holocaust education unit alongside me— to immediately see through the shtuyot and rush to my side. I waited for them to reach out during the most gruesome, terrifying weeks of my life. I waited for them to denounce the thinly veiled antisemitic conspiracy theories claiming that Israel is purposefully and gleefully murdering infants. I waited for them to have enough intellectual and moral courage to ascertain the fact obvious to me, that standing up for the Jews had once again become verboten, because we had once again been turned into very convincing scapegoats. But I waited in vain. 

And then I began to wonder, as they graduated from willful silence to emphatically chanting for the ethnic cleansing of my people, if they remembered pulling me aside at a sleepover in 7th grade— in the midst of our Holocaust unit— and saying “don’t worry, Rachel. If the Nazi’s come back, we’ll hide you.” But instead of being the esteemed righteous among the nations, like they promised me they would be when we were kids, as young adults they decided that because I was Jewish and had lived, worked, studied, volunteered, and come of age between the river and the sea, that I deserved the death penalty. What went wrong since those halcyon days of yore? 

I would venture a guess that the reason such middle school educational programming ultimately failed is due to a fundamental misunderstanding of antisemitism. As a community, we were taught that antisemitism is simply the anti-Jewish form of racism, homophobia, xenophobia, transphobia, or any other form of discrimination; that it is the conscious and deliberate prejudice against Jewish people. But this conception of antisemitism, though not entirely inaccurate, is dangerously superficial.

Antisemitism is unlike any other form of prejudice in that it is a disease not just of hatred, but of an altered and false reality. Antisemitism is not just a hostility in one’s heart but a parasite in one’s mind. Since the beginning of time, antisemitism has been designed to make the gentile masses think they are in the right and morally superior by persecuting Jews; through a distortion of mass-perception and cognitive dissonance, antisemitism instills the belief that the Jews are the source of all evil, even and especially as the collective definition of “evil” morphs over time.

By this I mean that antisemitism, unlike other traditional bigotries, shape-shifts throughout history to align the Jews against whatever the world values at the current moment, and then tricks the masses into thinking that such prejudice is fully justified, self-evident, and even obligatory of a thinking person. In other words, bigots of other traditional forms of hatred are typically aware that they harbor an active prejudice, or at the very least dislike, for members of a certain group. But the majority of the new-wave antisemites (I’m talking about the leftist ones, not the neo-nazis) do not even believe they are being antisemitic at all. This Macbethian phenomenon— convincing the masses that what is wrong is right, and what is right is wrong— is at the heart of what sets antisemitism apart from other hatreds. And by treating antisemitism simply as the anti-Jewish form of discrimination, without fully understanding antisemitism’s deeper, fundamental distortion of reality itself, we are essentially missing not only the core of the problem but the solution as well.

There is a concept in psychology in which disorders are classified as either egodystonic or egosyntonic. Egodystonic disorders are those in which the afflicted patient is aware of the disorder and most likely distressed by it, such as Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, Attention Deficit Disorder, and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Individuals with these maladies can seek treatment and almost always contain self awareness of their diagnosis. Egosyntonic disorders, on the other hand, are those in which the individual is unaware of its presence, such as Antisocial Personality Disorder, Narcissistic Personality Disorder, and other personality disorders. Kevin Benett, PhD writing for Psychology Today describes patients with egosyntonic disorders as being unable to see one’s own illness, as one’s condition seems normal and acceptable to the inner constitution.

I bring up this concept not because I want to diagnose antisemites with any specific disorder, as that is outside the purview of anything I am qualified to discuss. But I do wish to draw distinct differences between hatreds that are egodystonic (consider, for example, that a white supremacist who openly flies the confederate flag might try to blanket his bigotry in euphemisms like “heritage” instead of being open about his racism; but at the end of the day, if you ask him his thoughts on people of color, he will not mince words) and the more egosyntonic disease of antisemitism. Precisely because Holocaust education curricula treats antisemitism like any other hatred towards a targeted group, they fail to address the fact that the majority of the time, new-wave antisemites do not believe that they are antisemitic. And that lack of awareness of their brainwashing against Jews, subconsciously absorbing the message that we are inherently evil, results in their seeing themselves as champions of whatever noble, worthy cause the evil Jews are portrayed as endangering. They live in a fundamentally distorted reality in which the roles of victim and offender are reversed. 

In this way, treating antisemitism as egodystonic almost guarantees the failure and inefficacy of Holocaust education curricula. Such an approach does not adequately teach the non-Jewish students the warning signs about brainwashing, scapegoating, collective blaming, and the millenia old tactic of “blame the Jews first, check the facts later (if at all).” It doesn’t cause them to put their intellectual defenses up whenever someone is calling for the destruction of world Jewry under the guise of whatever social-justice campaign is in vogue. The students in my middle school learned what the Nazis did, but not how they did it. They learned that the Nazis killed 6 million Jews, but not the years-long propaganda that methodically took place in society (for example, amongst the Hitler Youth programs) to prime, prepare, and desensitize the next generation of Germans to become efficient and willinging participants in the Shoa. When my former classmates picture the Holocaust, they picture the gas chambers, but not the dehumanizing, demonizing rhetoric that allowed the Jews to be marched there without the protest of the free world. This oversight of the manipulated reality at the heart of antisemitism, I argue, contributed in part to enabling my non-Jewish classmates, who grew up in the town hailed as the “Reform Jewish capital of the world,” to uncritically and unquestionably support the 2024 incarnation of the very forces from whom they had earnestly promised to protect me in middle school.

Antisemitism is an affront to the objective truth that we all theoretically share in society. There is a reason for the common expression that if Jews are fleeing a country en masse, then that country is on the brink of collapse. It is because antisemitism is a tyrant that silences freedom of thought, freedom of dissent, and the expression of any and all minority opinions— both within society and within the psyche. Because the Jews refuse to bow to idols and resist with all our strength against forced assimilation, we are the canary in the coal mine for the collapse of free, liberal thought and the first to be scapegoated during (and in order to facilitate) the rise of fascism and totalitarianism. 

Ignoring the underbelly of antisemitism, with its distortions of truth and reality, leaves graduates of Holocaust education programs vulnerable to being misled and baited by the justice-camouflaged PR campaigns of the world’s most deadly terrorist organizations. To raise and educate allies, antisemitism must be acknowledged and treated as its own unique and historically separate entity of evil, and not treated as merely the equal of more contemporary forms of discrimination. Otherwise, we are essentially treating a virus with antibiotics.