Is Holocaust Education Making Anti-Semitism Worse?

Photographs by Evan Jenkins

When the 40-something reader in the kippah at my book event in Michigan approached the signing table, I already knew what he was going to say, if not the humiliating specifics. Readers like him always tell me these things. He hovered until most people had dispersed, and then described his supermarket trip that morning. Another shopper had rammed him with a cart, hard. Maybe it had been an accident, except the shopper had shouted, “The kosher bagels are in the next aisle!” He’d considered saying something to the store manager, but to what end? Besides, it wasn’t much worse than the baseball game the day before, when other fans had thrown popcorn at him and his kids.

The recent rise in American anti-Semitism is well documented. I could fill pages with FBI hate-crime statistics, or with a list of violent attacks from the past six years or even the past six months, or with the growing gallery of American public figures saying vile things about Jews. Or I could share stories you probably haven’t heard, such as one about a threatened attack on a Jewish school in Ohio in March 2022—where the would-be perpetrator was the school’s own security guard. But none of that would capture the vague sense of dread one encounters these days in the Jewish community, a dread unprecedented in my lifetime.

I published a book in late 2021 about exploitations of Jewish history, with the deliberately provocative title People Love Dead Jews. The anti-Semitic hate mail arrived on cue. What I didn’t expect was the torrent of private stories I received from American Jews—online, in letters, but mostly in person, in places where I’ve spoken across America.

These people talked about bosses and colleagues who repeatedly ridiculed them with anti-Semitic “jokes,” friends who turned on them when they mentioned a son’s bar mitzvah or a trip to Israel, romantic partners who openly mocked their traditions, classmates who defaced their dorm rooms and pilloried them online, teachers and neighbors who parroted conspiratorial lies. I was surprised to learn how many people were getting pennies thrown at them in 21st-century America, an anti-Semitic taunt that I thought had died around 1952. These casual stories sickened me in their volume and their similarity, a catalog of small degradations. At a time when many people in other minority groups have become bold in publicizing the tiniest of slights, these American Jews instead expressed deep shame in sharing these stories with me, feeling that they had no right to complain. After all, as many of them told me, it wasn’t the Holocaust.

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But well-meaning people everywhere from statehouses to your local middle school have responded to this surging anti-Semitism by doubling down on Holocaust education. Before 2016, only seven states required Holocaust education in schools. In the past seven years, 18 more have passed Holocaust-education mandates. Public figures who make anti-Semitic statements are invited to tour Holocaust museums; schools respond to anti-Semitic incidents by hosting Holocaust speakers and implementing Holocaust lesson plans.

[Dara Horn: Auschwitz is not a metaphor]

The bedrock assumption that has endured for nearly half a century is that learning about the Holocaust inoculates people against anti-Semitism. But it doesn’t.

Holocaust education remains essential for teaching historical facts in the face of denial and distortions. Yet over the past year, as I’ve visited Holocaust museums and spoken with educators around the country, I have come to the disturbing conclusion that Holocaust education is incapable of addressing contemporary anti-Semitism. In fact, in the total absence of any education about Jews alive today, teaching about the Holocaust might even be making anti-Semitism worse.

I. The Museum Makers

You could divide the story of Skokie, Illinois, “into two periods,” Howard Reich told me: “Before the attempted Nazi march and after.” Reich grew up in Skokie and is a former Chicago Tribune writer. His parents survived the Holocaust. When Reich was a kid in the Chicago suburb in the 1960s, they discussed their experiences only with other survivors—which back then was typical. “They didn’t want to burden us children,” Reich explained. “They didn’t want to relive the worst part of their life.” But the pain was ever present. Skokie’s Jewish community included a large survivor population; Reich remembers one neighbor whose recurring nightmares about Nazi dogs led him to kick a wall so hard that he broke his toe.

In 1977, the National Socialist Party of America wanted to march in uniform in Skokie. When the town attempted to block the march, the Nazis, represented by a Jewish ACLU lawyer committed to free speech, went to court. The case reached the Supreme Court; in the end, the law favored the Nazis, although—perhaps because they were sufficiently spooked by the public backlash—they didn’t march in Skokie at all.

The incident inspired many Skokie survivors to speak out about their experiences. They created a Holocaust museum in a small storefront and later successfully lobbied the state for one of America’s earliest Holocaust-education mandates. If American law couldn’t directly protect people from anti-Semitism, they hoped education could.

Last year, I met Skokie’s mayor, George Van Dusen, and a retired Skokie village manager named Al Rigoni in Van Dusen’s office. Both men were involved in local politics during the Nazi incident.

Like most people I spoke with who remembered that time, the men saw the outcome of the threatened march as positive. “The priests and rabbis—they never met and talked to each other until this happened,” Van Dusen said. “Out of that