About the Name
Why Teach Jewish History?
Teach Jewish History says the work plainly. It is both the material and the case for teaching it. The Makor Project publishes the site, and the Makor name holds the method.
History begins with sources. Primary documents, inscriptions, material culture, scholarly editions, the evidence itself, not secondhand summary. Jewish history, carried across millennia and continents, has too often reached classrooms as summary rather than source.
Makor (מָקוֹר) is the Hebrew word for source. In modern academic Hebrew, a researcher cites a makor rishon, a primary source. In the Hebrew Bible, the same word carries the older sense of wellspring or fountain, the fountain of living waters, the fountain of life, the teaching of the wise as a fountain of life. The Mishnah and Talmud use the word for a textual source, the verse from which a later ruling derives. The medieval commentators (Rashi, Ibn Ezra, Maimonides, Nachmanides) use it the same way. The root m-q-r (מ־ק־ר) also produces the verb to dig, to excavate, to trace something back to its origin.
Every meaning of the word is a step in the same work: digging back, finding the source, drawing from the wellspring. The Makor Project is named for that work.
Mission
Teach Jewish History addresses a structural gap: Jewish history runs continuously through the eras the curriculum already teaches (the ancient world, the medieval Islamic and European worlds, the Spanish and Ottoman empires, the World Wars, the modern Middle East) but reaches most classrooms only in fragments. The site reconnects that history to the eras around it, holding it to the same historical depth and documentary standards expected elsewhere in the curriculum. Alongside it runs the history of antisemitism: how the hatred was built, how it spread, and how it was answered. The goal is to bring this history into schools, inside the courses students already take, so that students no longer meet this civilization only at its destruction. The full case is on The Curriculum Gap. It is free, Creative Commons licensed, and independent. The argument is parity, not preference.
Founder
Orit Yakuel
Orit Yakuel is an art historian and educator whose work centers on the material culture of Jewish civilization, the objects, places, and primary sources through which its long continuity can be traced, much of it absent from the standard K–12 curriculum. She founded and directs The Makor Project and its site, Teach Jewish History.
Her training is in art history and archaeology, with fieldwork at Pompeii. She has worked in the Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and at The Jewish Museum in New York, in exhibition research, curatorial support, and collections management. She has run exhibition programs at the University of Pennsylvania's Burrison Gallery and at Columbia University. A U.S. State Department cultural-exchange initiative took her to Egypt to build academic partnerships there.
She has taught art history at Nassau Community College and Hofstra University. Teach Jewish History emerged from that work, an effort to assemble, from the evidence itself, the connective Jewish history that the standard curriculum leaves fragmented or absent.
Yakuel holds an MA in art history from the University of Pennsylvania and a BA in art history and criticism from Stony Brook University.
How the platform works
The site is organized around six Units. Read in order, the Chapters form an online textbook, the whole arc from antiquity to the present. Read singly, each fits into a course a school already teaches. Around the Chapters sit materials for each age and use, from K–5 lessons to college syllabi, for classrooms and for the curious minds outside them. The For Teachers page maps the classroom materials. Each Chapter is built around historical questions, primary sources, and material culture, encouraging readers to move from evidence to interpretation rather than from conclusion to evidence. Chapter pages, classroom modules, handouts, and source directories carry that method into the classroom.
Why the platform includes K–5
Children who first meet Jewish life through synagogues, holidays, neighborhoods, foods, and communities build a different foundation than children who first meet it through the Holocaust in middle or high school. The two are not interchangeable.
The K–5 lessons begin with a living people. When students reach the hardest chapters years later, they already know who those chapters are about.
Connect
Questions, comments, and classroom stories are always welcome. Find the right inbox on the Connect page →
Good history begins in curiosity, advances through evidence, and follows the record wherever it leads. Every page of the site is built on that standard.