A student who reaches the Holocaust without having met any of the civilization that preceded it cannot fully understand what was destroyed, or why. The argument is equal treatment: the same depth the curriculum already gives the other major civilizations it teaches.
A civilization a student meets only in fragments (a few pages in antiquity, a few in 1933) cannot be understood as a whole.
The missing historical context already exists, in archives, museums, primary sources, and decades of scholarship. Teach Jewish History organizes that material into classroom-ready resources that fit naturally within the lessons teachers already teach.
This is not a criticism of teachers. Most educators teach the curriculum available to them.
Each Chapter lists the standards it aligns with, and Standards Companion editions map the site to state and national frameworks. Much of the material also fits units teachers already teach, so it needs no new unit. The benchmark is parity: the continuous treatment the curriculum already gives India and China, Christianity and Islam. The Jewish story also belongs beside Greece and Rome in the ancient world the curriculum teaches. It begins in the Levant, between Mesopotamia and Egypt, and it continues from there to the present.
The premise
A history with no in-between.
Anyone can test the starting observation. Open a sixth-, ninth-, or tenth-grade world history textbook used in an American public school, and look for the Jewish people. They appear in the unit on the ancient Near East as the Israelites, beside Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Persia. They reappear more than two thousand years later, in the twentieth century, as victims of the Holocaust.
Almost none of the history in between is taught. It includes the Talmud, the medieval Jewish communities of Iraq, Spain, and the Rhineland, and the Sephardi Jews who settled across the Ottoman Empire after 1492. It includes the Cairo Geniza, a storeroom of medieval documents kept in a Cairo synagogue, and the Hasidic movement of Eastern Europe. It includes the Jewish communities of Yemen, Morocco, and Iran, the start of American Jewish life in 1654, and the long growth of the antisemitism that made the Holocaust possible.
Education scholars have a name for this kind of gap. Elliot Eisner called it the “null curriculum,” and he argued that “what schools do not teach may be as important as what they do teach.” Students who are never taught Jewish history still learn about Jews. They learn from whatever reaches them first.
Practical limits explain much of the gap: limited class time, textbook length, and the challenge of fitting world history into one school year. The Chapters supply the missing history.
The map below shows where that history fits into the courses schools already teach.
Integration map
Where this fits, from the foundation up.
The material runs the length of a K–12 education and into college courses. The Chapters are written to sit beside the textbook a class already uses and fill in what it skips.
Grades K–5 · the foundation
The K–5 portal introduces Jewish life the way a classroom introduces other cultures, with ready-to-teach lessons for world-cultures and ELA time. A child’s first encounter is a challah or a synagogue, not a catastrophe. Several states’ Holocaust-education requirements reach the elementary grades, and these lessons are an age-appropriate foundation for that instruction.
Grades 6–8 · the bridge
Many Chapters are written for readers from the middle grades up. Each Chapter shows its grade band, and many fit grade-6 world cultures and ELA.
Grades 9–12 · the courses you already teach
Each column below is a course teachers already run. Under it are the Chapters that fit that course, grouped by the unit where they belong. Where a course has no natural fit, the space is left empty. The map is a guide for teaching, not a claim that every Chapter matches a standard.
New York’s Grades 9–12 Social Studies Framework is used here as the example. Teachers in other states can map their own framework the same way.
Art History and ELA fits are noted by theme. Confirm them against your district’s course outline. Grade 11 U.S. History draws on American Jewry and the Unit 5 Chapters on Levi Strauss, Emma Lazarus, Samuel Gompers, Albert Einstein, the founders of Hollywood, and Jonas Salk. A Chapter left out of a column is not forced into it. It still stands on its own on the site.
College · the courses you already teach
The same gap can follow students into college, where a survey course may meet Jewish civilization in antiquity and again at the Holocaust, with the centuries between left out. Each college course draws on the Units below:
The same Chapters also serve as an incoming-student primer and a resource for the campus community. See For Colleges.
In any state or country, send Teach Jewish History to whoever shapes your district’s curriculum.
✉ Share this site with your districtWhat the gap looks like in practice
Two reference points, no connective tissue.
A 2009 study of two major publishers’ world history textbooks found that, of the three monotheistic religions, Judaism received the least coverage. The textbooks examined for this site show the same shape. Coverage of the Israelites runs from one page to one chapter: monotheism, the patriarchs, the Exodus, the kingdoms of David and Solomon, the Babylonian exile, and the Second Temple. After that, Jews reappear mainly as the targets of persecution, until the rise of Nazism in the 1930s.
Pearson’s World Civilizations: The Global Experience gives Judaism one page, inside its chapter on the earliest civilizations, and introduces the Jews through Babylon without naming their land. McGraw Hill’s middle-school Discovering Our Past dates the Jews and Judaism to the Babylonian exile. After antiquity, Jewish history appears only in passing. Medieval Jewish life gets a line, and there is no Sephardic civilization, no early modern Jewish thought, and no nineteenth-century mass migration. There is no account of how antisemitism changed, over a thousand years, from a religious accusation into a racial ideology.
The pattern runs across publishers, not one title. In the Margin documents the examined textbooks, with citations and suggested corrections.
In New York’s Grades 9–12 framework, the Holocaust sits in the unit on 1914 to 1945. The word “antisemitism” does not appear anywhere in the framework, and most of the roots are left out. They include early Christian teaching against Jews, the medieval laws that segregated and expelled Jewish communities, the blood libel, and the ghetto system. They also include the racial pseudoscience of the nineteenth century and the propaganda traditions the Nazi regime inherited rather than invented. Without them, the Holocaust looks like a sudden eruption of unexplained hatred. It was not sudden. It had a beginning, and students deserve to know it.
The years after the Holocaust are the second silence. The framework covers the founding of Israel, but it does not name the flight and expulsion of about 850,000 Jews from Arab countries between 1945 and 1972. It does not name the movement to free Soviet Jews, or the rebuilding of Jewish life in Europe after the war. For many students, the Holocaust is the last chapter of Jewish history they meet before college.
The equal-treatment standard
The benchmark is how the curriculum already treats other civilizations.
The site does not ask for special treatment. It asks for the treatment New York and other states already give other civilizations. New York’s Grades 9–12 framework follows India from the Gupta Empire to Gandhi’s independence movement. It follows China from the Han dynasty to its twentieth-century revolutions. These are taught as continuous civilizations, not as ancient origin stories that vanish after antiquity. The benchmark for Jewish history is the same standard, applied the same way.
Religion follows the same pattern. In the framework, Christianity returns again and again: the split between the Catholic and Orthodox churches, the Crusades, the Reformation. So does Islam: the caliphates, the division between Sunni and Shia, the Ottoman Empire. Judaism appears in Grade 9’s unit on belief systems. After that, the framework names Jews in one place, the persecution of Jews in Reformation Europe. It names the Holocaust, and it names Zionism and the creation of the State of Israel. Parity would mean giving Judaism the same reach the framework gives Christianity and Islam.
The standard, in one sentence
Teach Jewish history with the same continuity, the same chronological span, and the same instructional weight that the curriculum already extends to the other civilizations and religious traditions it covers.
Why this history
It runs through the history students already learn.
Jewish history is already in the curriculum. It runs through the units world history courses teach: ancient Babylon and Persia, Rome, the rise of Christianity and Islam, medieval Europe, Spain in 1492, the Enlightenment, the World Wars, and the modern Middle East. Students meet the eras. They rarely meet the people who lived through all of them.
It also shaped the world those eras built. The Israelites’ belief in one God is widely regarded as the root from which Christianity and Islam later grew. Those two faiths are held by more than half of the world’s people today. The Hebrew Bible shaped American symbols too. The Liberty Bell, cast in 1753, carries a line from Leviticus: “Proclaim Liberty Throughout All the Land Unto All the Inhabitants thereof.” In 1776, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson each proposed a design for the Great Seal of the United States drawn from the Exodus.
Followed across those eras, Jewish history answers a question every student will face as a citizen: who belongs? Few histories show how societies have answered it as clearly or for as long. Under Islamic rule, Jews and Christians lived under the dhimma (Arabic for “pact”), a status that promised protection of their lives, property, and worship but kept them legally subordinate. Its enforcement varied by ruler and century, and at its worst it gave way to massacre and forced conversion, as under the Almohads, a Muslim dynasty that ruled North Africa and Spain, in the 1140s. In Christian Europe, for centuries, Jews were forced into walled quarters and expelled from whole countries. When revolutionary France debated whether equal rights belonged to everyone, the Jews became the test case.
It is also one of the longest documented records of how a hatred works: how a lie about a people is invented, spread, believed, and written into law. That hatred is called antisemitism. It began long before the twentieth century, and it did not end there. The pattern is not unique to one people, and students need to recognize it in their own time.
Jewish history is also the story of a people who kept their language, their laws, and their memory without a country of their own for nearly two thousand years. Many students, from every background, carry a version of that story themselves.
None of this rests on the Holocaust. The history would matter, and the hatred would still need to be understood, if the Holocaust had never happened. Because it did happen, it belongs inside a history students already know, with what came before it and after it, so that it can be understood. The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s teaching guidelines make the same point. They ask teachers to show Jewish life before the Holocaust, “so that victims are not perceived only as victims.”
Some laws and agreements go beyond the Holocaust. Illinois law requires the teaching of history to include the contributions of Americans of different faiths, Jewish Americans among them. On December 8, 2016, Germany’s conference of state education ministers (the KMK) and the Central Council of Jews in Germany adopted a joint declaration on teaching Jewish history, religion, and culture in schools. Other histories have been written into existing courses by law. Florida’s required-instruction law lists African American history alongside the Holocaust. New Jersey’s Amistad law requires African American history throughout its courses on the United States.
A recognized standard, not special pleading
The same gap is documented in how schools teach slavery.
An event taught without the ideology behind it is an event students cannot learn to recognize. The argument is not unique to Jewish history. In 2018 the Southern Poverty Law Center published Teaching Hard History: American Slavery, a study of how American schools teach slavery. It reviewed 15 sets of state standards and 10 popular U.S. history textbooks. It found that students are taught the institution but not the belief system that justified it. None of the 15 sets of standards “addresses how the ideology of white supremacy rose to justify the institution of slavery.” The report also found that schools teach slavery as an exclusively Southern institution.
The historian Hasan Kwame Jeffries chaired the report’s advisory board. His preface says it is hard to teach “the ideology of white supremacy that justified it.” In his introduction, the historian David W. Blight calls that ideology “one of the deep roots of slavery.”
Why the parallel matters
Teaching the roots of an atrocity, and not only the atrocity itself, is a recognized standard for teaching hard history honestly. It has already been argued for in the teaching of slavery. Antisemitism offers an unusually long and unusually well-documented record of how that machinery is built: the accusation, the law, the propaganda, the violence. A student who learns to read it once can recognize it when it appears again.
Source: Teaching Hard History: American Slavery (Southern Poverty Law Center, 2018), preface by historian Hasan Kwame Jeffries, The Ohio State University; introduction by historian David W. Blight, Yale University.
Beyond the United States
The question is global, too.
The question is not only American. Many governments require Holocaust education, from Germany and France to provinces such as Ontario and Manitoba in Canada and states such as Victoria and New South Wales in Australia. In Europe, the longer history happened on home ground: the medieval ghettos, the expulsions, and the centuries of Jewish life before them. Venice’s ghetto, founded in 1516, gave the world the word. Rome had its ghetto too, and Spain expelled its Jews in 1492. See where the mandates stand, and how the site aligns →
What the gap costs
What students do not learn, they cannot recognize.
Two consequences follow from the gap. Both show up in the public debates students enter after high school.
The first consequence concerns the Holocaust. Taught without its history, the Holocaust is easier to treat as remote and harder to recognize in its early stages. It also cuts the Holocaust off from the propaganda, the laws, and the ideas that made it possible. Decades of scholarship have documented the long history of European antisemitism. It runs from the early Christian writers known as the Church Fathers through the blood libel, the expulsions, and the Inquisition. It continues through the debates over Jewish equality and the racial theories of the nineteenth century. The curriculum does not pass that record on.
The second consequence concerns the present. Students who know only the Israelites and the Holocaust are not prepared to weigh today’s claims about Jewish identity, Jewish history, or the modern Middle East. They have not learned that Jewish communities lived in Iraq, Iran, Yemen, Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, Libya, Algeria, and Syria for many centuries. In Iraq and Egypt, those communities were more than two thousand years old. In most of these lands, they were there centuries before Islam arrived. They have not learned about the Sephardic civilization of medieval Spain, the Jewish presence in the Land of Israel in every period from antiquity to today, or American Jewish life since 1654.
Other sources fill the gap. In a 2020 national survey of Americans aged 18 to 39, 49 percent said they had seen Holocaust denial or distortion posts on social media or elsewhere online. Students who meet those posts with two reference points and no history in between have no frame for judging them.
Propaganda also reached children directly. In 1936 the press of Der Stürmer, an antisemitic Nazi newspaper, published a picture book for young children, Trust No Fox in the Green Meadow and No Jew on His Oath. A curriculum that teaches the history first, including the methods, the forgeries, and the documented record, lets students trace a claim to its source before deciding what it is worth.
Common misconceptions this page addresses
The Misconceptions reference answers each claim below at length, with the record and its sources.
- “The killing began in 1933.” See the entry →
- “The Holocaust ended on V-E Day, May 8, 1945.” See the entry →
- “Antisemitism is primarily a Christian-European phenomenon.” See the entry →
- “The ghetto was a Nazi institution.” See the entry →
- “The Jewish people left the Land of Israel in 70 CE and returned in 1948.” See the entry →
- “The 1948 founding of the State of Israel caused the departure of Jews from Arab and Muslim-majority countries.” See the entry →
- “State Holocaust education mandates have been sufficient to close the curriculum gap.” See the entry →
What closing the gap means
The Holocaust needs a beginning, and a continuation.
Closing the gap means widening the frame in two directions, inside the courses schools already teach.
The Holocaust Needs a Beginning
The first direction runs back to the roots: the long history of antisemitism, from early Christian teaching through the laws and accusations of medieval Europe to the racial theories of the nineteenth century. With those roots in place, the Holocaust can be understood as the culmination of an arc.
The Holocaust Needs a Continuation
The second direction runs forward, into the trials and reckoning after the war and the founding of the State of Israel in 1948. It continues with the departure of the Jewish communities of the Arab world and Iran, the movement to free Soviet Jews, and Jewish life today. With that history, the Holocaust becomes part of a story that continues.
Neither direction needs a new course. Both fit units schools already teach: the world wars, the postwar world, decolonization, and the modern Middle East.
The legal landscape
What the law requires, and what it leaves open.
Holocaust education is already required in most states. A 2026 federal review found that 42 states and the District of Columbia require it through academic standards or state law, 25 of them by statute. New York is one of them, under Education Law §801, which directs the Board of Regents to prescribe the instruction and requires it in all the state’s schools. At the federal level, the Never Again Education Act, signed into law in 2020, authorized federal support for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum to develop and share classroom materials nationwide and to offer teachers professional learning.
These laws share a limit. They require that the Holocaust be taught. Many leave open what to teach, in which grade, and to what depth. Their subject is the Holocaust itself, not the history that came before it or the decades that followed. They set a floor, not a syllabus. That is why the gap this page describes persists even in states that require the subject. The fuller legal picture, from state laws to federal and international ones, is on Standards & Mandates.
In New York, filling that gap takes no new law. In a 2026 letter, the New York State Education Department wrote that districts “have the flexibility to incorporate instruction on pre-Holocaust historical context.” It added that curriculum decisions are made at the local level. The authority is already there. What stops a district is time. Few teachers have the hours to find the sources, verify the dates and images, and write the history for a classroom. This site does that work in advance.
What the site offers
Curated, free, source-grounded classroom material.
The site supplies the material the gap calls for: more than 60 Chapters across six Units. Around them are reference pages: a dated, sourced Timeline, a Glossary, a Misconceptions reference, the Museum, Field Trips, Films, a guide to Hate Symbols, the Recurring Cycle, the Legal and Incident Records, and the Sources directory. There are also printable Teaching Guides and a K–5 portal. The Chapters are built from primary sources and published scholarship, and the site is free to use.
The site supplements the existing Holocaust curriculum. It does not replace it. It is mapped to New York’s standards, with Standards Companion editions for other states.
Printable classroom supplements
Alongside the Chapters are print-ready “missing chapter” supplements: readings written to sit beside the chapters a textbook already gives Egypt and Mesopotamia, with the objects and images textbooks leave out. Each prints to PDF and carries a Grade 9 New York standards alignment. Two are ready: Ancient Israel and Judah → (the ancient Near East, NYS 9.1) and Judea in the Classical World → (the Greek and Roman era, NYS 9.3). They are part of the TJH Originals, materials written and produced for this site and listed together on the Sources page.
The six Units
How the site is organized · more than 60 Chapters across 6 Units.
The Curriculum Gap
This page: the case for the site and the equal-treatment standard. The six Units below fill the gap it describes.
The Jewish World
Who Are the Jews?, the Land of Israel, the Continuous Jewish Presence in the Land, the First and Second Temples, the Synagogue, the Sacred Texts, the Calendar, Ritual Objects and Material Culture, the Jewish Life Cycle, and the Diaspora.
Communities Across the World
A Connected People, the Jews of Iraq, Iran, and North Africa, the Departure from the Middle East and North Africa (1945–1972, about 850,000 people), the Jews of Spain and the Sephardic World, the Jews of Poland and Lithuania, Soviet Jewry, American Jewry (1654 to today), Ethiopian Jewry, and the Modern State of Israel.
The Evolution of Antisemitism
Adversus Judaeos, the Blood Libel, the Ghetto System, the Expulsions, the Racial Turn (1879), the Russian Pogroms, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the Nazi Synthesis, the Dhimma, the Eastward Turn, the Terror Record, and Contemporary Antisemitism.
The Holocaust Era
The Years Before the Killing (1933–1939), Aktion T-4, the Nazi Ghettos, the Camp System, the Einsatzgruppen, the Holocaust in the Middle East and North Africa, and Jewish Resistance and Rescue.
Jewish Contributions
Across the Fields, then Chapters on Rashi, Maimonides, Joseph Karo, Moses Mendelssohn, Levi Strauss, Emma Lazarus, Samuel Gompers, Theodor Herzl, Albert Einstein, the founders of Hollywood, and Jonas Salk.
Memory, Responsibility, and Today
Liberation and the Displaced Persons, the Postwar Trials, Hannah Arendt, Postwar Restitution, the Memory Architecture, Nostra Aetate, Holocaust Denial and the Response, the Afterlife of the Image, and The Hatred That Outlived the War.
The opportunity
The history has never been missing.
It has always been there: in archives, museums, libraries, archaeological sites, family collections, and decades of scholarship. The opportunity is to reconnect it, so students encounter the Jewish story with the same continuity, context, and historical depth that they are already given for the other major civilizations they study.
Sources and citations
- New York State Education Department. New York State K–12 Social Studies Framework. Albany, NY: NYSED. Grades 9–12 framework, revised February 2017. Grade 9 and Grade 10 Global History and Geography units; Grade 11 United States History units.
- New York State Education Department. Holocaust and Human Rights Education guidance materials. NYSED Office of Curriculum and Instruction.
- New York State Education Department, Office of Standards and Instruction. Letter on pre-Holocaust historical context in Holocaust instruction, 2026. NYSED.
- United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. “Guidelines for Teaching About the Holocaust.” Washington, DC: USHMM. See “Contextualize the History.” ushmm.org
- Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center. Educational resources on antisemitism as a long historical process. Jerusalem: Yad Vashem.
- Nirenberg, David. Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition. New York: W. W. Norton, 2013.
- Wistrich, Robert S. A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad. New York: Random House, 2010.
- Cohen, Hayyim J. The Jews of the Middle East, 1860–1972. Jerusalem: Israel Universities Press, 1973.
- Lewis, Bernard. The Jews of Islam. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984.
- Stillman, Norman A. The Jews of Arab Lands in Modern Times. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1991.
- Sarna, Jonathan D. American Judaism: A History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2nd ed. 2019.
- Eisner, Elliot W. The Educational Imagination: On the Design and Evaluation of School Programs. New York: Macmillan, 1979. The source of the term “null curriculum.”
- Flinders, David J., Nel Noddings, and Stephen J. Thornton. “The Null Curriculum: Its Theoretical Basis and Practical Implications.” Curriculum Inquiry 16, no. 1 (1986): 33–42.
- Allen, Jason Eugene. “The Treatment of the Monotheistic Religions in World History High School Textbooks: A Comparison of Sample Editions 2001–2007.” Ed.D. dissertation, West Virginia University, 2009 (ProQuest; ERIC ED532538). eric.ed.gov
- Source examined: Peter N. Stearns, Michael B. Adas, Stuart B. Schwartz, Marc Jason Gilbert, World Civilizations: The Global Experience, 7th Edition, Combined Volume (Pearson Education, 2015), ISBN 978-0205986309, Chapter 2, section “Judaism,” page 37.
- Source examined: Jackson J. Spielvogel, Discovering Our Past: A History of the World, Early Ages (McGraw-Hill Education, 2014), pages 152–169, 406, 569–575. New York Grade 6 edition: Discovering Our Past: The Eastern Hemisphere, New York Student Edition (McGraw Hill, 2016), ISBN 9780021427949. Full entries on In the Margin.
- Southern Poverty Law Center. Teaching Hard History: American Slavery. Montgomery, AL: SPLC, 2018. Preface by Hasan Kwame Jeffries, introduction by David W. Blight. learningforjustice.org
- Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany. U.S. Millennial Holocaust Knowledge and Awareness Survey. 2020. Survey of adults aged 18 to 39. claimscon.org
- Pew Research Center. “How the Global Religious Landscape Changed From 2010 to 2020.” June 9, 2025. Christians 28.8 percent and Muslims 25.6 percent of the world in 2020. pewresearch.org
- National Park Service, Independence National Historical Park. “The Liberty Bell.” The inscription and its source, Leviticus 25:10. nps.gov
- John Adams to Abigail Adams, August 14, 1776. Describes Franklin’s and Jefferson’s proposals for the Great Seal. Adams Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society. masshist.org
- Bauer, Elvira. Trau keinem Fuchs auf grüner Heid und keinem Jud bei seinem Eid (“Trust No Fox in the Green Meadow and No Jew on His Oath”). Nuremberg: Stürmer-Verlag, 1936. A Nazi propaganda book for children, cited here as a primary source and not linked.
- U.S. Government Accountability Office. “K–12 Education: How States and the U.S. Holocaust Museum Support Holocaust Education.” GAO-26-108023, July 2026. gao.gov
- Never Again Education Act, Pub. L. No. 116-141 (2020). govinfo.gov
- New York Education Law §801. nysenate.gov
- Illinois Compiled Statutes, 105 ILCS 5/27-505 (formerly 5/27-21), History of the United States. ilga.gov
- Zentralrat der Juden in Deutschland and Kultusministerkonferenz, “Gemeinsame Erklärung zur Vermittlung jüdischer Geschichte, Religion und Kultur in der Schule” (KMK resolution of December 8, 2016).
- Library of Congress. National Child Labor Committee Collection. Photographs by Lewis Hine, including “Boy Studying,” c. 1924. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
Comments?
Write to editor@teachjewishhistory.org.
Last updated: November 2026.