Teach Jewish HistoryTeach Jewish HistoryTEACH JEWISH HISTORY Translate · via Google Español Français Deutsch Italiano Português עברית العربية Русский 中文 Text size
For Teachers

For Teachers

How to teach with the site: ready-to-teach lessons, a free course, and the principles for teaching this history with care.
Teacher-training class, Washington, D.C. Normal School, 1899. Frances Benjamin Johnston, Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division.

Too many students meet Jews for the first time as victims. They should meet more than 3,000 years of Jewish life first.

Teach Jewish History offers free teaching materials in Jewish history and the history of antisemitism, from the ancient world to today. Each Chapter works as a single lesson that drops into the history, social studies, and English classes you already teach.

Need something for tomorrow?

Add a 15-minute lesson to a unit you already teach: the story, one source to read together, and one question to discuss. No preparation beyond reading the page.

15 minutesThe story, one source, one question.Pick your unit
One class periodA fully planned 40-minute lesson.Grades 9–12 · 6–8
A weekFive Chapters, five days, one story.Grades 9–12 · 6–8

Start hereHow to use the site

Read in order, the more than 60 sourced Chapters form an online textbook that can anchor a high-school elective or a college course, and two sample syllabi show complete semester plans. Taken one at a time, each Chapter fits into an existing course, with its own primary sources, discussion questions, Classroom Connections, and printable PDF.

Students working on their own can start at For Students, and college faculty and administrators at For Colleges.

What every Chapter includes

Each Chapter is free, dated, and built from sources you can follow yourself. Open any Chapter and you will find:

  • A readable history. The chapter itself, written to be taught or assigned.
  • Primary sources and images. Each with its credit and holding institution, so students work from the record rather than a retelling.
  • Further reading and curated materials. The strongest existing work on the subject, from museums, archives, and scholarship.
  • Questions for discussion and thought. For reflection, writing, and debate.
  • Classroom Connections. Where each Chapter fits in the curriculum, with its standards alignment.
  • A printable PDF. The whole chapter, ready to hand out.

Teach a Chapter in a single class or build a unit around it.

Who it’s for

Classroom teachers across subjects, in public, private, and religious schools, and college instructors. The leaders who shape what schools teach: superintendents, principals, deans, and curriculum directors. For committees, a one-page Curriculum Review Summary covers status, standards, sourcing, and implementation. Lifelong learners and families.

The site is a supplemental resource, published by The Makor Project LLC. Review each lesson for grade level and your district’s requirements before you teach it.

Print and goThe Teaching Guides

Eight printable guides of ready-to-teach lesson plans, one per grade band or subject, each with at least one lesson planned beat by beat.

Unit 4, in depthTeaching the HolocaustA five-lesson unit from the prewar years to the aftermath, with the whole arc behind it. Grades K–5Teaching the Youngest GradesA living people and its culture first, with the full K–5 program of lessons and book shelves at teachjewishhistory.org/k5. Grades 6–8Teaching Grades 6–8The middle-school entry: a first lesson in plain language, and the answers parents ask for. Grades 9–12Teaching Grades 9–12The high-school guide, from one lesson to a semester, AP and DBQ included. World HistoryTeaching World HistoryAn era-by-era chart from antiquity to the present, one chapter per era. U.S. History & CivicsTeaching U.S. History & CivicsThe American thread from 1654 onward, with government and media-literacy rows. English Language ArtsTeaching English Language ArtsThe chapter behind each book on the syllabus, from The Merchant of Venice to Night. The subject itselfTeaching the History of AntisemitismThe whole arc as a course: the turns, the registers, and the lens that reads them.

Matched to your state or countryThe Standards Companions

Each Standards Companion maps the chapters to the standards of a U.S. state or another country, course by course.

Teaching somewhere else? Write to education@teachjewishhistory.org and name your state or country.

Ready to teachLessons and materials

The lessons are the Chapter pages themselves. Alongside them, For K–5, For Middle School, and For High School each open with a ready first lesson, and the stand-alone lessons include The Primary Source vs. the Headline, the Recognizing Propaganda handout, and more in TJH Originals.

Also on the site: The Museum, Hate Symbols, Misconceptions, The Recurring Cycle, the Timeline, Films, Virtual Field Trips, and the Glossary.

Prepared, not surprisedIf an incident happens in your classroom

If a student repeats an antisemitic claim mid-lesson, put the document back on the screen and ask what it says. If a symbol appears, name it with Hate Symbols, then follow your school’s reporting process and the ADL’s incident response resources for K–12 schools.

The full steps, a student reporting guide, and a checklist for your materials

A student repeats an antisemitic claim mid-lesson. Put the document back on the screen and ask what it says. Argue with the record, not the student. The Misconceptions log takes claims one at a time and sets the documented record beside each.

A symbol appears, on a desk, a wall, or a screen. Hate Symbols identifies the imagery in words, with its history, so you can name what you are looking at without displaying it. Then follow your school’s reporting process, and if it has none, the ADL resources below include model protocols.

Beyond a single moment. For the school-level response, the Anti-Defamation League maintains incident response resources for K–12 schools: guides for educators and administrators covering intervention, prevention, and follow-up. The site’s own Incident Record documents incidents of the contemporary era, each entry ending with a verdict, a plea, or an official finding, for a class that asks whether this still happens.

When a student wants to report it. The For Students page has a short guide written for them: what antisemitism looks like today, how to report it, and an email template a student or parent can fill in and send to the school. Share it with your class. The student reporting guide →

Check your materials

A few questions to ask of any lesson, slide, or reading:

  • Do Jews appear only as victims, or as people with their own history?
  • Does it repeat an old trope, such as Jewish power, money, or disloyalty, even in passing?
  • Does it hold Israel to a standard no other country faces?
  • Does it treat Jewish students as responsible for what Israel does?
  • Are its claims backed by primary sources?

The free professional development course walks through this history and these patterns, at your own pace, with a certificate. The Recurring Cycle and Recognizing Propaganda show the patterns side by side.

Fit it to your syllabusBring it into a class you already teach

The site slots into the books and units already on your syllabus. The 15-minute lessons are listed by the unit you are teaching, and the English Language Arts guide gives the chapter behind each book, from The Merchant of Venice to Night.

Book pairings, units, a student club, and the depth behind the words

For a course-by-course map with standards alignment, take your state’s Standards Companion above.

The depth behind the words

For the terms, see the Glossary. For the people, start with Who Are the Jews? For the word “antisemitism,” see The Racial Turn of 1879.

How to teach this historyTen principles

These guide how this history is taught with care and rigor, and they run through the self-paced course below. They align with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) Guidelines for Teaching About the Holocaust and the IHRA Recommendations.

Read the ten principles
  1. Teach Jewish life, not only Jewish death. Begin with texts, communities, and contributions, so Jewish identity is not encountered only through victimization.
  2. Context, not inevitability. Teach the long build-up so students see hatred as constructed over time, and learn to recognize the mechanism.
  3. Precision of language. Define terms: antisemitism, Holocaust, genocide. Avoid euphemism, avoid “the Jews” as a monolith, and name perpetrators as people who made choices.
  4. Move from statistics to people. Six million is a number students cannot feel. Individual stories and survivor testimony restore the human scale.
  5. No simulations of victim experience. Never have students role-play victims, “hide,” or reenact a camp. Analyze sources. Do not reenact trauma.
  6. Use imagery with restraint, no sensationalism. Be mindful of images of war, violence, and atrocity. Graphic imagery shocks without teaching. Choose images that inform, prepare students, and never use suffering for shock effect.
  7. Respect for the dead. The victims were individuals, never statistics or spectacle. Treat their names, images, testimonies, and deaths with dignity. This history is taught in remembrance.
  8. Teach through inquiry, and resist simple answers. Give students the source and the question, not just the conclusion. The history is complex: no single villain, no tidy moral.
  9. A safe, age-appropriate space. Set norms, anticipate strong emotion, match depth to grade, and provide follow-up.
  10. Connect to the present, carefully. Help students recognize antisemitism today without flattening a specific history into a generic lesson, drawing false equivalences, or ranking suffering against other atrocities.

In their own voicesSurvivor testimony

Survivor testimony is the Holocaust told by the people who lived it, in their own voices. Start with Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center, which holds a vast archive of survivor testimony and the teaching resources built around it.

Classroom collections, and a speaker in the room

As the last survivors pass, their recorded words become the closest a student will come to hearing this history firsthand.

Testimony from North Africa and the Middle East

The Holocaust was not only a European story. Jewish communities had lived across the Middle East and North Africa for more than two thousand years when the Nazi era reached them. It arrived directly in the antisemitic laws and Saharan labor camps of Vichy France (the German-collaborating wartime French government) across Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, and in the German occupation of Tunisia in 1942 and 1943. It arrived indirectly in the Farhud, the 1941 Baghdad pogrom that followed the collapse of a pro-Axis government.

Most of these communities were later uprooted. About 850,000 Jews left or were forced out of Arab countries between 1945 and 1972, and most of Iran’s Jews left after 1979. The departing communities rebuilt their lives chiefly in Israel, France, and the Americas, where their traditions continue. Sephardi Voices and JIMENA preserve firsthand accounts of that world, before and after.

The courseProfessional development

Teaching Jewish History and the Roots of Antisemitism, a free, self-paced course for educators, built entirely from content already on this site. About six hours, in any order. As you go, note how you will use the site in your own classroom, then submit that integration plan through the completion form below for a certificate of completion.

The six parts of the course
  1. The gap, and why context matters. The curriculum gap: why the history before the Holocaust matters for recognizing how hatred is built.
  2. The long arc: Jewish civilization and communities. Unit 1 and Unit 2, the continuous record and the communities across the world, with a guided primary-source close-read.
  3. The evolution of antisemitism. Unit 3, Adversus Judaeos (Latin, “Against the Jews,” the early Christian writings against Judaism), the blood libel, the 1879 racial turn, and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a forged text, tracing a trope across time.
  4. The Holocaust in context. Unit 4, meeting the Holocaust as the culmination of a story, not its origin.
  5. Continuity, contribution, and memory. Unit 5 and Unit 6, a people few in number yet present across world history, and the reckoning and remembrance that follow. The history portion ends here, on responsibility.
  6. Teaching with sources, and integrating into your courses. The site’s primary-source method, each Chapter’s Classroom Connections, and the fit into world-history, ELA, and civics units (see Standards & Mandates). You finish by building your own integration plan.

This is self-directed professional development. It is not approved by any state for credit and does not carry CTLE (Continuing Teacher and Leader Education) hours or CEUs (continuing education units). The certificate records that you completed the course.

Finished the course?Submit your completion

When you have worked through the course, send us the classroom integration plan you built and a short reflection. We review each submission and follow up with your certificate of completion.

Certificates go out by email once your submission is reviewed.

Go deeper with other institutionsThe wider field

The institutions below offer live workshops, credit-bearing programs, in-person programs, and survivor testimony that complement the site.

See the institutions and programs

Training lists are alphabetical. Museums are grouped by region.

Professional development for educators

Antisemitism awareness & training, schools, administrators, workplaces

Testimony and heritage, Middle East and North Africa

  • Sephardi Voices, filmed oral testimony of Jews from the Middle East, North Africa, and Iran, organized by country, with teacher resources. Free · Virtual
  • JIMENA, Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa: history, testimony, and classroom materials. Free · Virtual

Museums & memorials worldwide

The site draws on many more archives, museums, and organizations than can be listed here. For the full directory, see Sources.

Standards, mandates & policyGovernment resources

The frameworks and bodies that set the requirement to teach this history, from your state to the international level. The site is mapped to the New York State framework, and the Standards Companions above match it to other states and countries. See Standards & Mandates for the full picture.

42 states and the District of Columbia require Holocaust education, a 2026 Government Accountability Office review found. See The Curriculum Gap, and where the mandates stand.

See the government resources

International International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) (working definition & teaching recommendations) · OSCE / ODIHR · EU Coordinator on Combating Antisemitism United States, federal National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism (2023) · Dept. of Education, Office for Civil Rights (Title VI) · State Dept. Special Envoy · Never Again Education Act United States, state commissions New Jersey · Illinois · Texas · Florida · New York Other national governments United Kingdom (Holocaust Memorial Day Trust) · Germany (bpb) · Canada · Australia

Free · stay connectedRegister for updates

The guides and Standards Companions are free downloads, with no registration needed. Register here for updates as new chapters and guides arrive.

You’ll receive occasional updates from Teach Jewish History as new chapters and guides arrive. We do not sell your information, and you can unsubscribe anytime.

Recommend the site to your department or district

A ready email for your department chair or curriculum director. Copy it or open it in your email, fill in the names, and send.

Subject: A free supplementary resource for our classrooms Dear [Name], I’d like to suggest a resource for our supplementary list, Teach Jewish History (teachjewishhistory.org). It is a free online resource on Jewish history and the history of antisemitism, from the ancient world to the present, for kindergarten through college. It fits courses we already teach, including world history, U.S. history, civics, English, and the Holocaust unit, so no new course is needed. A few points that matter for review. - Every chapter is built from primary documents and published scholarship and ends in a list of its sources, so students can trace its claims to the evidence. - Beyond the chapters, The Recurring Cycle traces how antisemitism returned across time, by lies, by law, and by force, and how Jewish communities rebuilt. Misconceptions sets common myths beside the documented record, and Hate Symbols explains the codes and imagery students may meet today. - Reference tools include a timeline, a museum of objects, a films guide, virtual field trips, and a glossary. - Standards Companions match the chapters to state standards, course by course, and the site can help meet state Holocaust-education requirements. - Printable teaching guides cover each grade band and major subject, and a free, self-paced professional development course is included. - There are no fees and no logins. A one-page Curriculum Review Summary for committees is at teachjewishhistory.org/tjh-curriculum-review.pdf. Would you consider adding it to our supplementary list? [Your name]
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Quick answersCommon questions

Is Teach Jewish History free?

Yes. Every chapter, lesson, and guide is open to any teacher, student, or school, with no cost and no login. It is also listed in two open-education libraries, OER Commons and MERLOT.

Why this history?

It runs through the world history students already study, it shows how each era answered the question of who belongs, and it is one of the longest records of how a hatred becomes law. All of that would be true if the Holocaust had never happened. The full answer is on The Curriculum Gap.

What does it cover?

The full arc of Jewish history and the history of antisemitism, from antiquity through the Holocaust to today, across Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and the Americas, drawn from primary sources.

Who is it for?

K–12 classrooms and college courses, with materials by grade band and a dedicated K–5 program.

Does it help meet state Holocaust-education mandates?

It can. It supplies the history around the Holocaust, the civilization before and the story after, mapped to standards in an edition for every U.S. state, D.C., and 25 places abroad. Whether a given use satisfies your state’s requirement is your district’s determination.

My state has no requirement. Can I teach this anyway?

Yes. In every U.S. state the content of a course is set locally within the state’s standards, and the chapters serve the skills state history standards ask for: sourcing, causation, perspective, and the credibility of evidence. The Standards Companion for your state shows where, and Standards & Mandates records what each state requires, including where no requirement exists. The same holds where the curriculum leaves content to the school, as in Scotland and Wales.

How is it sourced?

Every chapter draws on primary documents and scholarship, with transparent attribution to the archives and museums it comes from.

Teach Jewish History is original, source-based history you can teach from: chapter pages across six units, each built from primary documents. It also points to the institutions and programs above as places to go deeper. The site links to these but does not run or endorse them, and details change, so confirm each on its own page. See also Sources and Field Trips. Last updated: November 2026 · Return home