Glossary

How to use

A working reference.

This glossary defines terms that recur across these Chapters: the vocabulary of Jewish history, of religious life, and of the historians who study them. Definitions are written for grades 6 to 12 and can be used in class as they stand. Each entry gives a short definition and, where useful, a note on where the term recurs across the Chapters.

Periods and chronology

How these Chapters divide time.

• BCE / CE. “Before the Common Era” and “Common Era.” Scholarly conventions equivalent to BC and AD, used throughout the site.
• Antiquity. The period from approximately 1500 BCE to approximately 500 CE, covering the Israelite kingdoms, the Babylonian and Persian periods, the Hellenistic period, and the Roman and Byzantine periods. Unit 1’s Chapter on the Temples and the early synagogue belongs here.
• Late antiquity. Approximately 200 to 700 CE. The period of the rabbinic compilation of the Talmud, the rise of Christianity to imperial status, and the early Islamic conquests.
• Medieval period. Approximately 500 to 1500 CE in Europe, and approximately 600 to 1500 CE in the Islamic world. The period of the Lateran councils, the Spanish and Babylonian Jewish flourishing, and the medieval expulsions.
• Early modern period. Approximately 1500 to 1800. The period of the Reformation, the Sephardic dispersion after 1492, the development of the European ghetto system, and the early-modern Jewish communities of Italy, the Netherlands, and the Ottoman world.
• Modern period. Approximately 1800 to 1945. Emancipation, the rise of modern political antisemitism, the Eastern European mass migration, and the run-up to the Holocaust.
• Postwar / contemporary period. 1945 to the present. Nuremberg, Nostra Aetate, the State of Israel, the postwar diaspora reconstitution, and the contemporary moment.

Institutions and places

The architecture of Jewish life.

• Temple (First and Second). The central Jewish religious institutions of antiquity. The First Temple stood c. 957–586 BCE, and the Second Temple stood 516 BCE – 70 CE. See Unit 1’s Chapter on the Temples.
• Synagogue. Hebrew beit knesset, “house of assembly.” The institution that emerged in the Second Temple centuries, attested in Egypt from the third century BCE and in Judea before 70 CE. After the Temple’s destruction, the synagogue carried Jewish religious and communal life and became the central institution of the Jewish diaspora. See Unit 1’s Chapter on the Synagogue.
• Masgid. The Beta Israel house of prayer, the Ethiopian Jewish equivalent of a synagogue. As the community emigrated to Israel, many masgids in the Ethiopian highlands were left behind and now stand as ruins.
• Beit midrash. “House of study.” The institution dedicated to the study of Jewish texts, often adjacent to or contained within the synagogue.
• Yeshiva. (Plural: yeshivot.) A higher institution of Jewish religious learning, focused on the study of the Talmud and rabbinic literature. Famous yeshivot include those of medieval Babylonia (Sura, Pumbedita), of medieval Spain, of Eastern Europe (Volozhin, Mir, Slabodka), and of the modern world.
• Mikveh. (Plural: mikva’ot.) A pool used for ritual immersion in Jewish religious life. Archaeologically, mikva’ot are among the clearest markers of Jewish settlement at historical sites.
• Sanhedrin. The high court and council of Jerusalem in the Second Temple period. Historians debate who sat on it, and the rabbinic sources of late antiquity remembered it as a court of sages. It came to stand for formal Jewish religious legal authority.
• Ghetto (early modern). An enclosed and legally restricted Jewish residential quarter. The institution began in Venice in 1516. See Unit 3’s treatment.
• Mellah. The walled Jewish quarter of a Moroccan city. The first was created at Fez in 1438, when the city confined its Jews to a quarter beside the royal palace, and the word became the name for Jewish quarters across Morocco. Communities lived inside them for five centuries. The mellah of Fez had its own synagogues and rabbinic judges, and from the early 1500s a nagid, a recognized head of the community. See The Dhimma and The Jews of North Africa.
• Pale of Settlement. The territory of the Russian Empire to which Jewish residence was legally restricted between 1791 and 1917. The demographic and historical context of the Eastern European mass migration of 1881–1924.
• Cantonists. Jewish boys between eight and thirteen taken for the Russian army after Tsar Nicholas I made Jews liable to the military draft on August 26, 1827. Named for the schools for soldiers’ children, they were sent to battalions away from their parents until the age of eighteen, when a twenty-five-year term of service began. They were denied kosher food and often pressed into Russian Orthodox baptism. Some 40,000 Jewish boys passed through the system before the drafting of children was stopped in 1856. Treated in The Russian Pogroms.
• Matrikel. The Jewish registration list of the German states, Bavaria above all, in force there from 1813 to 1861. It capped the number of Jewish households each town was allowed, so a younger son often could not legally marry or settle. The caps pushed tens of thousands of Bavarian Jews to emigrate, Levi Strauss among them. See Levi Strauss (Unit 5).
• Hadassah. The Women’s Zionist Organization of America. On February 24, 1912, thirty-eight women met at New York’s Temple Emanu-El, elected Henrietta Szold president, and chose nursing as their work. In 1913, with 122 members and $542 in dues, the group sent two nurses to Jerusalem. It grew into American Jews’ largest mass-membership organization and built the Jerusalem hospital that carries its name. See American Jewry.

Texts and traditions

The foundational corpus.

• Tanakh. The Hebrew Bible. An acronym for Torah, Nevi’im (Prophets), and Ketuvim (Writings). Scholars generally date the settling of its canon, in its received form, to around the second century CE.
• Orit. (From the Aramaic for “law.”) The Beta Israel name for the Hebrew Bible in its translation into Ge’ez, the classical language of Ethiopia. It is their scripture. The community preserved the Orit but had no Talmud, because rabbinic literature never reached it.
• Torah. The first five books of the Hebrew Bible: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy. Also used more broadly to refer to the body of Jewish religious learning.
• Mishnah. The first written collection of rabbinic law, compiled around 200 CE under Rabbi Judah the Prince (Yehuda HaNasi).
• Talmud. The foundational document of rabbinic Judaism, consisting of the Mishnah together with the Gemara (extensive rabbinic commentary). Two Talmuds exist: the Jerusalem Talmud (compiled in late-antique Palestine, c. 400 CE) and the Babylonian Talmud (compiled in the academies of Sura and Pumbedita, c. 500 CE). The Babylonian is the more widely studied.
• Kebra Nagast. (Ge’ez: “The Glory of the Kings.”) The Ethiopian national epic, which traces a royal line to the union of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. It is the charter legend of Ethiopia’s Christian ruling dynasty, and it overlaps with the Beta Israel community’s own tradition of descent from ancient Israel.
• Midrash. The body of rabbinic interpretive literature on the Hebrew Bible, ranging from legal exegesis (halakhic midrash) to homiletic and narrative interpretation (aggadic midrash).
• Mishneh Torah. The systematic code of Jewish law by the twelfth-century rabbi and philosopher Maimonides, completed c. 1178. It is one of the most influential works in Jewish legal history.
• Shulchan Aruch. “The Set Table.” Joseph Karo’s authoritative codification of Jewish law, first published in Venice in 1565, which remains a central reference for observant Jewish communities today.
• Haggadah. The text recited at the Passover seder, narrating the Exodus from Egypt. The illuminated Haggadot of medieval Europe (the Sarajevo Haggadah, the Golden Haggadah, the Bird’s Head Haggadah) are among the most important surviving Jewish manuscripts.
• Zohar. The foundational text of medieval Jewish mystical literature, composed in Aramaic in late-13th-century Castile and traditionally attributed to the second-century rabbi Shimon bar Yochai.

Objects and ritual life

The material culture.

• Torah scroll (Sefer Torah). The handwritten scroll of the Torah used in synagogue worship. The central ritual object of Jewish religious life.
• Mezuzah. A small parchment scroll containing biblical verses, affixed to the doorpost of a Jewish home.
• Tefillin. (Phylacteries.) Small leather boxes containing biblical verses, worn during weekday morning prayer.
• Tallit. A four-cornered prayer shawl with fringes at each corner, worn during prayer.
• Menorah. The seven-branched candelabrum that stood in the Temple. Depicted on the Arch of Titus in Rome. Not to be confused with the eight-plus-one-branched Hanukkah lamp.
• Hanukkiah. The nine-branched lamp used during Hanukkah. Often called a “Hanukkah menorah” in colloquial English.
• Kiddush cup. A cup used for the blessing over wine that marks the beginning of Sabbath and festival meals.
• Seder plate. The plate used at the Passover seder, holding the symbolic foods of the ritual meal.
• Shofar. A ram’s horn sounded at the High Holy Days and on other ritual occasions.

Movements and traditions

The major streams.

• Rabbinic Judaism. The form of Judaism that developed in late antiquity around the authority of the rabbis and the textual tradition of the Mishnah and the Talmud. Nearly all later Jewish traditions descend from it. Karaite Judaism, in the next entry, is the main exception, and the Beta Israel of Ethiopia developed apart from it.
• Karaite Judaism. A medieval Jewish movement that rejected the authority of the rabbinic Oral Torah and recognized only the written Hebrew Bible as authoritative. Surviving Karaite communities exist today in Israel and elsewhere.
• Hasidism. A pietist mystical movement that emerged in eighteenth-century Eastern Europe under the leadership of Israel Baal Shem Tov (c. 1700–1760) and his successors. Major modern Hasidic groups include Chabad-Lubavitch, Satmar, Belz, Ger, and many others.
• Mitnagdim. (Hebrew: “opponents.”) The Lithuanian rabbinic tradition that opposed the early Hasidic movement, centered around the Vilna Gaon (Rabbi Elijah ben Solomon, 1720–1797). The mitnagdic tradition is the historical root of contemporary Lithuanian-style yeshivot worldwide.
• Haskalah. (Hebrew: “enlightenment.”) The Jewish Enlightenment, the movement that formed around Moses Mendelssohn in Berlin in the 1770s and spread eastward through the nineteenth century. Its followers, the maskilim, wanted secular studies taught beside Torah and Jews fluent in the languages of the countries they lived in. Mendelssohn’s German translation of the Torah (1780–1783) was its first great work. Treated in Moses Mendelssohn.
• Reform Judaism. A modern movement of Jewish religious reform that emerged in nineteenth-century Germany and developed in the United States from the mid-nineteenth century onward. Its American rabbis set out their principles in the Pittsburgh Platform of 1885. Treated in Moses Mendelssohn.
• Conservative Judaism. A modern movement of Jewish religious tradition originating in nineteenth-century Germany (the Positive-Historical school of Zacharias Frankel) and developing in the United States through the Jewish Theological Seminary (refounded 1902). Treated in Moses Mendelssohn.
• Neo-Orthodoxy. The answer of Samson Raphael Hirsch (1808–1888), rabbi of an Orthodox congregation in Frankfurt from 1851, to the question the Haskalah had opened. Jewish law stays binding in full, he taught, and a Jew who keeps it can also take part in the general culture of the day. Congregations in Germany and abroad copied his model. Treated in Moses Mendelssohn.
• Orthodox Judaism. The broad category encompassing modern observant communities that maintain rabbinic Jewish law and traditional liturgy. Includes Modern Orthodox, Centrist Orthodox, Haredi (“ultra-Orthodox”), and Hasidic streams.
• Reconstructionist Judaism. A twentieth-century American movement founded by Mordecai Kaplan (1881–1983), framing Judaism as an evolving civilization.
• Hovevei Zion (and BILU). (Hebrew: “Lovers of Zion.”) The societies formed in Russia and Romania in the early 1880s, and swelled by the pogroms of 1881–82, to settle Jews in the Land of Israel: the movement that came before Herzl’s political Zionism. Together with a student group called BILU, named for the Hebrew initials of “House of Jacob, let us go up,” they helped found the first farming villages, Rishon LeZion, Zikhron Ya’akov, and Rosh Pinah, by the end of 1882. See The Russian Pogroms and The Modern State of Israel.
• Zionism. The modern movement for Jewish national self-determination in the Land of Israel. Zionist settlement began in the 1880s (see Aliyah), and in 1897 Theodor Herzl convened the First Zionist Congress in Basel, which created the Zionist Organization. The movement led to the founding of the State of Israel in 1948.

Regions and communities

The geography of the diaspora.

• Sephardic. Referring to Jewish communities tracing their heritage to the medieval Iberian Peninsula (Spain and Portugal), and to the post-1492 diaspora these communities established in the Ottoman Empire, North Africa, the Mediterranean, the Netherlands, and the Americas. In modern use the word is often widened to the Jews of the Middle East and North Africa, many of whom follow Sephardic religious law and custom. See The Jews of Spain and the Sephardic World.
• Ashkenazi. Referring to Jewish communities tracing their heritage to medieval and modern Central and Eastern Europe: the Rhineland, France, Poland-Lithuania, Russia, and their descendant communities worldwide. The majority of contemporary American Jews are of Ashkenazi heritage.
• Mizrahi. “Eastern.” Referring to Jewish communities of the Middle East and North Africa, especially the communities of Iraq, Iran, Yemen, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, and Kurdistan. The term is sometimes used to include the North African (Maghrebi) communities and sometimes distinguished from them.
• Maghrebi. (From the Arabic Maghreb, “the west.”) Referring to the Jewish communities of North Africa (Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya). Many joined older North African communities with Sephardic exiles who arrived after 1492.
• Megorashim and toshavim. (Hebrew: “the exiles” and “the residents.”) In Morocco after 1492, the Spanish exiles and the Jews already living there. Each kept its own synagogues, and the exiles’ rabbis issued their own ordinances, the takkanot of the exiles of Castile, which governed marriage, divorce, and inheritance by Spanish custom. In time the exiles’ customs prevailed in the communities where they settled. Treated in The Jews of North Africa.
• Italkim. The historic Jewish community of Italy, distinct in liturgical and cultural tradition from both Ashkenazim and Sephardim.
• Romaniote. The historic Greek-speaking Jewish community of the eastern Mediterranean, tracing its origins to the Hellenistic and Roman periods.
• Yemenite (Teimani). The Jewish community of Yemen, with distinctive liturgical, musical, and textual traditions. The great majority emigrated to Israel in Operation Magic Carpet (1949–1950).
• Bukharian. The historic Jewish community of Central Asia, centered on Bukhara, Samarkand, and Tashkent in present-day Uzbekistan.
• Beta Israel. (“House of Israel,” Ge’ez.) The Jewish community of the Ethiopian highlands, with distinctive religious traditions preserved through long isolation from the broader Jewish world. Their status as Jews under halakha (Jewish law) was affirmed by Ovadia Yosef, Israel’s Sephardi Chief Rabbi, on February 9, 1973. Israelis of Ethiopian origin numbered about 171,600 at the end of 2023, by the count of Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics.
• Operation Moses. The Israeli covert operation (November 21, 1984 to January 5, 1985) that evacuated between about 6,500 and 8,000 Beta Israel, by different counts, from Sudanese refugee camps to Israel on unmarked Boeing 707 aircraft. It was halted after press exposure in January 1985, leaving about 1,000 Beta Israel stranded in Sudan. Operation Joshua, a U.S.-run airlift by C-130 transports in March 1985, brought out several hundred more.
• Operation Solomon. The Israeli airlift of May 24–25, 1991 that evacuated 14,325 Beta Israel from Addis Ababa to Israel in about 36 hours. It used thirty-four aircraft, among them El Al Boeing 747s with the seats removed. One flight carried 1,088 passengers, the Guinness World Record for the most people on a single aircraft.
• Falash Mura. An Ethiopian community mostly descended from Beta Israel members who converted to Christianity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Approximately 30,000 have been admitted to Israel since 1991 by special government decisions, under the Law of Entry rather than the Law of Return, generally followed by conversion. Debate continues about the community members who remain in Ethiopia.
• Sigd. The Beta Israel religious festival observed on 29 Cheshvan (50 days after Yom Kippur), commemorating the giving of the Torah and the spiritual yearning for Jerusalem. Recognized as an Israeli national holiday by Knesset law in July 2008.
• Kessoch. (Singular: kes.) The traditional Beta Israel religious leadership, trained and ordained, whom community tradition links to the ancient Israelite priesthood. The community’s Judaism developed apart from the rabbinic tradition, which never reached it. Scholars date its emergence as a distinct group to medieval Ethiopia.
• Berbers (Amazigh). The native peoples of North Africa, there long before the Arab conquests of the 600s and 700s CE. Amazigh is their own name for themselves. Many were Christian under Roman rule. See The Dhimma (Unit 3) and The Jews of North Africa (Unit 2).
• Copts. The Christians of Egypt. Before the Arab conquests, most Egyptians were Christian. See The Dhimma (Unit 3).
• Syriac Christians. The Christians of Syria and neighboring lands who wrote and worshipped in Syriac, a form of Aramaic. See The Dhimma (Unit 3).
• Zoroastrianism. Persia’s ancient religion and the state religion of the Persian empire before Islam. Under Islamic rule, Zoroastrians were given the same protected status as Jews and Christians. See The Dhimma (Unit 3).

Languages

The languages of the Jewish world.

• Hebrew. The classical and religious language of the Jewish tradition, the language of the Hebrew Bible, and the modern national language of the State of Israel, revived in modern spoken form beginning in the late nineteenth century.
• Aramaic. A Semitic language closely related to Hebrew, the language of much of the Talmud and of significant portions of late-antique Jewish liturgical literature.
• Yiddish. A Germanic language written in Hebrew script, spoken by Ashkenazi Jewish communities of Central and Eastern Europe for approximately a thousand years. A literary language with major modern works.
• Ladino (Judeo-Spanish, Judezmo). A Romance language descended from medieval Spanish, spoken by Sephardic Jewish communities of the post-1492 diaspora, especially in the Ottoman Empire and North Africa. See The Jews of Spain and the Sephardic World.
• Judeo-Arabic. The Arabic varieties spoken and written by Jewish communities of the Arabic-speaking world from the medieval period to the twentieth century. The language of Maimonides’s Guide of the Perplexed.
• Judeo-Persian (Judeo-Tat, Judeo-Bukharian). Persian and Persian-derived varieties used by Jewish communities of Iran, Central Asia, and the Caucasus.

Analytical terms

The scholarly vocabulary.

• Emancipation. The grant of full and equal citizenship to Jews by European states: the right to live, work, and worship like anyone else, in place of the special laws and taxes they had lived under. France went first, on September 27, 1791. In the German states it came in stages across the nineteenth century, and several states took rights back after 1815. The Habsburg Empire granted equality in 1867, and the German Empire extended it to all of Germany in 1871. The racial antisemitism of the 1870s set out to reverse it. See Moses Mendelssohn and The Racial Turn.
• Antisemitism. A nineteenth-century coinage, popularized by Wilhelm Marr and his circle in 1879, that presented anti-Jewish politics as racial and scientific rather than religious. Now used broadly to describe hostility toward Jews in any form. See Unit 3 for the full historical treatment.
• Jew-hatred (Judenhass). The plain term for hostility toward Jews. Judenhass (“Jew-hatred”) is the older German word. In 1879 Wilhelm Marr’s circle adopted “antisemitism” in its place, a racial, scientific-sounding label for the same hatred. Some scholars and writers today prefer “Jew-hatred” for its clarity. See Antisemitism, and The Racial Turn (Unit 3) for the history of the word.
• Anti-Judaism. Scholarly term distinguishing the long pre-modern tradition of religious and theological hostility toward Jews from the modern racial vocabulary of “antisemitism.” The two are related but historically distinct categories.
• Supersessionism (replacement theology). The Christian theological doctrine that the Christian church has replaced the Jewish people in God’s covenantal plan. Undercut by Nostra Aetate (1965), which said Jews “should not be presented as rejected or accursed by God,” and explicitly repudiated in later Vatican documents, above all The Gifts and the Calling of God Are Irrevocable (2015). Versions of it are still held in some Christian communities.
• Deicide accusation. The theological charge of collective and inherited Jewish guilt for the death of Jesus. Central to the Christian Adversus Judaeos (“against the Jews”) tradition from late antiquity through the medieval and early-modern periods. Formally repudiated by the Catholic Church in Nostra Aetate (1965) and by major mainline Protestant communions across the postwar period.
• Ecclesia and Synagoga. A pair of female figures in medieval Christian art representing the Church (Ecclesia, crowned and upright) and Judaism (Synagoga, shown blindfolded or with a serpent across her eyes, her staff broken). Carved on cathedral fronts across Europe, they taught the supersessionist claim (the Church as victorious successor, Judaism as superseded) to a public that mostly could not read.
• Judensau. German for “Jew’s sow.” A medieval relief, carved on the exterior of churches in Germany and central Europe, showing Jews in degrading contact with a pig, the animal Jewish law holds unclean. By most counts, about thirty survive today. The best known, at the Wittenberg town church, was the subject of a June 2022 ruling by Germany’s Federal Court of Justice. The court allowed it to remain because a memorial had been added beneath it.
• Blood libel. The false medieval accusation that Jews ritually murdered Christian children, first recorded at Norwich in 1144. Repeatedly rejected by popes, beginning with the 1247 papal bull Lachrymabilem Judaeorum.
• Tallage. In medieval England, a tax the king could demand from the Jews at any time and in any amount. By the end of the twelfth century a royal court, the Exchequer of the Jews, recorded their loans and collected it. Repeated tallages drained the community’s wealth across the thirteenth century, before the expulsion of 1290. Treated in The Expulsions.
• Dhimma. The legal status of Jewish and Christian communities under classical Islamic governance, permitted to practice religion in exchange for payment of the jizya tax, acceptance of subordinate legal status, and observance of various restrictions.
• Converso. A Jew baptized in Spain or Portugal, also called a New Christian, and that person’s descendants. Jews were baptized by force in the massacres of 1391 and in Portugal in 1497, and many others under pressure or to avoid exile in 1492. Some conversos became Christians in earnest, some kept Jewish practice in secret, and some left to live openly as Jews. See The Jews of Spain and the Sephardic World.
• Limpieza de sangre. (Spanish: “purity of blood.”) Iberian doctrine, codified from the fifteenth century, imposing legal disabilities on descendants of Jewish converts to Christianity. It judged people by their descent rather than their faith. The statutes, from Toledo in 1449, are treated in The Expulsions.
• Auto-da-fé. (“Act of faith.”) The public ceremony at which the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions read out their sentences, held on a feast day in a city’s main square and opened by a procession of its clergy. The tribunal pronounced no death sentence itself. It handed the condemned to the civil magistrate, who sentenced them, and they were led to the quemadero, the place of burning. Lisbon held its first in 1540. Treated in The Expulsions.
• Pogrom. (Russian: “devastation.”) A violent attack against a Jewish community, often with the tolerance, and sometimes the support, of local authorities. The word refers most prominently to the anti-Jewish violence of the Russian Empire and the Russian Civil War.
• Intifada. An Arabic word meaning “shaking off,” used for two Palestinian uprisings against Israel. The First Intifada (1987–1993) began with strikes, boycotts, demonstrations, and stone-throwing, and later saw firearms and explosives. During the Second Intifada (2000–2005), about 1,000 Israelis, most of them civilians, were killed, many in a campaign of roughly 140 suicide bombings. The documented record of both is in The Terror Record.

Holocaust-era terms

The specific vocabulary.

• Holocaust. The state-sponsored, systematic, bureaucratic, and ideologically driven persecution and murder of approximately six million European Jews by Nazi Germany, its allies, and its collaborators between 1933 and 1945. See The Years Before the Killing.
• Shoah. “Catastrophe.” The Hebrew term for the Holocaust, used in particular in Israel and in scholarly literature emphasizing the specifically Jewish dimension of the event.
• Final Solution (Endlösung). The Nazi euphemism for the systematic murder of European Jewry, in official use from 1941 and coordinated for Europe-wide implementation at the Wannsee Conference of January 20, 1942.
• Aktion T-4. The Nazi program (January 1940 to August 1941) for the killing of disabled Germans. Named for its administrative headquarters at Tiergartenstrasse 4, Berlin. By its own count, the formal program killed at least 70,273 people, and roughly 100,000 to 200,000 more were killed in the “wild euthanasia” that followed through 1945. T-4 was the precursor of the Operation Reinhard killing centers. Its gas-chamber methods and personnel (Wirth, Stangl, Reichleitner) moved directly to those camps.
• Kinder-Euthanasie. The Nazi children’s “euthanasia” program (1939–1945), run by the Reich Committee for the Scientific Registering of Serious Hereditary and Congenital Illnesses (Reichsausschuss zur wissenschaftlichen Erfassung erb- und anlagebedingter schwerer Leiden). At least 10,000 children were killed, by conservative estimates, mostly by overdoses of barbiturates, in about 30 Kinderfachabteilungen (special children’s wards) at psychiatric hospitals across Germany.
• Operation 14f13. The Nazi administrative code for the killing of concentration camp prisoners deemed unfit for slave labor at the T-4 killing centers (1941–43). An estimated 15,000 to 20,000 prisoners were killed at Bernburg, Sonnenstein, and Hartheim. The bridge between T-4 and the broader Nazi concentration camp system.
• Wilde Euthanasie (“wild euthanasia”). The decentralized killing of disabled Germans that continued after the formal Aktion T-4 program was officially halted in August 1941, carried out in hospitals and care homes by starvation, overdose, and lethal injection until the end of the war. It killed an estimated 100,000 to 200,000 more people.
• Galen, Clemens August Graf von (1878–1946). Catholic Bishop of Münster known as “the Lion of Münster” for his August 3, 1941 sermon at St. Lambert’s Church publicly denouncing the T-4 program. The sermon was printed and distributed across Germany. Hitler ordered the official program halted on August 24, 1941, and historians count the public protest, Galen’s above all, among the reasons.
• Wirth, Christian (1885–1944). The operational chief of T-4 who supervised the first killing center at Brandenburg (1940). He moved to Operation Reinhard and became the first commandant of Belzec (1942) and inspector of the broader Operation Reinhard apparatus. Killed by Yugoslav partisans May 26, 1944.
• Einsatzgruppen. Mobile killing units of the SS and police that carried out mass shootings of Jewish populations in the occupied Soviet territories from 1941 onward. The “Holocaust by bullets” phase. With other units and local collaborators, they murdered at least 1.5 million Jews in the occupied Soviet territories, by shooting and in gas vans. Since 2004, by its own count, the French organization Yahad-In Unum has identified more than 3,000 execution sites through witness interviews and field research.
• Ghetto (Nazi-era). A sealed residential zone established in Nazi-occupied territories (primarily in occupied Poland) for the concentration of Jewish populations. Distinct as a historical phenomenon from the early-modern European ghetto system. The Nazi ghettos were generally transitional concentration sites, while the early-modern ghettos were enduring arrangements.
• Judenrat. (German: “Jewish council.” Plural: Judenräte.) The Jewish council the Germans appointed in each ghetto and made carry out their orders. At first that meant distributing food and organizing labor. Later the Germans demanded that the councils draw up the deportation lists. In Warsaw the chairman, Adam Czerniaków, took his own life on July 23, 1942 rather than sign them. Historians, above all Isaiah Trunk in Judenrat (1972), find that the record varied widely from council to council. See The Nazi Ghettos and Jewish Resistance & Rescue.
• Operation Reinhard. The code name for the Nazi operation to murder the Jews of German-occupied Poland in the killing centers of Bełżec, Sobibór, and Treblinka. Approximately 1.7 million Jews were murdered between March 1942 and November 1943, most of them from Poland, along with Jews deported from elsewhere in Europe. Personnel transferred from Aktion T-4.
• Rassenhygiene (racial hygiene). The German form of eugenics: the belief that a society could be “improved” by controlling who reproduced. Built by figures such as Alfred Ploetz before the Nazi era, it supplied the intellectual framework the regime used to justify forced sterilization and, later, the Aktion T-4 killings.
• Wannsee Conference. The meeting held on January 20, 1942, at a villa outside Berlin, at which Reinhard Heydrich coordinated the bureaucratic implementation of the Final Solution across Nazi-occupied Europe. Minutes drafted by Adolf Eichmann survive in the documentary record. See The Einsatzgruppen.
• Wehrmacht. The regular armed forces of Nazi Germany (army, navy, and air force), 1935–1945. The Wehrmacht was long portrayed as separate from the Holocaust. Research since the 1990s has shown that the army cooperated with the killing on a large scale. Its units provided logistical support, security, and manpower for the Einsatzgruppen shooting operations in the occupied Soviet territories.
• Nuremberg Laws. The Reich Citizenship Law and the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor, enacted September 15, 1935 at the Nazi Party Rally in Nuremberg. The First Supplementary Decree of November 14, 1935 defined who counted as a “Jew” by the religion of a person’s grandparents. That definition framed the Nazi anti-Jewish measures that followed.
• Kristallnacht. The Nazi-organized pogrom of November 9–10, 1938. More than 1,400 synagogues and prayer rooms were burned, destroyed, or damaged (an early Nazi report counted 267). Approximately 7,500 Jewish-owned businesses were vandalized or destroyed. At least 91 Jews were killed in the violence, by the Nazi Party’s own count, and hundreds died in all. Some 26,000 to 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and imprisoned in concentration camps. On November 12, 1938, the regime imposed an “atonement payment” of 1 billion Reichsmarks on Germany’s Jews.
• Farhud. The attack on the Jews of Baghdad on June 1–2, 1941, during the festival of Shavuot. The word is Arabic and means “violent dispossession.” Rioters killed between 150 and 180 Jews, injured between 600 and 800, by different counts, and looted some 1,500 Jewish stores and homes. The attackers were Iraqi, and the violence broke out in the lawless gap between the fall of a pro-German government and the return of British-backed authority. The Farhud changed Jewish life in Iraq. By 1952, eleven years later, almost the entire community had left the country. Treated in The Jews of Iraq and The Holocaust in MENA.
• Oneg Shabbat. The clandestine Warsaw Ghetto archive organized by Emanuel Ringelblum (1900–1944) and approximately sixty collaborators across 1940–1943. Tens of thousands of pages recovered after the war from two of the three buried caches (1946 and 1950), some 35,000 documents by the count of the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, which holds them.
• Righteous Among the Nations. The honorific bestowed by Yad Vashem under the 1953 law on non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust. As of January 1, 2024, Yad Vashem had recognized 28,707 individuals from 51 countries. Poland, with more than 7,000, is the largest national group.

The Nazi apparatus

The state, the SS, and the camps.

• NSDAP (Nazi Party). The National Socialist German Workers’ Party, led by Adolf Hitler. It held sole power in Germany from 1933 to 1945.
• Führer. “Leader.” Hitler’s title as combined head of state and party from 1934, holding absolute authority.
• Third Reich. The Nazi name for the German state, 1933–1945, the “Third Empire,” after the medieval Holy Roman Empire and the 1871–1918 German Empire.
• SA (Sturmabteilung). The Nazi “brownshirt” paramilitary that carried the early street violence. It was broken and sidelined in the 1934 Night of the Long Knives, after which the SS rose in its place.
• SS (Schutzstaffel). The Nazi paramilitary organization, founded 1925 as Hitler’s bodyguard and built by Heinrich Himmler from 1929 into the regime’s instrument of terror. By 1936 it commanded all of Germany’s police. It ran the concentration camps and killing centers, and its units led the mass shootings. Emblem: the twin lightning-bolt Sig runes.
• SD (Sicherheitsdienst). The SS intelligence and security service, founded 1931 under Reinhard Heydrich.
• Gestapo (Geheime Staatspolizei). The secret state police, created 1933 and absorbed into the SS under Himmler. It could arrest and jail without trial under the Reichstag Fire Decree.
• Heinrich Himmler. Reichsführer-SS from 1929 and Chief of German Police from 1936. He was the principal architect of the SS state and the camp system.
• SS-WVHA. The SS Economic and Administrative Main Office (1942), which ran the concentration-camp system and the SS’s exploitation of prisoner labor.
• Concentration camp. A site of imprisonment, forced labor, and brutalization. The concentration camps were not built to murder prisoners on arrival, but the SS killed there too. Prisoners were executed in the camps, and between 1941 and 1943 the SS sent an estimated 15,000 to 20,000 prisoners judged unfit for work to be gassed at the T-4 killing centers under Operation 14f13. More were gassed in 1944. Distinct from a killing center. The first regular camp opened at Dachau on March 22, 1933.
• Killing center (extermination camp). A facility built for the systematic murder of people on arrival, chiefly by gas. Six operated, all in occupied Poland: Chełmno, Bełżec, Sobibór, Treblinka, Auschwitz-Birkenau, and Majdanek.
• Selection. The process, run by SS physicians on the arrival ramp, of dividing deportees between those kept for forced labor and those sent at once to the gas chambers.
• Kapo. A prisoner the SS assigned to oversee other prisoners, under coercion and with limited privileges.
• Sonderkommando. Prisoner units forced, under threat of death, to work in and around the gas chambers and crematoria.
• Appell. The roll call at which camp prisoners were counted, often standing for hours, twice a day.

Postwar reckoning

Liberation, restitution, memory.

• Displaced Person (DP). A postwar designation for refugees who could not return to their prewar homes. Approximately 250,000 Jewish DPs were housed in dozens of Allied-administered camps and assembly centers in occupied Germany, Austria, and Italy between 1945 and 1957. The last DP camp, Föhrenwald, closed in February 1957.
• Harrison Report. The report Earl G. Harrison delivered to President Truman on August 24, 1945, on the condition of Jewish DPs in the American zone. It contained the line: “we appear to be treating the Jews as the Nazis treated them, except that we do not exterminate them.” General Eisenhower then ordered separate camps for Jewish DPs. Truman’s directive of December 22, 1945 gave displaced persons priority within existing U.S. immigration quotas.
• Nuremberg trials. The International Military Tribunal (IMT), at which the United States, Britain, the Soviet Union, and France tried the surviving leaders of Nazi Germany in the Palace of Justice at Nuremberg, from November 20, 1945 to October 1, 1946. It was the first trial of a defeated nation’s leaders for what its charter named “crimes against humanity.” Twenty-four men were indicted and twenty-one sat in the dock. Twelve were sentenced to death and three acquitted. The United States then held twelve more trials at Nuremberg (1946–1949) for doctors, judges, industrialists, and the Einsatzgruppen commanders. Not to be confused with the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, named for the same city. Treated in The Postwar Trials.
• Kielce pogrom. The postwar pogrom at Kielce, Poland, on July 4, 1946. Polish soldiers, police, and townspeople killed 42 Jews, most of them Holocaust survivors, and wounded about 40. The pogrom sharply accelerated the Bricha movement (see the next entry).
• Bricha. (“Flight,” Hebrew.) The organized movement of approximately 250,000 Jewish survivors out of Eastern Europe toward DP camps in the Allied occupation zones and toward Palestine, 1944–48.
• Aliyah Bet. The clandestine immigration of Jews to British Mandate Palestine in defiance of the May 1939 White Paper restrictions, run after the war by the Mossad LeAliyah Bet of the Haganah (the Jewish underground defense force). More than 70,000 Holocaust survivors took this route. The British intercepted most of the ships and by 1948 held more than 50,000 Jewish refugees in internment camps on Cyprus. The Exodus 1947 was the best-known case.
• Displaced Persons Act. The U.S. federal law signed by Truman on June 25, 1948. “It is with very great reluctance that I have signed S. 2242,” his statement began. The act, he wrote, “discriminates in callous fashion against displaced persons of the Jewish faith,” chiefly through its cutoff date of December 22, 1945, since most Jewish survivors in the camps had arrived after it. About 80,000 Jewish survivors entered under the act, and roughly 137,000 Jewish refugees reached the United States by all routes across 1945–1952.
• Claims Conference. The Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, founded October 1951 in New York by 23 international Jewish organizations under the chairmanship of Nahum Goldmann. As a result of its negotiations, the German government has paid more than $90 billion to individual victims since 1952. In 2025 the Conference distributed about $530 million in direct compensation to survivors around the world.
• Luxembourg Agreement. (Hebrew: Heskem HaShilumim, “Reparations Agreement.”) The September 10, 1952 agreement signed by Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, Foreign Minister Moshe Sharett, and Nahum Goldmann. Approximately DM 3 billion to Israel and DM 450 million to the Claims Conference. The first state-to-state acknowledgment by a postwar German government of the obligation to compensate Jewish victims.
• BEG. The German Federal Compensation Law (Bundesentschädigungsgesetz), first enacted October 1, 1953 and expanded in 1956 and 1965. Approximately 4.4 million individual claims processed, and approximately DM 80 billion paid out across the broader period.
• Article 2 Fund. The Claims Conference program created under Article 2 of the Implementation Agreement to the German Unification Treaty of 1990, which committed Germany to further compensation for persecutees who had received little or none. It pays monthly pensions to Holocaust survivors who were in camps, ghettos, or hiding. About 30,550 survivors were receiving Article 2 payments in 2024.
• EVZ Foundation. Stiftung “Erinnerung, Verantwortung und Zukunft” (“Remembrance, Responsibility and Future”). Founded August 2, 2000 with €5.2 billion (50/50 German federal government and ~6,500 German companies). Approximately 1.66 million surviving forced and slave laborers in approximately 100 countries received payments across 2001–2007.
• Volcker Commission. The Independent Committee of Eminent Persons, 1996–99, that investigated Swiss banking dormant accounts of Holocaust victims. Final report: Report on Dormant Accounts of Victims of Nazi Persecution in Swiss Banks (1999). Its audit ran alongside American class actions, which ended in the August 12, 1998 settlement in which Credit Suisse and UBS agreed to pay $1.25 billion. The committee reported in December 1999.
• Washington Principles. The eleven Washington Principles on Nazi-Confiscated Art, adopted by 44 nations by consensus on December 3, 1998 at the Washington Conference on Holocaust-Era Assets. The framework for art restitution. Subsequently elaborated by the Terezín Declaration of June 2009.
• Yad Vashem. The Israeli national institution for Holocaust documentation, commemoration, and the Righteous Among the Nations program. Established by Knesset law on August 19, 1953, it stands on the Mount of Remembrance in Jerusalem, beside Mount Herzl. The name is drawn from Isaiah 56:5. Its Holocaust History Museum, designed by Moshe Safdie, opened in 2005. Its archives hold more than 200 million pages of documentation, and approximately 4.9 million names are recorded in its Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names.
• Pages of Testimony. The one-page forms completed by surviving relatives, friends, and community members documenting the basic biographical information of each Holocaust victim. Together with archival records, the Pages feed the Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names: approximately 4.9 million names recovered, toward a goal of all approximately 6 million.
• USHMM. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, federally chartered October 7, 1980 under Public Law 96-388 with Elie Wiesel as founding chairman. Opened April 22, 1993. Architect: James Ingo Freed. Some 50 million people have visited since its dedication.
• Stolpersteine. (“Stumbling stones,” German.) The decentralized memorial of the artist Gunter Demnig, who conceived it in 1992–93 and laid the first stones in Cologne on January 4, 1995. Brass-topped stones about 10 cm square are set into sidewalks in front of the last homes that victims of Nazi persecution chose freely. By the project’s count, 116,000 have been laid in over 1,860 municipalities in 31 European countries, most of them in Germany. The project calls itself the largest decentralized memorial in the world.
• International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Established by UN General Assembly Resolution 60/7, adopted by consensus on November 1, 2005. Observed on January 27, the anniversary of the Soviet liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau on January 27, 1945.
• Yom HaShoah. Holocaust Remembrance Day in Israel, set by the Knesset on April 12, 1951. It is observed on 27 Nisan. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising began on April 19, 1943, the eve of Passover (14 Nisan), and the Knesset chose a day a week after the festival.
• IHRA. The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, originally founded as the Task Force for International Cooperation on Holocaust Education, Remembrance and Research in 1998. It has 35 member countries. Produces working definitions and intergovernmental coordination of Holocaust education and remembrance.
• IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism. A non-legally-binding definition, adopted by the IHRA Plenary on May 26, 2016. It has since been adopted or endorsed by dozens of national governments, the European Parliament, and the U.S. State Department, among many other bodies.
• Volksverhetzung. (“Incitement of the people,” German.) §130 of the German Strafgesetzbuch (Criminal Code), enacted in its modern form in 1960 and expanded in 1994 and 2005. Section 130(3), added in 1994, criminalizes the public approval, denial, or downplaying of the Nazi genocide. The penalty is up to five years in prison.
• Loi Gayssot. The French law of July 13, 1990 (Loi tendant à réprimer tout acte raciste, antisémite ou xénophobe). It added Article 24 bis to the press law of 1881, criminalizing the public contestation of the crimes against humanity established by the Nuremberg Tribunal. It was passed amid the Holocaust denial of Robert Faurisson, a French academic, and others.
• Irving v. Lipstadt. The 2000 English libel case (Irving v. Penguin Books Ltd and Lipstadt, [2000] EWHC QB 115) brought by David Irving against the American historian Deborah Lipstadt and her publisher. Justice Charles Gray dismissed the suit and found that Irving was “an active Holocaust denier; that he is anti-semitic and racist.” Richard J. Evans and Robert Jan van Pelt, expert witnesses for the defense, later published their findings as Lying About Hitler (2001) and The Case for Auschwitz (2002).

Modern Israel and the Middle East

The geopolitical vocabulary.

• Aliyah. (Hebrew: “ascent.”) The term for Jewish immigration to the Land of Israel. The First Aliyah (1882–1903) brought approximately 25,000 Jews, mostly from the Russian Empire, with smaller numbers from Yemen. Subsequent waves through the Fifth Aliyah (1929–1939) and the post-1948 Aliyot reshaped the demographic record of the Yishuv (Jewish community in Palestine) and then the State of Israel.
• Youth Aliyah. The organization founded by Recha Freier in 1933 to bring Jewish children out of Nazi Germany to Palestine, directed from Jerusalem by Henrietta Szold (1860–1945) and paid for largely by Hadassah. It brought about 5,000 teenagers before the war and about 15,000 more after it, most of them survivors, and kept receiving children after 1948. Hannah Arendt ran its Paris office from 1935 to 1939. See The Modern State of Israel and Hannah Arendt.
• Yishuv. (Hebrew: “settlement.”) The Jewish community in Ottoman Palestine and then British Mandate Palestine prior to the founding of the State of Israel in 1948. The “Old Yishuv” refers to the pre-Zionist religious communities of Jerusalem, Safed, Tiberias, and Hebron. The “New Yishuv” refers to the communities of Zionist immigrants from 1882 on.
• British Mandate for Palestine. The League of Nations mandate, formally approved on July 24, 1922 and in effect from September 29, 1923 to May 14, 1948. Established British administrative control over the territory previously under Ottoman administration and recognized the Balfour Declaration’s framework for a Jewish national home.
• UN Partition Plan / Resolution 181. The UN General Assembly resolution of November 29, 1947 recommending the partition of the British Mandate territory into a Jewish state, an Arab state, and an international zone for Jerusalem. Vote: 33 in favor, 13 opposed, 10 abstentions. The Jewish Agency accepted it, and the Arab Higher Committee and the Arab League states rejected it.
• Plan Dalet. The Haganah operational plan adopted on March 10, 1948 for the defense of Jewish areas of British Mandate Palestine in advance of the anticipated withdrawal of British forces and the expected invasion by neighboring Arab states. The plan’s substance and intent, particularly with respect to the Palestinians who fled or were expelled during the 1948 war, is the subject of extensive scholarly debate (Benny Morris, Walid Khalidi, Efraim Karsh).
• Lydda and Ramle. The towns where the most explicit Israeli military expulsions of Palestinians during the 1948 war occurred: July 10–13, 1948, under orders tied to Yitzhak Rabin and Ben-Gurion. Approximately 50,000 to 70,000 Palestinian residents expelled. The Lydda-Ramle case is the canonical expulsion in the broader scholarly literature on how Palestinians fled or were expelled in 1948.
• Jews who fled or were driven out of Arab lands. Between 1945 and 1972 about 850,000 Jews left or were forced out of the Arab countries of the Middle East and North Africa. In Iraq, Egypt, and other countries, governments stripped Jews of citizenship, seized their property, made mass arrests, and ordered expulsions, and mobs attacked Jewish neighborhoods. About 600,000 of them settled in Israel. Treated in The Departure from MENA.
• Nakba. (Arabic: “catastrophe.”) The Palestinian name for what befell the Palestinian Arabs in the 1948 war, when many fled or were expelled from the territory that became the State of Israel. Historians’ estimates of their number run from under 600,000 to more than 750,000. Why they left, whether in flight, by expulsion, or in the course of the fighting, is debated by historians (see Plan Dalet and Lydda and Ramle).
• 1949 Armistice Agreements. The four agreements ending the 1948 Arab-Israeli War: with Egypt (February 24, 1949, signed on Rhodes), with Lebanon (March 23, 1949), with Jordan (April 3, 1949), and with Syria (July 20, 1949). The Armistice Lines were explicitly designated in the agreements themselves as non-permanent borders.
• Green Line. The 1949 Armistice Line between Israel and Jordanian-administered West Bank, named after the green ink used to draw it on the original maps. Operated as the de facto Israel-West Bank border from April 3, 1949 to June 1967. Remains the reference point for most subsequent diplomatic frameworks proposing permanent border arrangements.
• Six-Day War. June 5–10, 1967. In May 1967 Egypt closed the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping and had UN peacekeepers (UNEF) withdrawn from Sinai, amid wider Arab military mobilization. Israel opened the war with a preemptive strike against Egypt, and Jordan and Syria entered the same day. Israel captured the West Bank from Jordan, the Gaza Strip and Sinai Peninsula from Egypt, and the Golan Heights from Syria. See The Modern State of Israel.
• UN Security Council Resolution 242. Adopted November 22, 1967. It called for the “withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict” and the “termination of all claims or states of belligerency.” It affirmed the right of every state in the area to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries. The formula became known as “land for peace,” and the resolution remains a reference point for later peace efforts.
• Camp David Accords. The September 17, 1978 agreement signed by Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, mediated by US President Jimmy Carter. Produced the Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty of March 26, 1979, the first peace treaty between Israel and an Arab state. The treaty has held for more than four decades.
• Oslo I Accord. The Declaration of Principles on Interim Self-Government Arrangements, signed on the White House lawn on September 13, 1993, by Shimon Peres for Israel and Mahmoud Abbas for the PLO. Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, PLO chairman Yasser Arafat, and U.S. President Bill Clinton were present. It followed mutual recognition between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization and set the framework for the Palestinian Authority.
• Oslo II Accord. The Interim Agreement on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, signed September 28, 1995. Established Areas A, B, and C in the West Bank as the framework for the territorial division of administrative control.
• Areas A, B, and C. The administrative divisions of the West Bank set by Oslo II. Area A is under full Palestinian Authority civil and security control, and Area B under Palestinian civil control and Israeli security control. Area C, under full Israeli civil and security control and including the Israeli settlements, covers more than 60 percent of the West Bank, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). The framework has operated through later decades with significant modifications.
• Camp David II. The July 11–25, 2000 summit between Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat, and US President Bill Clinton. Produced no agreement.
• Clinton Parameters. The framework presented by U.S. President Bill Clinton on December 23, 2000 as the U.S. proposal for the final-status agreement between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. Both sides responded with reservations. The Taba talks of January 2001 followed but produced no final agreement.
• Israel-Jordan Peace Treaty. Signed October 26, 1994 by Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Jordanian Prime Minister Abdelsalam al-Majali, witnessed by US President Bill Clinton. The second peace treaty between Israel and an Arab state. The treaty has held for more than three decades.
• Abraham Accords. The series of normalization agreements between Israel and Arab states, beginning with the August 13, 2020 Israel-UAE agreement and including later agreements with Bahrain (September 15, 2020), Sudan (October 23, 2020), and Morocco (December 10, 2020). They added to the earlier peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan.

Curriculum, education, and policy

The vocabulary of curriculum and policy.

• The curriculum gap. The span of Jewish history between the ancient Israelites and the Holocaust, which American K-12 courses rarely teach. The Curriculum Gap sets out the record.
• NY Education Law §801. The New York State statute under which, since a 1994 amendment, Holocaust instruction has been part of the required curriculum in NY public schools. Among the earliest state Holocaust education mandates in the United States (Illinois, in 1990, was the first to require it in every public school, and New Jersey’s comprehensive mandate also dates from 1994). The statute leaves districts room to teach the history before and after the Holocaust.
• The §801 civic-history mandates. The broader reach of the same NY statute: civic-history content mandates including the Irish Famine (Education Law §801, 1996). The statute already names other histories directly.
• DASA. The Dignity for All Students Act: New York State legislation in effect since July 1, 2012 establishing the framework for reporting and addressing harassment, discrimination, and bullying in K-12 public schools, including antisemitic incidents.
• Never Again Education Act. Public Law 116-141, signed by President Donald Trump on May 29, 2020. Federal statute funding the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum to develop Holocaust education resources and professional development for K-12 teachers. It authorized $2 million a year for fiscal years 2021 to 2025.
• HEAL Act. The Holocaust Education and Antisemitism Lessons Act: proposed federal legislation, introduced in the Senate in 2023 by Jacky Rosen (D-NV) and James Lankford (R-OK) and reintroduced in the House in 2025. It would require the director of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum to conduct a nationwide study of Holocaust education in public schools and report to Congress.
• ADL Audit of Antisemitic Incidents. The Anti-Defamation League’s annual count of antisemitic incidents in the United States, published since 1979. It sorts incidents by type (assault, harassment, vandalism), by location (K-12 schools, college campuses, public places, Jewish institutions), and by year.
• IMPACT-se. The Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education. Founded 1998. Systematically analyzes school textbooks from the Palestinian Authority, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Turkey, Jordan, the UAE, and other countries against UNESCO standards. Reports archived at impact-se.org/research.
• Georg Eckert Institute. The Georg Eckert Institute for International Textbook Research, based in Braunschweig, Germany, a research center for the study of school textbooks worldwide. With UNESCO, it produced a 2015 study of 272 curricula from 135 countries, mapping how the Holocaust is taught.
• Schoen survey (Claims Conference, 2018). The survey of 1,350 US adults commissioned by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany and conducted by Schoen Consulting in February 2018. It found that 11% of US adults, and 22% of US millennials, had not heard of or were unsure if they had heard of the Holocaust. A follow-up 50-state survey of millennials and Gen Z (Schoen Cooperman Research, 2020) found that 63% did not know that six million Jews were murdered.
• Nostra Aetate. The Catholic Church’s Vatican II declaration on the relations of the Church to non-Christian religions, adopted October 28, 1965 by a vote of 2,221 to 88. It stated that what happened in Christ’s passion “cannot be charged against all the Jews” and that Jews “should not be presented as rejected or accursed by God.” It also “decries hatred, persecutions, displays of anti-Semitism, directed against Jews at any time and by anyone.”
• The Subordination vs. targeted-ideology distinction. A distinction drawn by historians such as Bernard Lewis, Mark R. Cohen, and Norman Stillman. It separates the hierarchical legal status that subordinated Jews and Christians together as “People of the Book” under classical Islamic rule (the dhimma) from the targeted anti-Jewish ideology of the Christian Adversus Judaeos tradition and of Nazi racial antisemitism. Historians use it to compare Jewish experience under Islamic and Christian rule without treating the two as one story.