The curriculum gap the platform documents is not confined to textbooks. It extends into public-television educational resources, online learning platforms, museum materials, and state-published curriculum frameworks. Some of these materials are excellent in most respects, and many were produced with care. Most reach more classrooms than any single textbook. Their patterns matter because their reach is wide.
The entries below name widely used K–12 resources where Hebrew or Jewish material is omitted, mis-traced, or thinly treated. Each links to the original, quotes or describes what it says, and gives the scholarship that would update it, with citations.
A note on scope. Every resource here was examined directly. This is not a survey of every state curriculum or platform, and absence from this page is not an evaluation.
Where additions would help · 5 entries
Documented examples.
“The Evolution of Ancient Writing”
View the original on PBS LearningMedia →
What the resource does well. The resource is freely available, well-produced, and classroom-projectable. The core argument, that writing emerged independently in only a few places in human history, is sound. The resource also correctly identifies three independent origins (Mesopotamia, China, and Mesoamerica), a widely held scholarly view.
What the resource says. The resource is a short instructional film with an accompanying explanatory text, distributed by the Public Broadcasting Service to K–12 teachers nationwide. It names “Phoenician, Greek, Cyrillic, Arabic, and even the Roman alphabet” as the descendants of the ancient script that produced today’s Western writing systems. It traces those descendants to ancient Sumerian cuneiform of the Fertile Crescent.
What is missing, and what is incorrect. Hebrew is not in the list. Cyrillic, a ninth-century Slavic Christian script developed for the First Bulgarian Empire, is included. Hebrew’s written tradition runs back about 3,000 years, and its script carries the Hebrew Bible, the Mishnah (the first written code of Jewish law, c. 200 CE), and the Aleppo Codex (a tenth-century manuscript of the Hebrew Bible). Beyond the omission, the lineage the resource describes is incorrect on its own terms. Most scholars trace the alphabet family to Egyptian hieroglyphs, not to Sumerian cuneiform, by way of the Proto-Sinaitic script. Canaanite workers in Egypt and the Sinai Peninsula developed that script around 1900–1500 BCE. Paleo-Hebrew (the early Hebrew script) and Phoenician are closely related scripts of the same family. Cuneiform is a separate tradition that did not give rise to the alphabetic family.
Suggested update. Two changes would strengthen the resource without lengthening it. First, the list of descendants might read “Phoenician, Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic, Greek, Cyrillic, and the Roman alphabet.” Second, the lineage might be traced to Egyptian hieroglyphs via Proto-Sinaitic rather than to Sumerian cuneiform. The platform is happy to provide a one-paragraph supplement and primary-source images: the tenth-century BCE Tel Zayit abecedary (an inscribed alphabet), the Wadi el-Hol inscriptions, and the Serabit el-Khadim inscriptions from the Sinai mines. It can also supply citations to Joseph Naveh’s Early History of the Alphabet (Magnes Press / Brill, 1982) and Benjamin Sass’s The Genesis of the Alphabet (Otto Harrassowitz, 1988), at no charge, for educational use.
“Christianity from Judaism to Constantine” (Episode 11)
Watch the original on YouTube (Crash Course) →
What the resource does well. The episode is among the most-watched introductory history videos in American secondary classrooms. It opens with the explicit claim that “any understanding of Christianity has to start with Judaism, because Jesus was born a Jew, and he grew up in the Jewish tradition.” At 5:17, the presenter directly debunks the historical libel that Jews were responsible for Jesus’s crucifixion: “The Romans crucified Jesus because he was a threat to their authority. Later traditions saying that the Jews killed Jesus? Very unfortunate, also, very untrue.” That correction, delivered in a widely-shown K–12 video, is responsible historical work and deserves recognition.
What is missing. Of the episode’s roughly eleven minutes, the segment titled “Understanding the Jewish Tradition” (0:33–3:32) runs approximately three minutes and covers Abraham, the Covenant, the development of monotheism, and circumcision. The remaining eight minutes are devoted to Jesus, Paul, and Constantine. The episode’s announced timeframe spans roughly 1900 BCE to 312 CE, and several pieces of Jewish history within it are not addressed. They include the Second Temple period (516 BCE – 70 CE), the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, and the rabbinic transition led by Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai at Yavneh, a town in Judea, around 70 CE. They also include the compiling of the Mishnah (c. 200 CE) and the continued growth of Judaism alongside Christianity: the Jerusalem and Babylonian Talmuds (the great commentaries on the Mishnah) and the academies of Sura and Pumbedita in Babylonia.
Suggested update. Three changes would strengthen the episode without lengthening it significantly. First, the “Understanding the Jewish Tradition” segment might add a brief reference to the Second Temple period’s sectarian diversity. Jesus was part of one of several Jewish movements in first-century Roman Judea. Second, the 70 CE destruction of the Second Temple, which falls within the episode’s announced timeframe, should be named. Third, the closing segment might briefly acknowledge that Judaism continued to develop alongside Christianity rather than treating the parent tradition as static background.
Primary and scholarly sources: Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews and Jewish War; Tacitus, Histories Book V; Geza Vermes, Jesus the Jew (Collins, 1973); Shaye J.D. Cohen, From the Maccabees to the Mishnah (Westminster John Knox, 3rd ed. 2014); Daniel Boyarin, Border Lines (Penn, 2004); E.P. Sanders, Judaism: Practice and Belief, 63 BCE–66 CE (Trinity Press, 1992).
New Visions Social Studies · Unit 9.2 Belief Systems
View the New Visions Social Studies curriculum →
What this curriculum does well. The New Visions Social Studies Curriculum is the NYC-DOE-supported implementation of the New York State K–12 Social Studies Framework. It is openly licensed, freely available online, and inquiry-based. Specifically on Judaism, the curriculum implements NYS Framework Key Idea 9.2, which names Judaism explicitly alongside Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, Confucianism, and Daoism in parallel language. It allocates four supporting questions to Judaism in Unit 9.2 (SQ 20–23) and treats Judaism as one of the world’s foundational belief systems, with substantive curricular space, not as a footnote.
The framing asymmetry. Three of the seven belief systems in the NYS Framework, the three Abrahamic traditions, receive a parallel “How do we know what we know about…” supporting question in the New Visions implementation. The phrasing across these three is otherwise nearly identical. The single difference is the addition of an epistemic-limit clause (a question about the limits of what can be known) to one of them.
Judaism · 9.2 SQ 21: “How do we know what we know about Ancient Israel? How is our knowledge limited?”
Christianity · 9.3 SQ 25: “How do we know what we know about Jesus?”
Islam · 9.4 SQ 13: “How do we know what we know about Muhammad and the founding of Islam?”
Only the Judaism supporting question is paired with the limit clause “How is our knowledge limited?” The Christianity and Islam parallel questions are not. Important scoping: This asymmetry appears in the New Visions implementation. The NYS Framework itself, in Key Idea 9.2, treats the seven belief systems with parallel language and does not include any knowledge-limit clause for any tradition. The framework is even-handed at the state level.
Suggested update, two paths restore parity. Either resolves the asymmetry: (1) Remove the limit clause from SQ 21. (2) Add equivalent limit clauses to SQ 25 and SQ 13. Option 1 is the lighter edit. Option 2 is more rigorous if the curriculum’s intent is to apply consistent epistemic discipline across the three Abrahamic traditions. The platform is happy to provide draft language for either option, free of charge, for educational use. (New Visions has since reorganized its curriculum pages under new unit numbering. This entry documents the implementation as examined, and the link points to the current course hub.)
Smarthistory · Curated Guides and Reframing Art History
What Smarthistory does well. Smarthistory is a non-profit OER (open educational resource) founded in 2005 by art historians Beth Harris and Steven Zucker. It offers thousands of free resources (essays, videos, and textbook chapters) produced in collaboration with over 800 contributors and partner museums from the Getty Research Institute to the Tokyo National Museum. Its content is peer-reviewed at a scholarly standard and openly licensed for educational reuse. On Jewish topics specifically, Smarthistory does have substantive individual essays. They cover the Synagogue at Dura-Europos, the Hammath Tiberias mosaics, the painted wooden Gwoździec Synagogue, the Torah and its adornment, Jewish ceremonial art, and Jewish art in the United States before 1900. Others treat individual Jewish artists, including Larry Silver’s essay on Maurycy Gottlieb and Samantha Baskind’s on Raphael Soyer’s Dancing Lesson.
The structural asymmetry. Smarthistory organizes its content into Curated Guides, chronological syllabi that provide pedagogical scaffolding from foundational concepts to specific monuments and objects. The Islamic Art and Architecture Curated Guide is extensive. It has an introductory essay, a survey of Arts of the Islamic world, and dedicated chronological units (Early Islamic, c. 900–1400, the Islamic West, the Sultanate period, Mughal, Ottoman, modern and contemporary). It adds foundational essays on the religion as a tradition (The Five Pillars of Islam, Hajj, The Kaaba, The Qur’an with four sub-articles, Mosque architecture). It also has essays on specific monuments (Dome of the Rock, Great Mosque of Damascus, Great Mosque of Córdoba, Quṣayr ʿAmra, Great Mosque of Kairouan, Great Mosque of Tlemcen, Qutb complex, Sultan Hasan complex, and many more).
There is no equivalent Curated Guide for Judaism or Jewish art and architecture. Jewish material on the site is real but scattered. It sits in standalone essays and in a Judaism section within the all-religions guide The Basics of Religion in Art. That section holds an introduction, the chronological series below, and essays on the Torah and its adornment, manuscript illumination, ceremonial art, and the history of Jewish architecture. What is missing is what Islamic art has: a dedicated Curated Guide with chronological units and monument-by-monument essays. Synagogue architecture receives one overview essay where mosque architecture receives its own essay and a shelf of individual monuments.
Specific content gaps in the chronological essays. Every essay of the Judaism section of The Basics of Religion in Art has been read in full for this entry. Smarthistory does have three chronological essays on Jewish history: Jewish history to the middle ages, Jewish history 1750 to WW II, and Jewish history in the post-war period. The ghetto institution (1516–1870), a 354-year European institution, appears in a single phrase: “boundaries that in some later instances became walled ghettos within which Jews were forced to live.” That is the entire treatment in the medieval essay. The uprooting of approximately 850,000 Jews from Arab countries (1945–1972), from communities between several centuries and more than two thousand years old, receives a single paragraph. The post-war essay notes that Jews “emigrated from North African and Middle Eastern countries” as pan-Arab nationalism narrowed. It gives no figures, no expulsion or denaturalization decrees, and nothing on the communities and property left behind. Factual slips in the essays also merit correction. In the 1750 to WW II essay, the yellow badge is attributed to the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, when the badge decrees came in occupied Poland in 1939 and in the Reich in 1941. The same essay places the two million Jewish emigrants from the Russian Empire in the 1880s, when that figure belongs to the whole wave of 1880 to 1914. In the medieval essay, the Spanish Inquisition is said to have forced “conversions and expulsions” of Jews. The Inquisition’s jurisdiction was over baptized conversos (Jews who had converted to Christianity, and their descendants). The mass conversions came in the violence of 1391, and the 1492 expulsion was a royal decree. The same essay dates the Second Temple “a century” after the first’s destruction, when the span was seventy years, 586 to 516 B.C.E. It also describes dhimmi status (the protected but subordinate status of Jews and Christians under Islamic rule) as religion practiced “freely.” It does not mention the jizya, a tax on non-Muslims, or the legal subordination that defined the arrangement. In the introductory essay, Titus is styled Roman emperor at the sack of Jerusalem in 70 C.E., nine years before his accession. He commanded the siege as the son of the emperor Vespasian. The same essay names the Maccabees’ opponent a “Hellenistic Persian kingdom,” when the kingdom the Maccabees fought was Seleucid, the Hellenistic Greek dynasty of Antiochus IV. In the post-war essay, the United Nations is said to have “unanimously voted” for an independent State of Israel in 1948. The partition resolution passed on November 29, 1947, by 33 votes to 13 with 10 abstentions, and Israel declared independence in May 1948. In the Jewish ceremonial art essay, the expulsion from Portugal is dated 1536, when the expulsion decree came in 1496 and the forced conversions in 1497. The year 1536 is the founding of the Portuguese Inquisition.
Suggested update, three interlocking additions. (1) A Curated Guide on Jewish Art and Architecture that parallels the Islamic Art and Architecture guide in structure. It could include an introductory essay, a survey, and foundational essays on the synagogue as institution, the Torah and Hebrew scripts, the Hand of God in Jewish art, Hebrew illuminated manuscripts, and micrography (images drawn in tiny Hebrew script). Its chronological units could treat Jewish visual culture in the Second Temple period, late antiquity, medieval Sephardi Spain, Ashkenazi central and eastern Europe, the Ottoman Mediterranean, and the modern period. (2) Substantive treatment of the ghetto institution and the uprooting of the Jews of MENA within the existing chronological Jewish history essays. (3) A rebalanced lead visual for the Judaism section of The Basics of Religion in Art. It could lead with a building Jews built, a book they illuminated, or a synagogue they painted, rather than a Roman victory monument depicting the destruction of Jerusalem.
The essays, read in sequence, do carry the arc. Taken together, the Smarthistory essays on Jewish history carry the European Jewish story from origins to the present, through the Talmud, the medieval communities, emancipation, and the modern era. They include the chronological series by Drs. Jessica and Shaina Hammerman (an introduction, to the middle ages, 1750 to World War II, and the post-war period). They also include Dr. Steven Fine’s essay on the history of Jewish architecture, which frames the subject as “an unbroken chain of 3000 years.” The limit is placement: it sits in the AP Art History section, alongside the study of objects and buildings, rather than in the World History course where students first meet the subject.
The platform can help with framework development, source recommendations, and scholarly contacts, at no charge.
“Overview of Early Judaism,” Parts 1 and 2
Watch Part 1 on Khan Academy →
Watch Part 2 on Khan Academy →
What the resource does well. Khan Academy’s two-part “Overview of Early Judaism,” in its World History course, is free, clearly presented, and among the most widely viewed introductions to the subject online. The presenter is careful about historicity, separating biblical narrative from the historical record and noting that historians “view it more along the lines of legend.” The videos are openly licensed under Creative Commons (Attribution / Non-Commercial / Share-Alike) for classroom reuse. Together they carry the story from Genesis through the patriarchs, the Exodus, the kingdoms of Saul, David, and Solomon, the First and Second Temples, and the Assyrian, Babylonian, and Roman conquests.
What is missing. The two-video arc ends at 70 CE. Part 2 closes on the Roman destruction of the Second Temple and the dispersion, with the final words observing that afterward “you don’t see a significant resettlement of the Jewish people into this area.” The narrative stops there, no rabbinic transition, no Talmud, no medieval communities across the Christian and Islamic worlds, no continuous living tradition. A student who watches both videos is left at the year 70 with dispersion as the endpoint. This is not a separate problem from the textbooks below: the videos follow the same curricular organization as the adopted textbooks and frameworks, so the boundary that ends the textbook thread at antiquity ends the video here too. The free resource inherits the cutoff from the curriculum it is built to serve.
Suggested update. A brief closing segment, or a note pointing to the continuation, would carry the arc past 70 CE: the move to rabbinic Judaism, the Talmud, the medieval communities, and the continuity of Jewish life to the present. A fuller arc already exists on Khan Academy itself, in the Smarthistory essays hosted in its AP Art History section (see the Smarthistory entry above), but a student in the World History course is unlikely to find it there.
Primary resource: Khan Academy, “Overview of Early Judaism,” Parts 1 and 2, World History (Creative Commons BY-NC-SA). Closing quotation transcribed from Part 2.
Textbooks in use · the core problem
The books on the desk.
The resources above are optional supplements a teacher might add. Textbooks are different: they are the assigned spine of the course, adopted at the district or state level and used by every student for a year. When the gap is in the textbook itself, it sits in the foundation the whole class is built on. The two titles below were examined directly. The point is not the individual book. It is the pattern. A 2009 doctoral study of two widely adopted high-school world-history textbooks, from Prentice Hall and McDougal Littell, documented it: of the three monotheistic religions, Judaism received the least coverage, in narrative, imagery, and questions alike. Little of Judaism’s own history appeared except where it connected to Christianity or Islam.
Discovering Our Past (McGraw Hill middle-school world history)
What the resource is. McGraw Hill’s middle-school world-history series. New York’s Grade 6 edition is Discovering Our Past: The Eastern Hemisphere. The edition examined here is the series’ national volume, Discovering Our Past: A History of the World, Early Ages, by Jackson J. Spielvogel (2014).
What the resource does well. Its chapter on the Israelites carries the story past the destruction of the Temple. It follows the Diaspora, Jewish life under Greek and Roman rule, the Pharisees, Yohanan ben Zakkai’s school at Yavneh, and the rabbis whose discussions became the Talmud (pages 160–167).
What is missing, and what is inaccurate. The chapter dates the Jews and their religion to the exile. “During their exile, they became known as the Jews,” it says. “We call their religion Judaism” (page 154). The kingdom of Judah, with Jerusalem as its capital, stood for centuries before Babylon destroyed Jerusalem and the First Temple in 586 BCE, and the people carried their religion into exile with them. The same page says the exiles “spent 70 years away from Judah.” Seventy years is the figure of Jeremiah’s prophecy. The exile the book describes, from 586 BCE to Cyrus’s decree of 538 BCE, lasted under fifty years. After the Roman period, the book’s Jewish history is a line on the flourishing community of Córdoba (page 406) and the persecutions of medieval Europe: scapegoating, expulsions, the Black Death, and the expulsion from Spain in 1492 (pages 569–575).
Suggested update. Present the Jews as the people of the kingdom of Judah, named for it, and Judaism as the religion they carried into exile and brought back. Correct the length of the exile. Give medieval Jewish life its own pages, not only its persecutions. The platform can supply corrected language and primary-source images at no charge.
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.
World Civilizations: The Global Experience (7th Edition)
What the resource is. A college world-history survey by Peter Stearns and colleagues, also published in an AP Edition for high-school AP World History courses. Its chapter on early civilizations (Chapter 2, “Early Civilizations, 3500–600 B.C.E.”) gives Judaism one page, page 37.
What is missing, and what is inaccurate. The page credits the Jews with “the first clearly developed monotheistic religion” and says Jewish monotheism “has sustained a distinctive Jewish culture to this day.” It places them only as “a Semitic people influenced by Babylonian civilization” who “settled near the Mediterranean around 1200 B.C.E.” It names no land, no Jerusalem, and no Temple, and it introduces the Jews through Babylon before it says where they lived. Egypt’s own record places them in Canaan. The Merneptah Stele, of about 1208 B.C.E., names “Israel” as a people there. The kingdom of Judah and its capital, Jerusalem, stood for centuries before Babylon destroyed Jerusalem and the First Temple in 586 B.C.E. The page also dates foreign rule over the Jewish state “from 772 B.C.E.” Assyria conquered the northern kingdom of Israel in 722 B.C.E., so 772 is likely a misprint.
Suggested update. Name the land: the land of Israel, with Jerusalem and the Temple. Introduce the Jews as a people of that land, and check the date of 772 B.C.E. against the Assyrian conquest of 722 B.C.E. The platform can supply corrected language, a map, and primary-source images at no charge.
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. Pattern study: Jason Eugene Allen, “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). On the Merneptah Stele: The Land of Israel, Unit 1.
The record so far, and where to turn.
A mainstream K–12 textbook that covers the full arc well. The project has not found one. The 2009 survey above, and the examinations summarized here, point to a gap that is industry-wide rather than the fault of any single title. If you know of a current K–12 textbook that treats Jewish civilization as continuous and accurately sourced from antiquity to the present, the project would like to see it, and would list it here.
What does exist. Two pointers. For textbook accuracy, the Institute for Curriculum Services (ICS) has reviewed K–12 instructional materials for accuracy on Jews, Judaism, and Jewish history since its founding in 2005. ICS, not this project, is the established partner for getting an adopted textbook fixed. For a complete model at the college and teacher-reference level, John Efron, Steven Weitzman, and Matthias Lehmann’s The Jews: A History (Routledge) carries the full span. It runs from the ancient Near East and the Greek and Roman world through the medieval realms of Christianity and Islam, modern Europe and the Holocaust, and contemporary America and Israel, and it is used as a university course text. It is not a K–12 classroom book, but it is a model of what complete coverage looks like.
ICS textbook-review record: icsresources.org. Model reference text: Efron, Weitzman & Lehmann, The Jews: A History, 4th ed., 2-volume set (Routledge, 2025), ISBN 9781041007296.
Done well · 2 entries
Resources that get this right.
Some widely used K–12 resources cover Hebrew and Jewish history with care and accurate sourcing. Two are below.
OpenStax · World History, Volume 1: to 1500
View the OpenStax textbook (free) →
OpenStax World History Volume 1, a free open-access textbook, covers the Hebrews and Israelites in Chapter 4 (The Near East) with academic care. It names the Hebrews explicitly and traces their emergence in Canaan, the construction of the united monarchy, and their conflicts with Neo-Assyria and Neo-Babylonia. Engages the Hebrew Bible as a primary source, treated seriously as text, and distinguishes the biblical narrative from the archaeological record without dismissing either. Cites specific archaeological sites by name (Gezer, Hazor, Megiddo). Acknowledges that some narrative elements are not supported by archaeology, while others have material confirmation. Cross-references scholarship on the Hyksos, foreign rulers of northern Egypt in the second millennium BCE. Frames monotheism precisely as “the definitive characteristic of the Hebrews,” with the worship of Yahweh named directly.
Free, openly licensed (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0), and downloadable in full from openstax.org.
National Geographic Education
Visit National Geographic Education →
National Geographic Education publishes a large body of resources on Jewish history and tradition, treated with care, accurate sourcing, and editorial respect. Hidden History (grades 5–12+) is a full article on the Crypto-Jews of the Americas, descendants of Iberian Jews forced to convert who kept Jewish practices in secret. It treats the Spanish Inquisition seriously, quotes Rabbi Yosef Garcia, and documents the 600,000 Jewish conversions by the end of the 15th century. It also traces Crypto-Jewish migration and describes specific concealment practices, such as a mezuzah (a small scroll fixed to a doorpost) hidden inside a statue of the Virgin Mary. The Jerusalem film educator toolkit presents Jewish, Christian, and Muslim perspectives on the city with three named guides. Culture and Food and Ritual uses Passover alongside Easter and Eid al-Fitr as three classroom-friendly examples of religious food traditions, with kashrut (Jewish dietary) laws explained accurately.
A small note: in some of National Geographic Education’s geography resources, the Abrahamic religions appear in the order “Christianity, Judaism, and Islam” rather than chronologically.
Recommendations of other resources to review are welcome at editor@teachjewishhistory.org.
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Last updated: November 2026.