Don't blame campus antisemitism on a failure of Holocaust education

In her response to last month’s NUS report on persistent antisemitism within the student organisation, Baroness Deech concluded that Holocaust education in schools had failed and that it needed to be reshaped.

She made two valid points. It is important to recognise the IHRA Working Definition of antisemitism and school students should be taught about modern antisemitism. Both points were explicitly made by the government’s independent adviser on antisemitism, Lord Mann, in a report entitled Anti-Jewish Hatred last year.

However, her critique of Holocaust education is wrong.

Firstly, Holocaust education, comprising learning about and from the Holocaust, can never be an antidote to antisemitism. The former focuses on the historical narrative with the Jewish experience of the Holocaust at its very core; the latter focuses on broader issues related to active citizenship.

Lessons “about” include the attempted genocide of the Roma and Sinti, and the persecution and discrimination of other distinctive groups as well as the genocide of the Jews lessons “from” include learning about human rights, genocides, discrimination and hate crimes today.

From my experience, secondary teachers in Scotland (where Holocaust education is not mandatory, and whose students are also NUS members) who teach the Holocaust, will focus lessons on human rights in areas such as the plight of today’s refugees, LGBTQ or Black Lives Matter issues rather than on modern antisemitism.

Secondly, the Holocaust is mandatory in the national curriculum, in history. One could well argue that history is not the place for teaching modern antisemitism, and that this teaching should take place elsewhere in the curriculum. This point is supported by Unesco, which has recommended that antisemitism is taught within a framework of human rights and global citizenship, in addition to being taught in the context of the Holocaust.

Finally, is it not possible that the political left often use the Holocaust as a tool to promote their views because of the success of Holocaust education? I would argue that the success and impact of Holocaust Memorial Day, the Lessons From Auschwitz Project, survivor talks and other Holocaust educational initiatives, demonstrate that not only is Holocaust education successful but that it is constantly “reshaping” and adapting to society’s needs, using new technologies and applying new pedagogies.

As we are graced with few survivors, and work in an unfriendly environment of antisemitism, Holocaust distortion and denial, consistent ongoing change in Holocaust education is vital.

Examples of this change are the establishment of Vision Schools Scotland (2017), an organisation that supports teachers in Scotland in their Holocaust teaching and whose schools consider Holocaust education to be beneficial to their schools’ values; the IHRA Toolkit Against Holocaust Distortion (2021); and the UK Holocaust Memorial at Westminster, which will convey a comprehensive and unique narrative of Britain’s response to the Holocaust.

There are many reasons for the National Union of Students’ behaviour. Inadequate teaching of antisemitism in contexts other than Nazi antisemitism may well be one of these, but Holocaust education is not to blame.

Paula Cowan is director of Vision Schools Scotland

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