By Dr. Jennifer Rich, author of Politics, Education, and Social Problems

January 27 marked the 77^th anniversary  of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp complex in Poland, when the world memorialized the victims of the Holocaust with an International Holocaust Remembrance Day  (IHRD).This somber occasion reminds us of the calamitous outcomes of ideologies of hate, bigotry, and intolerance, and honors the survivors who “remind us what happens when we allow inhumanity to prevail. They are living testaments of the power of the human spirit and the inherent dignity and worth of every person.”

And yet, nearly eight decades after Russian troops liberated the most notorious of the Nazi death camps, and almost two decades after the United Nations designated January 27 as an International Day of Commemoration, our global society faces a unique moment of threat: to democracy in our own country and abroad, rising antisemitism, and an amplification of far-right ideas.

At the end of 2021, Holocaust education was in the news when the director of curriculum and instruction in Southlake, Texas told teachers to “make sure that if you have a book on the Holocaust, that you have one that has an opposing, that has other perspectives.” Shortly following that incident, a third-grade teacher in Washington, DC made the news for having students reenact the Holocaust: one student was asked to “play” Hitler, others were told to simulate dying in a gas chamber.

Last month, just days after the USA marked the horrific events of last January 6^th, Congressman Warren Davidson equated vaccine mandates with Nazi Germany, tweeting “let’s recall that the Nazis dehumanized Jewish people before segregating them, segregated them before imprisoning them, imprisoned them before enslaving them, and enslaved them before massacring them … Dehumanizing and segregation are underway - and wrong.”

Then on January 15, three congregants and Rabbi Charlie Cytron-Walker were taken hostage in their synagogue, Beth Israel, in Colleysville, Texas. The assailant’s first demand was to speak with a rabbi in New York City, who he believed could help him free a Pakistani woman imprisoned on terrorism charges. This man believed that Jews control the world, and that a New York City rabbi would have the power and authority to get him what he wanted.

Sometimes it feels as if there is no end to these awful events, and it is often difficult to know what to do about them or how to address them. Drawing on my recent book, Politics, Education, and Social Problems: Complicated Classroom Conversations, I argue that instead of avoiding hard conversations about difficult events, both past and present, in our schools, teachers need to engage in open, civil, constructive dialogue on fundamental issues facing our society. This is not easy, but the real-world skills of listening, speaking, compromising, debating, imagining, and creating need to be integrated into classrooms. The hard work of using knowledge to fuel change is, to my mind, the most critical outcome of education.

Religion often feels like the final frontier of complicated classroom conversations. I live in New Jersey, the state with the second-largest Jewish population (after New York), and I regularly have college students tell me that I am the first Jewish person they’ve met. I teach about the Holocaust, and every semester a student asks what it means to be Jewish. In discussing this, student responses have included: a religion, a culture, a nationality, an ethnicity, a race, and a country. With 29 states in the US that have Jewish populations below 1% (and 18 of those have Jewish populations of under .5%), there are young people who have never encountered a Jewish person. As a result, I believe that we need to approach teaching about religion regularly, and with clear intended outcomes, in every school and classroom.

The implicit question raised when considering religion in public schools is: Why teach about religion in schools at all?  The key word in that question is “about.”  Teaching about religion means that education must be focused on teaching students about the role of religion in historical, cultural, literary, and social contexts of the United States and other countries. The goal of teaching about religion should be to help students understand and respect diverse religions with the goal of contributing to a pluralistic society. This form of religious education should focus on broadly accepted tenets rather than personal beliefs of the teacher. A course of study about religion generally discusses religious freedom as a core element of democracy in the United States, and the ways in which the United States constitution supports this idea.

Antisemitism, like racism, Islamophobia, xenophobia – the list goes on – is dangerous, and, and at the same time, built into the fabric of society. Challenging these dangerous ideologies by bringing them into the open, and grappling with harmful beliefs and stereotypes, opens the door for the possibility of real change. 

Embracing complicated conversations – about the events of the past and the challenges that reverberate into the present – is essential in creating a more just, democratic society. As we prepare to mark one of the most horrific events in world history by commemorating liberation and hope, I believe that there is hope for all of us in open, civil dialogue. By recommitting to those ideas, we can help make a world worthy of those who survived the tragic events of the Holocaust.

Jennifer Rich is the Executive Director of the Rowan Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights, and Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at Rowan University, USA. Her work appears in Hechinger Report, The Conversation, The Philadelphia Inquirer, EdWeek, and The Washington Post.