£2 million for Holocaust education is welcome – But what will it really teach?

November 1, 2024, 2:58 PM | Updated: November 1, 2024, 4:20 PM

An extra £2 million for Holocaust education cannot be a bad thing. My only question is: what does “Holocaust education” mean?

The fires of anti-Jewish racism rage all around us. The traditional tools of Holocaust education are inadequate to eradicate them. We cannot fight the fire with a few tears and a handkerchief. And yet this is what we expect when we send schoolchildren to Auschwitz for a day. Or when we ask them to listen to a Holocaust survivor tell their story.

Yes, the audience feels horror at what happened. Yes, they feel empathy and admiration for incredible survivors like Martin Stern and Janine Webber. But the public cannot connect their stories to it anti-Jewish racism Today. This is where expert teachers come into the picture. That’s why I only hire people with a professional education background to do this work. They know how to lead a class of schoolchildren ranging from apathetic to openly hostile.

Our teachers do not rely solely on the facts of 80 years of history. They focus on the unconscious biases that surround this topic in a multicultural classroom today. They explain who Jews actually were and are. They don’t teach the Holocaust as a one-time thing; but as the darkest chapter of a 2000 year story.

They don’t say the Nazis were to blame; but suggest that the real culprit was European civilization. The Holocaust could not have happened without the help of 200 million ordinary men and women in 22 countries. What they felt about the Jewish people was the real cause of the Holocaust. Not what they knew. What they felt.

Many descendants of that generation today feel the same way about the Jews. For most, it’s a silent, passive assumption. And most will never have met a Jew. So it’s easier for them to remain silent when a monstrous anti-Jewish conspiracy theorist comes along. Like Sinwar, Nasrallah or Khamenei. Or their ‘useful idiots’ in this country.

Hard-left and Islamic propaganda about Jews is based on the same conspiracy theories as Nazism. They pin every world problem on ‘Jewish power’. The big difference is how they frame it.

The Nazis blamed ‘the Jews’. Anti-Israel activists today blame “the Zionists.” When they try to wipe out the world’s only Jewish nation, they say, “I hate the Jews.” When they repackage Israeli self-defense as ‘oppression’, but never criticize, let alone advance, barbaric oppressors like Putin, Assad or ISIS, they say, “I hate the Jews.” Through their monomania they reveal their delusional racism.

They hate Jews and the Jewish state just because they are Jewish; for the imagined behavioral characteristics of Jewishness. Power, greed, control. It is the only racism that does not put down, but believes in the omnipotence of a people that make up 0.2% of the world’s population.

We at the National Holocaust Museum started teaching about the Holocaust in 1995. Today we run a very different kind of Holocaust educationfor a very different kind of Britain. We address the “why” of the Holocaust, not just the “what” – because that “why” is an unbridled, racist elephant currently marauding through our city centers. They are banners with vile conspiracy theories that trample on truth, decency and cohesion for all of us. I hope that the government is really prepared to tackle this elephant.

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Marc Cave is director of the National Holocaust Museum.

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