At the start of the Jewish new year, I have been struck by the number of messages and actions by our government that are at cross purposes with each other.
The disconnect between the Holocaust Education Trust dinner in September celebrating its success, while the keynote speaker Sir Simon Schama called the accusation of genocide against Israel “a profound lie” and the “new blood libel”; the disconnect between the Holocaust education given to teenagers at school but who then plan to march against Israel on October 7, the anniversary of the slaughter in Israel by Hamas, and who make Jewish students' lives on campus difficult; Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband ("a proud Jew" he called himself – who knew?) appeasing a section of his voters by imposing sanctions on the West Bank while ignoring the Chief Rabbi's warning that it will fuel antisemitism; I worry about our local synagogue being surrounded by police and concrete blocks during holiday services and needing £350,000 of security infrastructure which the government is unlikely to fund.
I would like to offer the following analysis of what I believe lies behind these conflicts.
For decades, Holocaust education and memorialisation have been treated as the central tool for addressing antisemitism. Yet its core flaw is now impossible to ignore: it teaches people to care about dead Jews, not living ones.
The young people who march through city streets calling for the destruction of Israel and equating Zionism with Nazism have had compulsory Holocaust education at school. As Dara Horn argues in her book People Love Dead Jews, societies have developed a performative reverence for dead Jews that masks an ambiguity about Jews who are alive today. Holocaust education has done a good remembrance job. But it has not equipped students to recognise, understand, or resist contemporary Jew-hatred. Instead, it has produced a sentimental account that ignores Jewish continuity, culture, and citizenship.
There are three structural failures that explain why it's not working. The first is that the Shoah – the Jewish genocide – is being diluted, e.g. the UK government remit for the Holocaust Education Trust requires Holocaust events to include other genocides, for example Kosovo, Rwanda and Cambodia. The report by Lord Harrington on the 2025 Holocaust Memorial Day event explains this:
Each of these is a tragedy in its own right but they are all totally different to the Shoah. Earlier this year, the government even rejected an amendment put forward in the House of Lords that would have confined the theme of the planned Holocaust Learning Centre in Westminster to the Jewish genocide by the Nazis. So it will be open to exhibitions on other unrelated killings, and, it is feared, even the situation in Gaza. This is framed as inclusivity. In practice, it relativises the Holocaust and dilutes its unique nature. It opens the path to turning the accusation of genocide against the Jewish state because, after all, it intimates that genocide is something that turns out to be not uncommon and consequently displaces the eternal guilt once felt about the Holocaust.
But the Shoah was not simply one genocide among many. It was a state-engineered, industrialised attempt to eradicate every Jew on earth. As Yehuda Bauer, Holocaust scholar, described it, it was unprecedented in its ideological scope and technological execution. When Holocaust education is folded into generalised “genocide studies” or a vague “hatred” framework, students are taught a universal moral lesson about human cruelty but lose sight of the specific ideology of antisemitism that drove the Holocaust.
This universalising impulse turns Jews into symbols, not people. It encourages students to see Jews only as historical victims, stripped of contribution, culture, and survival. It lavishes attention on Auschwitz, Anne Frank and memorial candles while ignoring the lived reality of Jews today, their attachment to Israel and the antisemitism they face.
Jonathan Frisher, a British teenager who persuaded his school to teach about today's antisemitism and is campaigning to make this nationwide, pointed out that the education at his school made no connection between the events of the Second World War and today's antisemitism, thus failing to ensure that young people recognise it.
Maybe I am alone in finding it strange that the annual memorial event in the Foreign Office includes speakers about other genocides and concludes with wine and sandwiches. The Canadian academic, Professor Ruth Wisse, has warned for decades that treating Jews as metaphors rather than neighbours is itself a form of antisemitism. When Holocaust education becomes a generic lesson about tolerance, it erases Jewish particularity and makes it harder to understand why antisemitism persists.
The second failing, which is evident in Holocaust memorials, is placing antisemitism safely in the past: Germany, Nazis, and nothing to do with today. Holocaust education often frames antisemitism as an historical problem located safely in 1930s Germany, an interesting subject for films. Students learn about Hitler, Nuremberg Laws, ghettos and concentration camps, but almost nothing about where antisemitism comes from, how it mutates, or why it remains potent. It teaches them that to upset Jews of today, Nazi symbolism is very effective.
Are young people taught about the elimination of Jews from most Middle Eastern states in the 1940s? The history approach creates a dangerous illusion: antisemitism is something only “the Nazis did,” not something that exists in Britain, Europe, or the wider world today. It places responsibility for Jew-hatred firmly in the past, absolving contemporary societies of any need for understanding.
The result is moralising rather than history. Students are encouraged to “not be bystanders,” “be kind,” or “stand up to hate,” but are not taught what antisemitism actually is: its theological roots, political uses, conspiracy structures, or modern expressions. They are not taught why despising Jews has become normalised again, or why Jews today report rising fear, harassment, and exclusion. The very word “Holocaust” is misused. With survivors dying, the emotional storytelling model is losing its power, and even so their very stories and their age again fixes antisemitism in the past. And because students have not been taught how antisemitism mutates, they are not equipped to recognise or resist contemporary Jew-hatred. They know how Jews died, not how Jews live, or why Jews are still targeted. How many of the young visitors to Auschwitz later defend the existence of Israel?
The third failing is ignoring Israel: the missing piece of contemporary antisemitism.
Perhaps the most striking omission in Holocaust education is Israel. Students are taught little if anything about why Jews need a state, how Zionism emerged, or why today’s antisemitism is overwhelmingly focused on the only Jewish state. This silence is not neutral. It leaves students unable to understand the central driver of modern antisemitism: the political demonisation of Israel and the delegitimisation of Jewish self-determination.
Without explaining Jewish history up to the present, Holocaust education cannot explain why antisemitism today looks different from antisemitism in 1936, yet is rooted in the same ideological patterns. One would not teach people not to discriminate against black people by teaching only about slavery. Yet we teach about antisemitism by teaching and commemorating only the Holocaust and not about the living Jewish world and its state. The UCL Centre for Holocaust Education has reported on the defects of current education courses, but their criticisms have had no impact so far. The UK Jewish leadership and organisations have too much invested in the current model to be open to constructive change.
Dara Horn has put forward a new model of Holocaust education in her most recent book The Final Solution to the Jewish Question: A Love Story for the Living, pointing out that Holocaust education has preserved memory but that alone cannot counter contemporary antisemitism.
I agree with her that we need a new model that teaches:
- Jewish civilisation, not just Jewish destruction
- Jewish survival and contribution, not only Jewish victimhood
- The history and legitimacy of Israel
- The roots of antisemitism, past and present
Horn, Wisse, and Bauer all point toward the same conclusion: education must present living Jews, not only dead ones. It must teach who Jews are, not only what was done to them.
Sir David Bell has been commissioned by the government to report on antisemitism in schools and colleges. His report is imminent and one can only hope that he will understand how Holocaust education has failed and what has to be done to make it relevant today.
Only then will students be equipped to recognise and resist the antisemitism of their own time, not just mourn the antisemitism of the past.
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