How to fix Holocaust education

Is Holocaust education letting today’s anti-Jewish racism off the hook? When it became compulsory in 1991, Britain was largely in remission from the ancient disease of anti-Semitism. Life was stable. The Berlin Wall had fallen. Liberal democracy was the only future — indeed, Francis Fukuyama infamously wrote how the 1990s would mark ‘the end of history’.

How we Fukuyama’ed it all up. Times are now bad and bad times demand scapegoats. So anti-Jewish conspiracy theories thrive on a global scale Joseph Goebbels would lust after. It creates the conditions for the next Jewish genocide. And yet Holocaust education has barely responded. A different kind of Britain today calls for a different kind of Holocaust education. Below is what must change.

Holocaust education begins and ends with the Nazis, but anti-Jewish racism has continued for 2,000 years. We cannot excuse ourselves from that continuum. After being colonised and expelled from their own country by the Romans, Jews formed diasporas both eastwards (where they have remained dark-skinned) and westwards (where they have not).