On the eve of the anniversary of the November 1938 pogrom known as Kristallnacht, in my first year as director of the Holocaust and Genocide Studies graduate programs at Gratz College, I find myself asking a question that seems increasingly urgent — not simply what should we teach about the Holocaust, but what must Holocaust education itself become in our troubling times?

We are educating a new generation at a moment of declining historical literacy, resurgent antisemitism, political polarization, Holocaust distortion and inversion, and unprecedented digital manipulation of historical knowledge happening globally. Young people encounter the Holocaust not only through classrooms, museums, books and survivor testimony, but through TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, political slogans, memes, decontextualized photographs, conspiracy narratives and artificial intelligence. The educational landscape has fundamentally changed, and Holocaust education must change with it.

U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum/Facebook

After the war, prosecutors at the Nuremberg Trials used the Nazis' own documents against them. They presented thousands of German documents, perpetrator testimonies, and even film recorded by Nazi officials — irrefutable evidence documenting the full scope of the Holocaust and other Nazi crimes.

History must come first

For decades, we have asked Holocaust education to do almost everything: preserve memory, teach tolerance, combat antisemitism, promote democracy, create empathy, defend human rights and encourage moral courage. These are, of course, worthy goals, but I have become increasingly convinced that Holocaust education cannot fulfill its ethical mission if it begins with moral lessons rather than with history.

Before asking students what the Holocaust teaches about prejudice or human rights, we need them to understand what actually happened: to whom, where, how and why. They need to have a good grasp of chronology, geography, ideology and historical context. They must understand antisemitism not simply as “hatred,” but as a historical phenomenon with its own religious, cultural, political, racial and conspiratorial traditions. They need to understand that the Holocaust did not take place in an empty social landscape. It unfolded within societies populated by institutions, bureaucrats, police, neighbors, collaborators, profiteers and all kinds of rescuers and helpers. And the students must encounter Jews not merely as victims who suddenly appear out of history at the moment of persecution. 

Others have recently written in eJewishPhilanthropy about the need to include Jewish life before the Holocaust in the classroom: families, communities, political movements, religious and secular cultures, languages, Jewish cultural life, education, professions, friendships, conflicts, aspirations and ordinary lives of young and adults. 

Jews during the Holocaust must also be understood as historical actors. Victimhood and agency are not opposites. People could be radically powerless and still act purposefully — seeking information, hiding, organizing, negotiating, resisting, caring for relatives, forging documents, smuggling food, creating underground archives and making impossible decisions within conditions of extreme persecution. In my work, I increasingly find the concept of constrained agency essential to discuss experiences of Jewish families and children and youth during the Holocaust.

Finally, Holocaust education should not end with 1945 because liberation did not restore the destroyed world. Survivors searched for families, struggled with loss, displacement, changed identities, silence and trauma, including sexual assault and the difficult work of constructing new lives and identities. Survival did not necessarily produce emotional wholeness and a smooth restoration for Jewish families and for oneself. Therefore, the aftermath belongs to Holocaust history, too.

This perspective also forces us to move beyond what I identify as the comfort zones of Holocaust education. 

Getting out of the comfort zone

We understandably teach about rescuers of Jews because we want young people to encounter courage in their study of a dark period in human history. But the facts are that the historical environment also encompassed indifference, fear, antisemitism, material self-interest, denunciation, exploitation and official and social collaboration with the Nazis. Such realities resist any simple division between rescuers and non-rescuers. 

Rescue itself constituted a complex and often unstable spectrum: assistance could be altruistic, paid, reluctant, temporary, or shaped simultaneously by compassion, self-interest and dependency. Rescue also involved coercion, emotional or sexual exploitation, and mental abuse, blurring the boundaries between genuine rescuer, rescuer-abuser and even rescuer-perpetrator. 

Acknowledging these morally ambiguous forms of assistance does not diminish the courage or heroism of genuine rescuers; on the contrary, it makes such acts more historically meaningful by situating them within the difficult social and moral environments in which they occurred. For this reason, in my view, Holocaust education should not seek to make history emotionally soothing or comfortable. Instead, it must be willing to unsettle us, to challenge reassuring assumptions and, at times, to make us uncomfortable. Discomfort with history, when grounded in evidence and careful analysis, is not a pedagogical failure. It can be one of the conditions of deeper understanding.

The need for meaningful comparisons

This is also important when we teach comparison. Comparative history and comparative genocide studies are indispensable. But comparison must be an intellectual method, not a political slogan driven by ideological convictions. Serious comparison requires knowledge of every history being compared, such as Armenian, Rwandan, Cambodian or Yazidi genocides. Comparison asks about ideology, chronology, perpetrators, victims, institutions, war, state structures, methods of violence and historical aftermaths. 

Today, however, Holocaust vocabulary is frequently deployed and manipulated simply to intensify political accusations. Political enemies become Nazis. Conflicts become Auschwitz. This is especially dangerous when the Jews and Israeli society become accused of being the new Nazis. 

Students therefore need to learn how to ask: What exactly is being compared? What evidence supports the comparison? What are the similarities? What are the differences? What context has been removed? And most importantly: Is the comparison driven by antisemitic prejudices and ideologies? Is this comparison intended to help us understand history, or is history being used principally as a weapon against Jews – against victims and survivors?

The distinction between historically grounded comparison and politically driven distortions, false analogies and Holocaust inversions must become one of the essential skills that Holocaust education teaches. But students can only learn to make such distinctions if they understand how historical knowledge is constructed, tested and grounded in evidence. This brings us to one of the foundations of historical education: serious engagement with primary sources.

A return to primary sources

Personal testimony, diaries, photographs, letters and other primary sources are indispensable because they restore individual human beings to the history of mass murder. They can generate empathy and emotional engagement, but they must also be approached as historical evidence requiring careful contextualization and critical reading. Emotional engagement cannot substitute for intellectual analysis. A powerful image may move us before we know who created it, where it was taken, when it was taken, or what it actually depicts.

Young people increasingly inhabit a culture shaped by instantaneous emotional reaction, so Holocaust education must therefore teach another habit: When something produces an immediate emotional response, investigate it more carefully. This is why I believe so strongly in a renewed commitment to primary sources and archival literacy. They teach students not only to feel, but also to ask about the origins of evidence, how it should be interpreted and what allows us to make a historically responsible claim.

Students should learn to ask who created a document, when, for whom and why. They should learn that survivor testimony is both a human encounter and historical evidence requiring contextual interpretation. They should understand that archives contain meaningful silences as well as voices. They also need to ask one deceptively simple question: How do you know?

In the age of artificial intelligence, this question is fundamental. A fabricated quotation can now appear authoritative. A synthetic photograph can look archival. A false historical claim can arrive in beautifully polished prose. Therefore, the future of Holocaust education must involve not simply remembering the past, but teaching students how historical knowledge itself is constructed and verified: Where did this quotation come from? How can we locate the original testimony? What is the provenance of this photograph? Does the source say what somebody claims it says? Can the claim be corroborated?

These questions are not merely technical. They concern the ethics of knowledge, and universities have a particular responsibility in this area. As a leader of a graduate program, I believe strongly that universities and colleges must remain places where historical complexity is protected. Students should be able to investigate difficult subjects without being told in advance what political conclusion their work must reach.

Historical research cannot begin with a predetermined interpretation and then search selectively for evidence to sustain it. Evidence must come first; interpretation follows. Arguments must be made through evidence. This does not make Holocaust education morally neutral. But intellectual and ethical seriousness cannot be replaced by political and ideological certainty.

Finally, perhaps we should be more modest about what Holocaust education can accomplish. We cannot promise that teaching the Holocaust will eradicate antisemitism. We cannot guarantee that visiting Auschwitz will make someone more open and civil. Historical knowledge does not automatically produce moral goodness. But Holocaust education can accomplish something deeply important. It can teach intellectual discipline. It can cultivate respect for evidence. It can teach young people to recognize conspiracy thinking, historical manipulation and ideologically driven distortions emerging from different political milieus — including the far right, the radical left and Islamist movements. It can teach them to distinguish serious historical comparison from false equivalence, to cultivate empathy without sentimentalization and to engage morally with the past without reducing its complexities to reassuring or ideologically convenient lessons.

And it can cultivate an increasingly rare form of intellectual humility: the willingness to say, “I don’t know enough yet to make this claim. I need to investigate this event further.” That matters enormously in our current, post-truth culture.

This is the Holocaust education I want to build — historically rigorous, empirically grounded, intellectually courageous and prepared to confront uncomfortable histories.

I want Jewish lives and Jewish voices to be restored to the center of Holocaust history, while also giving serious attention to the Nazi persecution and genocide of Roma and Sinti and the experiences of other groups targeted by Nazi racial and political persecution. 

I want antisemitism to be taken seriously as both a historical and a contemporary phenomenon.

I want students to encounter Jewish victims and survivors as human beings and historical actors rather than as symbols. I want the complex history of rescue to be taught without mythologization — comparison without distortion, and empathy without emotional manipulation. Memory anchored in evidence.

Above all, I want us to teach that complexity is central to understanding, not its enemy. Complexity is the beginning of understanding the Holocaust and other genocides. At a moment when history is increasingly reduced to slogans, ideological weapons and digital fragments, defending historical integrity is no small educational task. I can think of few responsibilities that matter more.

Joanna Beata Michlic is an associate professor of Holocaust and genocide studies, director of the Holocaust and Genocide studies graduate programs and associate director of the Center for Holocaust Studies and Human Rights at Gratz College. An internationally recognized social and cultural historian of the Holocaust and its aftermath, her scholarship focuses on Jewish children and families, rescue and survival, antisemitism, nationalism and Holocaust memory and distortion. She has held academic appointments in the United States, the United Kingdom, Israel and Sweden. Michlic is the author, editor, or co-editor of numerous books, including Poland’s Threatening Other and, most recently, Through the Eyes of Jewish Child Survivors from Poland: Family, War, Identity, and Nationhood.