Uncategorized
How the Holocaust is remembered in the land of Anne Frank
(JTA) — You’d think that in a country so closely identified with Anne Frank — perhaps the Holocaust’s best-known victim — cultivating memory of the genocide wouldn’t be a steep challenge.
That’s why a recent survey, suggesting what the authors called a “disturbing” lack of knowledge in the Netherlands about the Holocaust, set off alarm bells. “Survey shows lack of Holocaust awareness in the Netherlands,” wrote the Associated Press. “In the Netherlands, a majority do not know the Holocaust affected their country,” was the JTA headline. “The Holocaust is a myth, a quarter of Dutch younger generation agree,” per the Jerusalem Post.
“Survey after survey, we continue to witness a decline in Holocaust knowledge and awareness. Equally disturbing is the trend towards Holocaust denial and distortion,” Gideon Taylor, the president of the Conference of Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, which conducted the study, said in a statement.
Like other recent studies by Claims Conference, the latest survey has been challenged by some scholars, who say the sample size is small, or the survey is too blunt a tool for examining what a country’s residents do or don’t know about their history. Even one of the experts who conducted the survey chose to focus on the positive findings: “I am encouraged by the number of respondents to this survey that believe Holocaust education is important,” Emile Schrijver, the general director of Amsterdam’s Jewish Cultural Quarter, told JTA.
One of the scholars who says the survey doesn’t capture the subtleties of Holocaust education and commemoration in the Netherlands is Jazmine Contreras, an assistant professor of history at Goucher College in Maryland. Contreras studies the historical memory of the Holocaust and Second World War in Holland. In a Twitter thread earlier this week, she agreed with those who say that “the headline that’s being plastered everywhere exaggerates the idea that young people in NL know nothing about the Holocaust.”
At the same time, she notes that while the Netherlands takes Holocaust education and commemoration seriously, it has a long way to go in reckoning with a past that includes collaboration with the Nazis, postwar antisemitism, a small but vocal far right and a sense of national victimhood that often downplays the experience of Jews during the Shoah.
“It’s such a complex issue,” Contreras told me. “There’s no one answer to how the Holocaust is remembered in the Netherlands.”
Today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, and I took the opportunity to speak with Contreras not only about Dutch memory, but how the Netherlands may serve as an example of how countries deal with Holocaust memory and the national stories they tell.
Our interview was edited for length and clarity.
Jewish Telegraphic Agency: Tell me a little bit about when you saw the survey, and perhaps how it didn’t mesh with what you know about the Netherlands?
Jazmine Contreras: My major problem is that every single outlet is picking up this story and running a headline like, “Youth in the Netherlands don’t even know the Holocaust happened there. They cannot tell you how many people were killed, how many were deported.” And I think that’s really problematic because it paints a really simplistic picture of Holocaust memory and Holocaust education in that country.
There are multiple programs, in Amsterdam, in other cities, in Westerbork, the former transit camp. They have an ongoing program that brings survivors and the second generation to colleges, to middle schools and primary schools all across the country. And they also have in Amsterdam a program called Oorlog in Mijn Buurt, “War in My Neighborhood,” and basically young people become the “memory bearers” — that’s the kind of language they use — and interview people who grew up and experience the war in their neighborhood, and then speak as if they were the person who experienced it, in the first person.
You also have events around the May 4 commemoration remembering the Dutch who died in war and in peacekeeping operations, and a program called Open Jewish Houses [when owners of formerly Jewish property open their homes to strangers to talk about the Jews who used to live there]. It’s really amazing: I’ve actually been able to visit these formerly Jewish homes and hear the stories. And, of course, the Anne Frank House has its own slew of programming, and teachers talk a lot about the Holocaust and take students to synagogues in places like Groningen, where they have a brand new exhibit at the synagogue. They are taking thousands at this point. The new National Holocaust Names Memorial is in the center of Amsterdam.
I think, again, this idea that children are growing up without having exposure to Holocaust memory, or knowledge of what happened in the Netherlands, is a bit skewed. I think we get into a dangerous area if we’re painting the country with a broad brush and saying nobody knows anything about the Holocaust.
Have you anecdotal evidence or seen studies of Dutch kids about whether they’re getting the education they need?
Anecdotally, yes. I was invited to attend a children’s commemoration that they do at the Hollandsche Schouwburg theater in Amsterdam, which is the former Dutch theater that was used as a major deportation site. And it’s children who put on a commemoration themselves. Again, not every child is participating in this, but if they’re not participating in the children’s commemoration, then they’re doing the “War in My Neighborhood” program, or they’re doing Open Jewish Houses, or they’re taking field trips. That’s pretty impressive to me, and it’s pretty meaningful. They want to help participate in it in the future. They want to come back because it leaves a lasting impression for them.
Let’s back up a bit. Anne Frank dominates everyone’s thinking about Holland and the Holocaust. And I guess the story that’s told is that she was protected by her neighbors until, of course, the Nazis proved too powerful, found her and sent her away. What’s right and what’s wrong about that narrative?
Don’t forget that Anne Frank was a German Jewish refugee who came to the Netherlands. And I think that part of the story is also really interesting and left out. She’s this Dutch icon, but she was a German Jewish refugee who came to the Netherlands, and the Dutch Jewish community was single-handedly responsible for funding, at Westerbork, what was first a refugee center. I think that’s really complicated because now we also have a discourse about present-day refugees and the Holocaust.
Jazmine Contreras, an assistant professor of history at Goucher College, specializes in Dutch Holocaust memory. (Courtesy)
I’ve also never quite understood the insistence on making her an icon when the end of the story is that she’s informed on and dies in a concentration camp. The idea that the Franks were hidden here fits really well into this idea of Dutch resistance and tolerance, and her diary often gets misquoted to kind of represent her as someone who had hope despite the fact that she was being persecuted. In the 1950s, her narrative gets adopted into the U.S., and we treat it as this globalizing human rights discourse.
We don’t talk about the fact that she’s found because she’s informed upon, and we don’t talk about the fact that you had non-Jewish civilians who were informers for a multitude of reasons, including ideological collaboration and their own financial gain.
And when it was talked about most recently, it was about a discredited book that named her betrayer as a Jew.
That was a huge controversy.
I get the sense from your writing that the story the Dutch tell about World War II is very incomplete, and that they haven’t fully reckoned with their collaboration under Nazi occupation even as they emphasize their own victimhood.
On the national state level, they have officially acknowledged not only the extensive collaboration, but the failure of both the government and the Crown to speak out on behalf of Dutch Jews. [In 2020, Prime Minister Mark Rutte formally apologized for how his kingdom’s wartime government failed its Jews, a first by a sitting prime minister.] Now, the question is, what’s happening in broader Dutch society?
Unfortunately, there was an increase in voting for the Dutch far right, although they’ve never managed to get a majority or even come close to it.
Something else that’s happening is that many ask, “Why should Dutch Jews get separate consideration after the Second World War, a separate victimhood, when we were all victimized?” The Netherlands is unique because it’s occupied for the entirety of the Second World War — 1940 to 1945. There is the civil service collaborating, right, but there’s no occupation government. So it’s not like Belgium. It’s not like France, not like Denmark. And there was the Hunger Winter of 1944-45 when 20,000 civilians perished due to famine. You have real victimhood, so people ask, “Why are the Jews so special? We all suffered.”
And at the same time, scholarship keeps emerging about the particular ways non-Jewish Dutch companies and individuals cooperated with the Nazis.
The NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies in Amsterdam, which has done so much of this research, found that Jews who were deported had to pay utility bills for when they weren’t living there. You have a huge controversy around the the Dutch railway [which said it would compensate hundreds of Holocaust victims for its role in shipping Jews to death camps]. The Dutch Red Cross apologized [in 2017 for failing to act to protect Jews during World War II], following the publication of a research paper on its inaction. A couple of decades ago, the government basically auctioned off paintings, jewelry and other Jewish possessions, and in 2020 they started the effort to give back pieces of art that were in Dutch museums. Dienke Hondius wrote a book on the cold reception given to survivors upon their return. Remco Ensel and Evelien Gans also wrote a book on postwar Jewish antisemitism.
So a lot has been happening, a lot of controversies, and, thanks to all of this research, a lot happening in order to rectify the situation.
It sounds like a mixed story, of resistance and collaboration, and of rewriting the past but also coming to terms with it.
There’s a really complex history here of both wanting to present it as “everybody’s a victim” and that the resistance was huge. In fact, the data shows 5% of the people were involved in resistance and 5% were collaborators. So it’s not like this wholesale collaboration or resistance was happening. It was only in 1943, when non-Jewish men were called up for labor service in Germany, that they got really good at hiding people and by then it was too late.
Right. My colleagues at JTA often note that the Nazis killed or deported more Dutch Jews per capita than anywhere in occupied Western Europe — of about 110,000 Jews deported, only a few thousand survived.
Yes, the highest percentage of deportation in Western Europe.
A room at the Anne Frank House museum where she and her family hid for two years during the Holocaust in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. (Photo Collection Anne Frank House)
Since this week is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, let me ask what Holland gets right and wrong compared to maybe some other European countries with either similar experiences or comparable experiences.
The framing of that question is difficult because there’s so many unique points about the Holocaust and the occupation in the Netherlands. Again, it was occupied for the entirety of 1940-45. You have a civil service that was willing to sign Aryan declarations. The queen, as head of a government in exile in London, is basically saying, “Do what you need to just to survive.”
One of the big problems is there are people like Geert Wilders [a contemporary right-wing Dutch lawmaker] who practice this kind of philo-Semitism and support of Israel, but it’s really about blaming the Muslim population for antisemitism and saying none of it is homegrown. They don’t have to talk about the fact that there was widespread antisemitism in the aftermath of the Holocaust.
In the Netherlands they’re not instituting laws around what you can and can’t say about the Holocaust like in Poland [where criticizing Polish collaboration has been criminalized]. There are so many amazing educational initiatives and nonprofit organizations that are doing the work. And even these public controversies ended up being outlets for the production of Holocaust memory when survivors, but mostly now the second and third generations, use that space to talk about their own family Holocaust history.
Tell me about your personal stake in this: How did the Holocaust become a subject of study for you?
I specialize in Dutch Holocaust memory. I’m not Jewish, but my grandparents on my mother’s side are Dutch. For my first project I looked at relationships between German soldiers and Dutch women during the war during the occupation, and I eventually kind of made my way into the post war, when these children of former collaborators were still very marginalized in Dutch society. It ties into this. I do interviews with members of the Jewish community, children of resistance members and children of collaborators and how these memory politics play out.
What is the utility of events like International Holocaust Remembrance Day and the major Holocaust memorials in educating the public about the Holocaust and World War II?
International Holocaust Remembrance Day and May 4 result in the production of new memories about the Holocaust and the Second World War. I was at the 2020 International Holocaust Remembrance Day commemoration when the prime minister formally apologized. It was a really big moment, and it allowed the Jewish community, and the Roma and Sinti community, a space to remember and to share in that and to speak to it as survivors and the second and third generation.
Unlike the United States, the Netherlands is a small, insular country, so the relationship between the public and the media and academics is so close. So in the weeks before and the weeks after these memorials, academics, politicians and experts are publishing pieces about memory. That’s useful to the production of new memories and information about the Holocaust.
But what about the other days of the year? Will putting a monument in the center of Amsterdam actually change how people understand the Holocaust? That is a question that I think is harder to answer. The new monument features individual names of 102,000 Jews and Roma and Sinti and visually gives you the scope of what the Holocaust looked like in the Netherlands. But does that matter if somebody lives outside of Amsterdam and they’re never going to see this monument?
—
The post How the Holocaust is remembered in the land of Anne Frank appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Uncategorized
AIPAC defends $2.3M spend against ‘pro-Israel’ politician in NJ-11, where anti-Israel candidate is prevailing
(JTA) — If AIPAC has any regrets about pouring more than $2 million into opposing a candidate who calls himself pro-Israel — and is set to lose to an anti-Israel opponent — it isn’t saying so. In fact, the pro-Israel group’s affiliated super PAC suggests it would do it again.
“We are going to have a focus on stopping candidates who are detractors of Israel or who want to put conditions on aid,” Patrick Dorton, a spokesperson for the United Democracy Project, said in an interview.
The target of the UDP’s recent spending was Tom Malinowski, a former congressman running in a special election in New Jersey’s 11th Congressional District. Malinowski, who calls himself pro-Israel and has been endorsed by the liberal Zionist organization J Street, has said he’d be open to placing conditions on some U.S. aid to Israel.
AIPAC pummeled Malinowski with $2.3 million in negative ads — but not about Israel. Instead, the ads tarred him from a progressive angle — one emphasized his vote on a 2019 bill that included increased funding for ICE, the immigration enforcement agency.
By one measure, AIPAC’s spend could be seen as a success: The candidate it opposed, seen as a favorite, did not score an easy win on Election Day. But in another crucial way, the effort appears to have backfired by throwing open the door for Analilia Mejia, a progressive grassroots organization leader who is far more critical of Israel.
The race is too close to call, but Mejia, who was the national political director for Bernie Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign, is ahead by nearly 900 votes with 4,800 left to count. Tahesha Way, the former lieutenant governor of New Jersey who is thought to have been AIPAC’s preferred candidate, finished in a distant third.
Critics, including AIPAC supporters, have slammed AIPAC’s strategy in the race.
“They could not have gotten a worse result than what they got,” said Alan Steinberg, a journalist in New Jersey who was an EPA administrator under George Bush. “I’m a very pro-AIPAC person, very supportive of AIPAC, but this is one of the worst strategic errors that they could’ve ever made.”
The UDP got into the race because of Malinowski’s comments on U.S. aid to Israel at a time when a large number of Democrats, and some Republicans, were expressing new openness to attaching conditions to the aid as they sought to press Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to end the war in Gaza and adopt different policies in Israel and the West Bank.
Asked last fall about the possibility of conditioning or suspending aid to Israel, Malinowski told Jewish Insider that he “would make case-by-case judgments given what’s happening on the ground.” He said he would similarly make case-by-case judgments for any U.S. ally receiving aid.
“We had very serious concerns about Tom Malinowski, who clearly was open to conditioning aid to Israel,” Dorton said. “He knew that he had moved to what is not a pro-Israel position.”
Dorton indicated that the UDP would likely go after other candidates who have expressed openness or interest in conditioning aid. “Adding conditions to aid to Israel, and undermining the U.S. relationship, is a top priority for us in assessing candidates,” he said.
In New Jersey, the result could be elevating a politician whose stance on Israel is much harsher. Mejia has accused Israel of committing a genocide in Gaza and pledged not to take any AIPAC-funded trips to the country. She also began calling for a ceasefire in Gaza within weeks of Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel after tweeting on Oct. 10, “Every fiber of my being is horrified beyond words at what is furthering in Gaza. Yet again we see how oppression & dehumanization leads to despair & unthinkable destruction.”
Mejia’s campaign focused on affordability and she drew endorsements from progressives including Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ro Khanna. If she holds her lead, she will become the Democratic nominee for April’s special election to fill the House seat vacated by now-governor of New Jersey, Mikie Sherrill.
Steinberg said he thought that AIPAC “never took seriously the possibility of her winning in this primary,” and that Malinowski would be far more aligned with AIPAC on Israel.
“I don’t think Malinowski is anti-Israel,” said Steinberg. “I know Tom, I disagree with him on Israel, but he is much preferable to Analilia Mejia. Much preferable.”
Jeremy Ben-Ami, the president of J Street, which endorsed Malinowski, wrote in a Substack column that AIPAC was responding to criticism of the Israeli government’s policies as if it were hostility toward the country itself.
“AIPAC now treats even good-faith criticism from friends as a threat to be crushed,” he wrote.
Dorton downplayed the impact of a Mejia primary victory because the upcoming special election decides only which candidate fills the seat until the end of 2026. A second primary, held in June 2026, will decide the Democratic nominee for the regular November election.
But others are viewing her potential win as a larger victory for progressives, and specifically the pro-Palestinian movement.
“Analilia Mejia for New Jersey just set a new precedent in NJ and beyond,” wrote pro-Palestinian activist Linda Sarsour in a Facebook post on Monday featuring a photo of Mejia raising her hand as the lone candidate indicating that she believed Israel committed genocide, at a forum hosted by the Council on American-Islamic Relations. “She’s teaching us that it’s okay to stand alone so as [sic] long as you are on the right side of history.”
The UDP has spent millions on congressional races to mixed results since AIPAC began directly funding candidates in 2021; it had previously worked only to cultivate support for Israel among politicians. In 2024, it spent at least $14.5 million against the incumbent “Squad” member Jamaal Bowman in New York, and more than $8 million to take down Cori Bush in Missouri; both incumbents lost their primaries. But the $4.5 million it spent was not enough to beat Dave Min for Katie Porter’s House seat in California.
Now, the upcoming midterms will likely serve as a test of AIPAC’s strength as lawmakers and voters on both sides of the aisle distance themselves from Israel and its advocates. They will also answer the question of what dividends AIPAC — whose PAC opened the year with a nearly $100 million war chest — will draw if it focuses on punishing candidates who show insufficient support for Israel.
Dorton said he is not concerned. The UDP is looking ahead to the June midterm primaries and will “continue to run ads that move the needle” in primary races about issues that mostly don’t involve Israel, he said. He added that the group is assessing polling data and “candidate viability” for dozens of races around the country — including in NJ-11.
“There is a strong bipartisan pro-Israel majority in Congress,” Dorton said. “And we intend to keep it that way.”
The post AIPAC defends $2.3M spend against ‘pro-Israel’ politician in NJ-11, where anti-Israel candidate is prevailing appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Oklahoma board denies proposal for Jewish charter school — and lawyers up ahead of expected legal battle
(JTA) — A Jewish group is preparing to sue to overturn a ban on publicly funded religious charter schools in Oklahoma, after a state board unanimously rejected its proposal on Monday.
The Oklahoma Statewide Charter School Board’s decision blocked an application from the National Ben Gamla Jewish Charter School Foundation to open a statewide virtual Jewish school serving grades K-12 beginning next school year.
Ben Gamla’s legal team, led by Becket, a prominent nonprofit religious liberty law firm, said the rejection violates the Constitution’s Free Exercise clause and announced plans to file suit in federal court. In a statement, Becket attorney Eric Baxter criticized Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond, who has argued that publicly funded religious charter schools are unconstitutional.
“Attorney General Drummond’s attack on religious schools contradicts the Constitution,” Baxter said. “His actions have hung a no-religious-need-apply sign on the state’s charter school program. We’ll soon ask a federal court to protect Ben Gamla’s freedom to serve Sooner families, a right that every other qualified charter school enjoys.”
A victory for Ben Gamla could redraw the line separating church and state, establishing the first school of its kind nationwide and opening the possibility for taxpayer-funded religious schools across the country.
Spearheaded by former Florida Democratic Rep. Peter Deutsch, the Ben Gamla proposal called for a blend of daily Jewish religious studies alongside secular coursework. Deutsch, who nearly two decades ago established a network of nonreligious “English-Hebrew” charter schools in Florida, has said he chose Oklahoma as a testing ground for what he views as a viable model of publicly funded religious education.
In a statement, Deutsch criticized the board’s decision.
“Parents across the Sooner State deserve more high-quality options for their children’s education, not fewer,” Deutsch said in a statement. “Yet Attorney General Drummond is robbing them of more choices by cutting schools like Ben Gamla out. We’re confident this exclusionary rule won’t stand for long.”
The rejection, delivered during the board’s monthly meeting, did not come as a surprise. The board’s 2023 approval of a similar application by a Christian group to establish St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School was ultimately overturned by the Oklahoma Supreme Court on constitutional grounds.
An attempt to challenge the state court decision at the federal level failed when the U.S. Supreme Court deadlocked on the case last year due to a recusal by Amy Coney Barrett, who has ties to the Catholic group.
Several board members cited the legal outcome in explaining their votes against Ben Gamla.
“I am troubled by the fact that our hands are tied by the state Supreme Court decision, but I think we have to honor it, and it’s a very clear directive,” board member Damon Gardenhire said at the meeting.
Board member David Rutkauskas said it was “very unfortunate” that the board was “bound” by the Oklahoma Supreme Court, adding that the decision was not because Ben Gamla is “not a good candidate or qualified.”
“If I could have voted for this school today without being bound, I would have voted yes,” Rutkauskas said. “I think it would be great for the Jewish community and the Jewish kids to have this option of a high quality school.”
Ahead of the board’s vote, during public comment, Jewish Oklahoma resident Dan Epstein argued that the “public should not be funding sectarian education.”
“My religious education was entirely private,” Epstein said. “My parents didn’t ask for anybody else to pay for it. They paid for it as part of dues to our congregation, and so I’m here today to express my opposition to the application of the Ben Gamla school.”
Epstein was not the only Jewish voice in Oklahoma to object to Ben Gamla.
Last month, the Tulsa Jewish Federation and several local Jewish leaders issued a joint statement in which they criticized Ben Gamla for failing to consult local Jewish leaders ahead of their application to open the school.
“We are deeply concerned that an external Jewish organization would pursue such an initiative in Oklahoma without first engaging in meaningful consultation with the established Oklahoma Jewish community,” the leaders wrote. “Had such a consultation occurred, the applicant would have been made aware that Oklahoma is already home to many Jewish educational opportunities.”
Oklahoma is home to fewer than 9,000 Jews, many of whom live in Tulsa.
During Monday’s deliberation, board member William Pearson cited opposition to the Ben Gamla proposal from Oklahoma Jewish congregations.
“My real concern is that I don’t see a grassroots effort from the Jewish community in the state of Oklahoma,” Pearson said. “Now maybe I’m wrong, but I haven’t seen it. What I have seen is the synagogues, both from Oklahoma City and Tulsa, come out in opposition to this, and I find that very interesting, that the Jewish community, the people that are involved daily in Jewish lifestyle, that they’re opposed to this.”
Immediately after voting to turn down Ben Gamla, the board approved hiring outside legal counsel in anticipation of a lawsuit.
“I can’t predict the future, but I would say, by all indicators, I would be shocked if there’s not a lawsuit filed by Friday,” board chair Brian Shellem said.
The post Oklahoma board denies proposal for Jewish charter school — and lawyers up ahead of expected legal battle appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Anne Frank and ‘Night’ may soon be required reading in Texas public schools. Is that good for the Jews?
(JTA) — In the years since school libraries became a culture-war flashpoint, Texas has been one of the most active states to pull books from shelves in response to parental complaints — sometimes including versions of Anne Frank’s diary and other Jewish books.
Now, Texas is pursuing a new approach: requiring that Frank’s diary, and several other Jewish texts, be taught throughout the state.
The Texas state education board recently discussed draft legislation that would create the nation’s first-ever statewide K-12 required reading list for public schools. Among the roughly 300 texts on the list: Elie Wiesel’s Holocaust memoir “Night”; Lois Lowry’s young-reader Holocaust novel “Number the Stars”; George Washington’s letter to a Rhode Island synagogue in 1790, and Frank’s diary — the “original edition.”
Each of the works could become mandatory reading for Texas’s 5.5 million schoolchildren as soon as the 2030-31 school year, as the state’s conservative education leaders seek to reverse a nationwide decline in the number of books read or assigned in class while also constraining the texts that activist parents tend to object to. Instead of letting individual teachers put together reading lists that might include “divisive” or progressive content, Republicans in Texas are trying to nudge the curriculum toward a “classical education” said to draw on the Western canon.
Supporters said the list would help ensure every student is on the same page.
“We want to create an opportunity for a shared body of knowledge for all the students across the state of Texas,” Shannon Trejo, deputy commissioner of programs for the Texas Education Agency, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency about why the group undertook the list project.
While state lawmakers passed a law mandating at least one required book per grade, the board has decided to implement a full reading list. Trejo said the options had been whittled down from thousands of titles suggested in a statewide teachers survey. They were also cross-referenced with a variety of other sources, including books from “high-performing educational systems” in other states and reading lists from the high-IQ society Mensa.
“We’re trying to help students love reading again,” LJ Francis, a Republican member of the state school board who supports the list, said during the Jan. 28 meeting. “I personally think schools should be teaching more than what we have on this list.”
The proposal underscores a complicated moment for Jewish literature in Texas schools, where books about the Holocaust and Jewish history have recently been pulled from shelves amid parental complaints but are now poised to become required reading statewide. Jewish educators and free-speech advocates say the shift reflects both recognition of Holocaust education’s importance — and continuing tensions over who controls what students read and how those stories are taught.
The overall list largely centers the Western canon and deemphasizes modern works as well as most books about race and identity, although selections from Booker T. Washington, Frederick Douglass and other Black American authors made the cut. The Bible is also heavily represented, with selections from both the Old and New Testaments on the reading list.
The state’s Holocaust Remembrance Week education mandate means that Jews are one of the few ethnic groups whose stories are fairly well represented on the state’s required reading list. That doesn’t mean that Holocaust educators are unreservedly enthusiastic about the new approach.
“Obviously I’m pleased that they’re including quality Holocaust materials,” Deborah Lauter, executive director of TOLI, the Olga Lenkyel Institute for Holocaust Studies, told JTA. Lauter noted that many teachers trained by TOLI on how to teach the Holocaust in their classrooms — including in Texas — already rely on books that made the list.
But, Lauter said, teachers generally like to develop their own curricula to tailor to their classrooms. “Mandating certain books, I don’t know how teachers would feel about that,” she said.
Lauter also expressed concern about whether the state would be providing materials to help teachers decode the Holocaust texts for their students. Trejo told JTA that fell beyond the scope of the list and the statute.
“It is just the title that is going into the standards for the state of Texas,” Trejo said. “Beyond that, it would be up to publishers to look to, how can I support districts and teachers in teaching this title?”
To literacy activists in the state, the approach was concerning.
“This is censorship as well,” Laney Hawes, co-director of the Texas Freedom to Read Project, told JTA. The overall list, she said, reflects “a very narrow worldview,” and the large number of books on the list would make it difficult for educators to find time for additional texts of their own choosing in class.
At the same time, Hawes said, “there are some really worthwhile books on this list. ‘The Diary of Anne Frank’ is an incredible book.”
The Jewish titles, Trejo said, were selected with additional input from Holocaust museum experts, local rabbis and Jewish day schools in the state. They also sought input from the Texas Holocaust, Genocide, and Antisemitism Advisory Commission.
“We were invited to provide input regarding a few specific parts of these proposals,” Joy Nathan, the commission’s director, told JTA in an email.
She named “Blessed Is the Match,” a poem by the Hungarian-born poet and resistance fighter Hannah Senesh, as a reading that her commission recommended for the draft list. “We will continue these direct conversations throughout the process.”
At the state education board meeting, a last-minute amendment proposed by the board’s GOP treasurer sought to remove dozens of works from the list, including Senesh’s poem and Washington’s letter.
The amendment would replace those texts with a new crop of selections, including “Refugee,” a young-adult novel by Alan Gratz that partially follows a German Jewish World War II refugee; Biblical passages on Moses; Maurice Sendak’s “Where the Wild Things Are”; George Orwell’s “1984”; and a book about former Polish president Lech Walesa. The amendment also listed “Night” as required in two different grades.
The story of Moses, the board member said, made the amendment’s cut because “there are a lot of parallels between Moses leading the people out of Egypt and the American Revolution.” Debate on the topic dragged into the night, with board members arguing whether requiring Bible passages would violate the Establishment clause and which Biblical translation had superior literary merit.
Following the amendment, the board agreed to postpone a vote on the required books until April to give members time to review both lists. Another board member, pushing for greater racial diversity in the list, submitted his own titles for review as well.
Once voted on, the legislation would enter a public comment period prior to being formally adopted at a later meeting.
A long list of public commenters at the meeting opposed the law on various grounds, including that it was overly prescriptive, lacked proper balance between classical and modern literature, included more books than could realistically be taught, overly emphasized Christian texts over other religious works, and lacked racial and gender diversity. One teacher said that “Night” is traditionally taught at a different grade level than the law mandates.
Among those who testified against the policy was Rebecca Bendheim, a middle-school teacher at an Austin private school and author of young-adult novels about Jewish and LGBTQ identity. “I believe the list underestimates what Texas students can do,” Bendheim said.
A handful of commenters voiced support for the measure. Matthew McCormick, education director at the conservative Texas Public Policy Foundation, which backed the law, said that it covers “important historical eras such as the Great Depression and the Holocaust.”
He added, “By approving this reading list, the board has the opportunity to enact a generational change by ensuring that every public school student has a strong foundation in literacy and literature.”
At Wednesday’s meeting, the board also voted on new required civics training for teachers and new required vocabulary lists, which would be extracted from the required books.
The state’s embrace of Jewish curricula comes after one Texas school district recently pulled “The Devil’s Arithmetic,” another young-reader Holocaust novel, following a “DEI content” weeding process aided by artificial intelligence. A state law currently on the books in Texas places classroom restrictions on “instruction, diversity, equity and inclusion duties, and social transitioning.”
While Jewish texts are generously represented on Texas’s list, works by and about authors of other identities are not; the high school list, for example, features no Hispanic authors. An estimated 245,000 Jews live in Texas, or less than 1% of the population, according to Brandeis University demographics; Hispanics, by contrast, form 40% of the state population, more than the white share.
The state offered lists of approved Holocaust materials teachers may select from when marking Holocaust Remembrance Week last month. Those approved materials, provided by the Texas Holocaust, Genocide, and Antisemitism Advisory Commission, include many of the texts now required in the legislation.
The proposed legislation concerns activists in the state who oppose book bans and restrictions on students’ “right to read.” Hawes, a Fort Worth mother of four children in the state education system, first became an activist after her district removed the “Graphic Adaptation” of Frank’s diary from its shelves in 2022.
That district returned the book after public outcry. But other districts both in and outside of Texas followed suit by pulling the same edition, along with other Jewish books including “Maus” and “The Fixer,” over the last few years.
Seeing Frank’s diary on the state’s required reading list now, Hawes said, “feels weird to me.”
She noted that the draft legislation specifies that the “original edition” must be taught. The 2018 illustrated adaptation, which includes a passage of Frank discussing a same-sex attraction that had been excised from the original published edition, has been opposed by conservative parents across the country.
In a slideshow by the Texas Educational Agency that outlines the proposed requirements, Frank’s diary is portrayed as an “anchor” text for the 7th grade. “Blessed Is the Match,” an ode to self-sacrifice for a higher cause, and Washington’s letter, a landmark statement of religious tolerance, are listed as supplemental texts for the diary.
The goals of the unit, the agency states, are “factual accounts of Jewish resistance during the Holocaust” and “foundational American ideals of religious liberty and tolerance.”
The Biblical passages, the agency notes, are intended to fulfill a statewide requirement that school districts have “an enrichment curriculum that includes: religious literature, including the Hebrew Scriptures (Old Testament) and New Testament, and its impact on history and literature.” Christian activist groups within Texas, and several elected officials, have pushed for years to promote Evangelical Christian texts in public schools.
The inclusion of Washington’s letter, which assures the Newport congregation that Jews will find safe haven in the United States, also struck Hawes as suspicious. The list contains numerous texts promoting patriotism but does not include any material addressing ongoing antisemitism in America.
“This is making us think that George Washington solved antisemitism. And he didn’t,” she said.
Lauter said that if Texas’s policy of statewide Holocaust book requirements becomes a broader trend, she would welcome it — despite her concerns.
“I think it’s a positive. We support more Holocaust education in schools,” she said. “It’s certainly better than the opposite, which is banning books.”
The post Anne Frank and ‘Night’ may soon be required reading in Texas public schools. Is that good for the Jews? appeared first on The Forward.