Creating Communities of Inquiry, Allyship, and Ethical Holocaust Education
Jill Abney, Janice W. Fernheimer, Lauren Hill, and Karen Petrone
Credit: Lane Springer
Jill Abney is associate director of the University of Kentucky’s Center for the Enhancement of Learning and Teaching.
Janice W. Fernheimer is a professor of Writing, Rhetoric, and Digital Studies and Zantker Charitable Foundation Professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Kentucky.
Lauren Hill is a National Board certified teacher and founder of Classroom Teachers Enacting Positive Solutions.
Karen Petrone is a Professor of History and the Zantker Professor of Jewish History at the University of Kentucky.
Facing her students on the first day of their last eighth-grade term, English teacher Lauren Hill felt the moment’s weight. About to start a Holocaust unit, Lauren worried about how she could teach the subject without traumatizing her students, denying victims’ individuality, or glossing over painful and important stories. Students from myriad backgrounds, some with painful histories of their own, study together in Lexington, Kentucky’s schools. She wondered how she might honor their experiences. Her mind raced: had any of them met a Jewish person before? What did they already know about the Holocaust? How could she help them understand the historical context of the event when they’d last learned about Judaism three years prior, in 5th grade? As a Jewish woman steeped in Holocaust stories and an experienced teacher, she’d eagerly anticipated this opportunity but, in the moment, she found the challenge much more complex than she’d thought it would be. If she, with her personal knowledge, experience, and background struggled with this task, how much more so might teachers across the state and nation, most of whom are not Jewish, feel anxious about how to appropriately, effectively, and ethically approach the Holocaust?
As the anecdote above illustrates, Holocaust education carries with it a great ethical responsibility. Jewish and non-Jewish Americans commonly assume that Holocaust education can serve as civic, ethical, or moral education or that its purpose is to eradicate modern antisemitism, racism, and other forms of hatred. But even without these grand ambitions, the sheer magnitude of the Holocaust, the pressure to honor its victims appropriately, and the need to help students identify historical connections with it and other atrocities combine to transform these instructional moments into ethical dilemmas with significant consequences. In 2018, Kentucky passed the Anne Klein and Fred Gross Holocaust Education Act, mandating that all middle and high school students learn about the Holocaust without providing any funds or structures to support quality Holocaust education.
Kentucky’s mandate is a more recent part of a national push to mandate Holocaust education, which began when California first legislated it in 1985. New Jersey adopted a mandate in 1994, followed in quick succession by Florida that same year. Currently, 29 states have legislative mandates, with legislation pending in Louisiana.
State mandates, especially when they are unfunded, along with other community, legislative, and political pressures give teachers even more reasons to be anxious. No wonder teachers like Lauren feel immense pressure to get Holocaust education “right.”
Teachers also face questions about their pedagogical choices when teaching these complex histories, including what content to include and what methods one should use to introduce and assess it. Advice and teaching materials for Holocaust instruction abound but sorting through them and identifying which best fit the local context and curricular time constraints can be both time-consuming and intimidating.
We believe that teacher communities facilitating reciprocal vulnerability and engaged conversations about ethical pedagogy can provide key support for effective Holocaust education. Our own work through the University of Kentucky-Jewish Heritage Fund Kentucky Holocaust Education Initiative (UK-JHF KHEI), which creates and sustains such reciprocal communities and facilitates conversations girded by principles that embrace radical listening, Jewish rhetorics, and Jewish values, offers a replicable model for Holocaust education for states facing similar mandates and demographic realities.
Defining Ethical Holocaust Education
For us, maintaining a delicate balance between particularism and universalism is a necessary but difficult aspect of ethical Holocaust education. It requires bringing awareness to the specific circumstances that make the Holocaust unique, without making it impossible for others to relate to it. In our model, we highlight the ways the Nazi regime overwhelmingly targeted Jewish people just because they were Jewish, without insisting that there are no parallels. We teach about the complexity and diversity of Jewish communities without flattening Jewish experiences into a monolith or minimizing differences between Jews and their non-Jewish neighbors. We help instructors to successfully balance the particulars of Jewish experience and the universal opportunities for intervention against dehumanization.
Today, this important work faces mounting challenges. It has never been easy to explain to students how an educated, advanced, industrialized society used its technical prowess to kill six million Jewish people, along with seven million members of other targeted marginalized groups, while most of their neighbors acquiesced to and, in many cases participated in, the dehumanization those acts required. The task has become increasingly difficult as backlash against teaching difficult histories has led some states to restrict teaching “divisive topics.” These bills, in Kentucky as well as in Florida, Tennessee, and Texas, add further complexity to educating about discrimination and dehumanization. Strong reactions to the war in Israel and Gaza over the last 18 months have also sparked heated disagreements that have made Holocaust education increasingly fraught.
In Kentucky, where less than half a percent of the population identifies as Jewish and most students are unlikely to encounter Jewish people, the challenges of Holocaust education and instruction about Jewish religion, cultures, identities, history, etc., are particularly acute. In a 2023 Atlantic essay, Dara Horn claims that “Holocaust education is incapable of addressing contemporary anti-Semitism” and even that “in the total absence of any education about Jews alive today, teaching about the Holocaust might even be making anti-Semitism worse.” Horn subtly challenges whether it is appropriate for non-Jewish educators to teach about the Holocaust, faulting their lack of lived Jewish experience as fomenting further antisemitism. (She repeats this criticism in an article published in the Atlantic in October 2024).
Yet, the need for non-Jews to teach about the Holocaust is a demographic reality. There simply are not enough Jewish educators to accomplish the heavy lift that Holocaust education demands in Kentucky and states like it. Nor is it realistic to ask Jewish educators to have to shoulder this burden alone. So, while we share Horn’s sense of urgency about educating all students regarding Jewish experiences, we are concerned that her criticism fails to consider the very real legislative, demographic, and curricular constraints teachers face.
This is why, in contrast to Horn, who seems to see non-Jewish educators as a liability, we argue that Jewish collaboration with non-Jewish educators to increase knowledge of the Holocaust and of Jewish life is an important aspect of Holocaust education ethics. In fact, we believe that such mixed communities of Jewish and non-Jewish people working together to support effective Holocaust education help to build more inclusive and accepting learning environments. Members of marginalized groups should not have to take on full responsibility for intervening in problems that arise when people lack exposure, education, and experience with individuals or communities different from themselves. And partnerships across religious and ethnic divides help strengthen allyship.
Despite increasing numbers of antisemitic acts and consistent public criticism of Holocaust education, there are some positive signs that effective Holocaust education paired with instruction about Jewish culture, identity, etc., can help assuage antisemitism and other bigotry. A June 2023 study by Echoes and Reflections demonstrated “strong evidence of the positive impact of Holocaust education on students’ attitudes towards diversity, tolerance, and upstander behavior in the face of hate and intolerance.” Such an outcome requires educator networks comprising both Jewish and non-Jewish teachers equipped to engage in meaningful conversation, collaboration, relationship-building, and listening.
In what follows, we detail our model, the background that led to its creation, and the Jewish rhetorical practices that underpin our approach to both creating reciprocally vulnerable learning communities and facilitating conversations around hard histories in ways that foster understanding and empathy.
An Ethical Exemplar: Our Initiative in Action
Our model for supporting Holocaust education in the UK-JHF KHEI is a collaborative, grassroots approach involving middle and high school teachers, university faculty and staff, and local community members, both Jewish and non-Jewish. It is designed to engage and empower local teachers through the cultivation of meaningful inquiry and conversation. This collaborative model yields two essential aspects of effective Holocaust education: 1) a network of highly trained educators equipped to be leaders within their region, and 2) exposure to quality curricular content and to Jewish communities. Since 2021, our initiative has selected 63 teacher leaders who participate in an intensive summer orientation and a year-long series of seminars as they prepare to deliver workshops and write lesson plans for their colleagues. Our teacher leaders serve as vital catalysts in creating a supportive network of Holocaust educators throughout Kentucky. In partnership with K-12 and university experts, these teacher leaders have facilitated workshops serving more than 500 teacher-participants statewide. We have engaged teachers in 60 of Kentucky’s 120 counties.
We have three priorities in helping educators teach the Holocaust: 1) valuing each participant’s knowledge and expertise, 2) building enduring relationships and community; and 3) ensuring students learn about Jewish people, history, heritage, and culture beyond the context of the Holocaust. We use inquiry- and trauma-informed pedagogical strategies that encourage teachers to approach distressing content in ways that prioritize student well-being and emotional self-regulation, so as not to expose students to secondary traumatization. Our instructional interventions also rely on constructivism and adult learning theory: Constructivist pedagogy invites students to actively build their own understanding through experiences, discussions, inquiries, and reflection. Adult learning theory, or andragogy, relies on adult learners’ propensity for self-direction, internal motivation, and existing expertise to design meaningful learning experiences.
Our program has tremendous momentum and is growing significantly. In 2024, we added three assistant directors as part of a team of 12 regional lead teachers, all of whom are former local teacher leaders eager to continue supporting the work of Holocaust education. These regional leaders serve as mentors for teacher leaders in their areas, creating regional professional communities that support the longevity and expansion of our network.
One of the advantages of our grassroots approach is that it creates a broad network of teachers across the state, newly empowered to recognize and intercede when they witness antisemitic acts and similar acts of othering, and to teach about difficult topics with nuance and grace. One of the challenges has been providing our highly motivated teachers with enough background and exposure to convey the rich diversity of Jewish people, culture, and practice.
Background
Two factors that ultimately led to the creation of UK-JHF KHEI were the passage of Kentucky’s Holocaust education mandate in 2018 and a rise in local, national, and global antisemitism. Fred Whittaker, a middle school science and religion teacher at the Louisville-based St. Francis of Assisi parochial school, and his students, first began advocating for a mandate in 2004. Though their initial efforts failed, the Ernie Marx Resolution stipulating that “Holocaust-related curriculum would be developed and made available for optional use by state educators by March 2009” was signed into law in 2008. Another 10 years elapsed before Kentucky’s mandate passed.
In Kentucky, we have confronted our own challenges with antisemitic events and rhetoric. In October 2020, two DuPont Manual High School students in Louisville broke a story in their school newspaper about the Kentucky State Police’s use of a cadet training manual that positively quoted both Hitler and Robert E. Lee. The story was picked up by national and international news outlets and led to the resignation of then-KSP Commissioner Rodney Brewer. On December 1, 2020, the Lexington Herald-Leader reported that the Kentucky State Department of Criminal Justice training for smaller law enforcement agencies included videos that displayed Nazi symbols and perpetuated Jewish conspiracy theories.
In addition to these local concerns, national violence against Jews underscores the need for intentional educational interventions to combat antisemitism. The Pittsburgh Tree of Life Synagogue attack, the worst attack ever experienced by Jewish American communities on US soil, occurred on October 27, 2018, just a few months after the passage of the Kentucky mandate. This attack signaled a lethal turn in increasingly regular acts of antisemitism in the United States (and around the world). These alarming local and national events, and a desire to support the state mandate for Holocaust education, inspired our team's wider concern for supporting teachers in their efforts to combat antisemitism.
We want to note as well the Jewish communal connections and values that make this work possible. Our initiative was jump-started by generous grants from the Jewish Heritage Fund in Louisville, Kentucky, which supported University of Kentucky faculty and staff working together with teachers and administrators in Fayette County Public Schools to design pilot programs. The model we have developed is deeply rooted in Jewish ethical values that gird the Jewish rhetorical canons of hearing (deep, engaged listening that changes the listener), chidush (renewal through dialogue and relationship), tzedek (justice), and multiplicity (non-binary thinking that can accept multiple perspectives simultaneously). We did not set out to design our model along these lines, but four years into our work, as we reflect on the most effective avenues for Holocaust education, these themes emerge clearly. In a time when so many public voices criticize and question teachers and their approach to Holocaust education, we offer these suggestions as positive interventions. In what follows, we share more about our work, with the goal of providing suggestions for educators in other states facing similar challenges and concerns.
Love Jewish Ideas?
Subscribe to the print edition of Sources today.
Hearing Teachers’ Concerns/Valuing Their Expertise and Time: The Importance of Relationships, Respect, and Remuneration
Our content and our partnerships with teachers are forged by a commitment to deep listening and by respect for educators’ concerns. The original concept envisioned by content experts at the university level involved developing workshops for middle and high school teachers. However, our pioneering work with Fayette County School teachers, especially with Lauren Hill, who specializes in teacher leadership, and with university-based teacher educators like Jill Abney, revealed that the initiative would be far more effective if we developed workshops with the teachers instead.
Our model for supporting meaningful, effective Holocaust education prioritizes teachers’ expertise, relies upon their daily classroom experiences, responds to their expressed needs, and compensates them for their efforts. The teachers’ understanding of local educators’ needs informs the decisions made by initiative creators. Faculty leadership recognizes the wisdom that teachers possess about their communities, schools, and students. Similarly, our teacher partners value and appreciate the scholarship that our faculty partners have put into best practices for teaching Holocaust content. We compensate both teacher leaders and workshop participants for their time.
In pre-surveys, teachers reported they were experiencing many of the pressures outlined above, expressing lack of confidence and concerns over their content knowledge. Nearly 66 percent of teachers who registered for our workshops reported worrying about saying the wrong thing when teaching the Holocaust or other atrocities or not knowing how to react if a student said something inappropriate or antisemitic. One teacher stated, “I am afraid I will say something that is inaccurate and open the floor for criticism towards me. If I am wrong, then students will doubt everything I say and I do not want that with this topic.” Another teacher stated that a motivating factor for participating in our initiative was that “I need help reaching an audience that is not familiar with [Jewish] culture.” The lived realities of our teachers shape pedagogical choices: their understanding of their communities is vital when developing workshops for their colleagues and curricula for their students.
Teacher leaders are linchpins between the overall initiative and local communities, because they enhance pedagogical practices and develop strong relationships with others in their group that inform their teaching. These relationships foster an environment that allows participants to ask hard questions, be vulnerable in their attempts to answer them, and facilitate and navigate nuanced conversations that improve their understanding of the Holocaust. In turn, teacher leaders build local networks through the relationships they form with teachers, administrators, and students in their home schools and districts whom they recruit to join them in this important work. Finally, teacher leaders form relationships with initiative creators and content specialists, while also becoming content specialists for the many students they influence.
Enacting Chidush: Reciprocal Relationships Yield Paths to New Knowledge
A core insight of our work is that learning and knowledge-building are profoundly social endeavors. We emphasize interpersonal connection in all aspects of our work, including our leadership structure and strategies for workshop design. Part of our model’s success comes from welcoming all individuals as equals who, as they learn, can contribute meaningfully to the learning of others. The executive leadership and steering committee are made up of a mix of university faculty/staff and K-12 teachers; among our four executive members, three identify as Jewish and moved to Kentucky from elsewhere between 15 and 30 years ago. One identifies as non-Jewish and is from rural Kentucky. There are 3 additional Jewish faculty members on our steering committee. In contrast, only one of the 63 teacher leaders we have worked with identifies as Jewish.
Part of our role as executive members is to model mutual vulnerability in our teacher/faculty and Jewish/non-Jewish interactions in the hope of providing a method teacher leaders can adapt to their own classrooms and communities. Our willingness to share stories of our own experiences with participants helps them understand local Jewish communities, and in turn, invites our teacher leaders to become our allies. This kind of sharing requires a willingness to be mutually vulnerable, because sharing experiences of antisemitism or of being a minority can be difficult and painful, just as feeling that one has said the wrong thing or asked a question in an offensive way can be difficult. Yet, by agreeing to be vulnerable in this way, we extend the network of individuals who have access to lived Jewish experiences and thus also the network of those able to identify and comprehend the feelings engendered by encounters with antisemitism—even when such acts stem from ignorance rather than malice. In so doing, we create a wider network of individuals able to intervene when they witness such circumstances.
Our mostly Jewish leadership team values and amplifies the voices of our non-Jewish members and partners as we shed light on hatred and bigotry directed at non-Jewish people. We focus on Nazism’s other victims, including the LGBTQ community and the disabled, and we are collaborating with The Olga Lengyel Institute and the Association for Teaching Black History in Kentucky on a week-long seminar, “Envisioning a Collaborative Future through the Lens of Intertwining Histories: Teaching Holocaust and Black History in Kentucky.” Our mostly non-Jewish teachers value and amplify the experiences of the Jewish individuals they encounter. While this shared labor can be messy at times, it pays dividends in personal growth and enriches and sustains the work.
By calling participants into conversation, even if they say something "wrong,” rather than shaming or silencing them, we make space for repair, and we communicate that all members of our intellectual community hold valued expertise. This is a delicate step because these interactions must accommodate engagement without exoticizing or othering Jewish people. Similarly, we want to make space for non-Jewish teachers who have little exposure to the Jewish world to ask questions, get answers, and even make mistakes in the way they ask. These questions address the long history of antisemitism, Jewish life before the Holocaust, and Jewish life today. Good questions, at their core, are risky, as they often reveal the limits of our own knowledge. They also help learners go beyond cursory curiosity by leading them to recognize commonalities and find solutions. We invite inquiry from our teacher leaders and workshop participants to model the very environments of trust and inquiry we believe are crucial for fostering students’ inquiry and critical thinking about difficult topics. When someone uses imprecise (and perhaps offensive) language, there is an opportunity for gentle correction without judgment to allow conversation to continue and deepen, rather than responding in a harsh way that shames or shuts down further inquiry and growth. In these moments, we are able to model trauma-informed, constructivist teaching approaches.
This type of community building is immersive, sustained, iterative, and recursively revised as we go along. We co-create community norms and grow alongside each other continuously. It is a complex process, but by working together throughout the year, community members emerge as local experts. They reach out to other teachers in their schools and districts and partner with district leaders to design, implement, and evaluate local curriculum resources, as well as to offer workshops for other local teachers.
A Localized Curriculum that Goes Beyond the Holocaust
Although we do not prescribe any single source of content, we do strive to help educators expand their teaching about Jewish people beyond the Holocaust to explore the lived experiences of Jewish communities in Europe before the Holocaust, and also to introduce students to their Jewish neighbors, to invite further compassion and empathy through experiential interactions. The Holocaust might seem to students like an event from the too distant past, deeply disconnected from their own day-to-day reality, causing them to struggle to engage and find meaning. Also, Kentucky students who only encounter Jewish people in the Holocaust’s historical narrative might assume that antisemitism is a problem of the past and be misinformed (or uninformed) about present-day Jewishness and Jewish communities. To mitigate these challenges, our workshops employ strategies for helping students understand unique, diverse Jewish communities and traditions while sharing Kentucky connections to Holocaust history. Inviting more student inquiry around Jewish history, culture, etc., especially on a regional or local level, is an attempt to bring non-Jewish students into community with their Jewish neighbors.
Since Kentucky curriculum guidelines encourage making connections with the state’s history, life, and culture, we collaborate with teachers to identify places in the curriculum where they can teach about Jewish life in Kentucky before and after the Holocaust. Finding the right time to discuss local Jewish cultures, histories, and customs can be challenging when statewide standards and district pacing guidelines barely provide room for teaching about the Holocaust itself. Given time constraints, teachers may not even realize they are only speaking of Jewish people in the context of the Holocaust. But after their time with us, they are more aware of the need to expand student understanding of Jewish people beyond that historical frame.
When asked, “what did you learn that will most likely make its way into your teaching?” one workshop participant said, “being mindful of sharing Jewish culture/joy and not just trauma or treating survivors as mere victims.” Participants learn about Jewish religious practices such as the celebration of the sabbath and life cycle events like bar and bat mitzvah. They are also invited to learn about examples of Kentucky Jewish history, including the bourbon industry, and the story of I.W. Bernheim, a 19th-century German-Jewish immigrant who funded Jewish institutions in Kentucky. These are just two examples of positive local history that can be brought into conversation with other Kentucky-centered topics.
We invite teachers to explore Kentucky Holocaust survivors’ experiences in live presentations, recorded talks, and written work. We highlight survivor Dr. Alice Dreifuss Goldstein, who frequently visits our workshops to share her memories of life as a girl in Germany under the Nuremberg laws. We also provide all teacher leaders with an anthology of Kentucky survivor testimonies titled, This Is Home Now: Kentucky’s Holocaust Survivors Speak—a beautiful collection of interviews and photographs compiled by Arwen Donahue and Rebecca Gayle Howell. Our teachers consistently report students’ surprise when they realize that people who have lived in or near their hometowns personally survived the Holocaust. Photographic and filmic evidence, texts, and other records of Jewish life in pre-war Europe showing familial relationships, leisure pursuits, and the daily lives of ordinary Jewish people equip our teachers to provide context in their lessons about the Holocaust’s global scale.
Conclusion
This project seeks to build and strengthen teaching and learning communities across Kentucky by modeling our core belief that learning is a social act and requires engagement from a broad coalition of allied educators. By creating an expansive, interconnected, and informed community, we shape the delivery of Holocaust education and of Jewish studies content to yield more empathetic and educated citizens.
The ethical values of our initiative, such as deep listening, mutual vulnerability, and reciprocal dialogue, help to put Jewish and non-Jewish educators into community with each other, and to support one another in engaging in this difficult work. These interconnected communities then introduce students to local Kentucky Holocaust survivors and local Jewish communities to create meaningful learning opportunities in K-12 classrooms. These values also create further avenues of engaged inquiry. By exposing students in middle and high school to Jewish communities, history, and culture beyond the Holocaust, we allow them to recognize that Jewish life not only existed in the past but also continues to thrive in and outside of Kentucky in diverse and non-monolithic ways in the present. By increasing this circle of exposure, we hope to expand the field of people who can recognize and intervene in antisemitism wherever it occurs.
For us, UK-JHF KHEI conversations serve to encourage enduring allyship from teachers and students who are non-Jews, thereby equipping them to help carry the load of combatting antisemitism while ensuring they are less likely to engage in it themselves. Our ultimate goal is one that goes beyond teachers and students to the broader population of the Commonwealth. We envision a community of Jewish and non-Jewish Kentuckians in partnership to honor and respect difference and to understand the peril of turning difference into disdain, othering, and belittling—attitudes which initiate the cascading events that make such atrocities as the Holocaust possible. Our ethical teaching model continues to yield ever-expanding positive results in Kentucky, and we believe that it can produce potent pedagogical results far beyond this state. By presenting it here, we hope to open up new dialogues and relationships, especially with educators in other states under mandate.
