US Holocaust education aims to “counter discrimination” and teach “universal lessons,” yet many students fail to recognize contemporary antisemitism. Educated in a DEI model of competitive victimization, they don’t connect the “oppressed” Jews of the Holocaust with those they term “white colonialist oppressors.” While students should recognize parallels between the Holocaust and contemporary challenges, it is crucial they see Anne Frank as a Jewish girl, not merely a universal symbol of suffering.

In her diary, Anne Frank presents herself as “just like us.” Examining Anne’s revisions of her diary reveals her efforts to frame herself as relatable by omitting references to Jewish holy days and declaring Sinterklaas “much more fun” than Hanukkah.Even as she envisions a post-war audience in a liberated Netherlands, Anne worries about Dutch antisemitism.

When students claim, “Anne wasn’t even that Jewish!” they ignore Nazi  “redemptive antisemitism.” Holocaust pedagogy can reinforce that dehumanization by fashioning a Jewish identity composed solely of victimhood, denying the complexity of Jewish experience, and contributing to contemporary antisemitism. This paper offers Anne Frank as a model for centering the intersectionality of Jewish identity in Holocaust education. Restoring such complexity can help foster empathy not only with Jews of the past but also today.

Scholars have repeatedly emphasized that much Shoah education initiative research doesn’t measure impact on combating antisemitism. At the expense of focus on combating antisemitism, Shoah education globally has been misused to promote human rights and educate about prejudice in general or other specific prejudices. England is no exception: Shoah education teachers’ top aim is that students understand bigotry’s general dangers and most don’t perceive Shoah education as connected to combating antisemitism today, which impacts teaching, as a large-scale study found most Shoah education pupils in England could define homophobia and racism, but not antisemitism. While UCL’s Holocaust Education Centre introduced a teacher module on antisemitism’s history to correct this, most teachers haven’t taken the module and contents likely exclude continuities between Nazi antisemitism and contemporary antisemitism. This paper synthesizes scholarship on Shoah education, antisemitism and historical sources to discuss how those continuities’ incorporation into teacher training may improve Shoah education implementation. This knowledge may help teachers recognize Shoah education’s relevance to and significance for combating contemporary antisemitism, equip them to recognize and respond to antisemitism in schools and help students understand and identify contemporary antisemitism.

Furthermore, many pupils believe Britain was a hero during the Shoah, an overly simplistic perception likely reflecting insufficient teacher knowledge about Britain’s role in impeding Jews’ survival. From 1936-1949, British officials strove to prevent Jewish immigration to (pre 15-May-1948 pre-state) Israel, perceiving Jewish immigration there as imperiling the British Empire’s future. Education about this history may improve teacher and student ability to recognize as antisemitic distortions and refute contemporary British left claims of “colonialism” and “imperialism” about Israel. Lastly, British officials against rescuing Jews invented Shoah inversion and continued use knowing the Shoah’s horrors. Knowing this may increase recognition of Shoah inversion’s antisemitism and refutation of the discourse today.

Since the Hamas terrorist attack in Israel on the 7th October 2023, antisemitic acts have significantly increased across many European countries. In France, the teachers I regularly meet in my work struggle to combat this issue and especially within a complex political climate where extreme-left wing leaders, popular among the youth, openly make antisemitic remarks. Holocaust history lessons are no longer sufficient to educate young people about the dangers of antisemitism.

Therefore, alongside history classes, a humanistic approach to Holocaust education must be incorporated into literature and arts lessons, as proposed by the pedagogical association I have founded in 2021, Mémoires à l’oeuvre, which I currently lead.

My research focuses on testimonial literature, particularly Yiddish literature from the Holocaust, Khurbn in Yiddish – meaning “Destruction” -, written in ghettos and camps during World War II, especially poetry. For three years, I have been giving lectures in secondary schools, introducing students to not only a world of victims but also one of resistance through culture, arts, and literature – a world that resists to destruction through creation. I would be interested in presenting a paper to explain how Yiddish literature, very different from post-war Western European testimonial literature, helps students to comprehend the unthinkable reality of Holocaust.

Social media companies are central actors in the shifting dynamics of our current societies — and in the case of antisemitism — their role is as significant; playing a unique part in managing hate speech online. In doing so, educational tools have become paramount, with companies focusing on their development to strengthen their public commitment to end Holocaust denial and to both appease and cooperate with Jewish organisations. My proposal examines the policy making and public discourses of Facebook and TikTok — as one of the oldest and newest social media platforms — focusing on their concept of hate speech, its relationship with antisemitism and the development of discourse-management systems. Specifically, I will study their approach to fighting antisemitism through online educational tools and the public narratives attached to their advancement. In the process, I will argue that companies have positioned the battle against Holocaust denial at the forefront of their public discourse on antisemitism and approached it differently from other types of Jewish-hatred; questioning how the companies use antisemitism and mediate Holocaust education and memory. Methodologically, I will use a critical qualitative analysis and employ a dual analytical viewpoint that explores both the theoretical apparatuses and the practices of the companies in historical