Holocaust education has been a mainstay of British education for some time. But the rising tide of anti-Semitism in the UK suggests that it may not be accomplishing its supposed goals. Irene Lancaster and Rowan Williams consider the nature of the problem and its possible solutions:

Schoolchildren, of course, study the Holocaust. But what is disturbing—from our own experience and that of many other teachers—is that they often emerge with only the haziest idea of the specifics. We have heard of students who have studied the diaries of Anne Frank with barely any mention of the fact that she was Jewish. Holocaust education, and even events around Holocaust Memorial Day, can come to be focused on generalities about victimized minorities. We have encountered schoolchildren who have visited Auschwitz and returned with only the vague notion that it is bad to persecute people for their religion.

What would effective Holocaust education look like? It would certainly have to involve an attempt to trace the historical roots, to look at, for instance: the history of the “blood libel”—the myth that Jews routinely kidnapped, tortured, and killed Christian children [to use their blood for religious rituals]—with origins that lie in this country in the Middle Ages. . . . It would need to look at how [Jewish] communities took root and developed, what they had to battle against and still have to combat in the form of lazy prejudices encoded in British literature and popular culture, even when the latter’s Christian rationale has long been forgotten.

Holocaust education must, . . . above all, involve awareness of what Jewish faith and culture have to say about themselves, not just what others say about them, which often recycles, however unwittingly, the stereotypes of the past. It would introduce students to what the state of Israel actually means for Jewish people, [rather than treating it] as an unfortunate but ignorable extra to Jewish identity.

While it is commendable that administrators of several universities finally called upon police to crack down on violent and disruptive anti-Israel protests, the actions they have taken may be insufficient. At Columbia, demonstrators reestablished their encampment on the main quad after it had been cleared by the police, and the university seems reluctant to use force again. The school also decided to hold classes remotely until the end of the semester. Such moves, whatever their merits, do nothing to fix the factors that allowed campuses to become hotbeds of pro-Hamas activism in the first place. The editors of National Review examine how things go to this point:

Since the 10/7 massacre, Columbia’s Jewish students have been forced to endure routine calls for their execution. It shouldn’t have taken the slaughter, rape, and brutalization of Israeli Jews to expose chants like “Globalize the intifada” and “Death to the Zionist state” as calls for violence, but the university refused to intervene on behalf of its besieged students. When an Israeli student was beaten with a stick outside Columbia’s library, it occasioned little soul-searching from faculty. Indeed, it served only as the impetus to establish an “Anti-Semitism Task Force,” which subsequently expressed “serious concerns” about the university’s commitment to enforcing its codes of conduct against anti-Semitic violators.

But little was done. Indeed, as late as last month the school served as host to speakers who praised the 10/7 attacks and even “hijacking airplanes” as “important tactics that the Palestinian resistance have engaged in.”

The school’s lackadaisical approach created a permission structure to menace and harass Jewish students, and that’s what happened. . . . Now is the time finally to do something about this kind of harassment and associated acts of trespass and disorder. Yale did the right thing when police cleared out an encampment [on Monday]. But Columbia remains a daily reminder of what happens when freaks and haters are allowed to impose their will on campus.