Holocaust Education Is No Guarantee against Anti-Semitism https://mosaicmagazine.com/picks/politics-current-affairs/2022/12/holocaust-education-is-no-guarantee-against-anti-semitism/

December 20, 2022 | Stephen Pollard
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In much of the West there is an assumption among both Jews and those who sympathize with them that teaching people about the Holocaust somehow inoculates them against anti-Semitism. Stephen Pollard observes that education about the Shoah in Britain is very good, but evidence shows that hostility toward Jews is nonetheless on the rise:

Last year, I was told by the anti-extremism educator Charlotte Littlewood of her experience in one school. After giving training to a sixth form about 9/11, a teacher approached her about the session. Why, he asked, had she ignored the “evidence” that 9/11 was organized by the Jews?

Ms. Littlewood is the author of a study cited today by the government’s so-called “anti-Semitism tsar” Lord Mann in his ground-breaking report calling for all schools to have policies to recognize and combat anti-Semitism, which should also be part of teacher training. (One might also point out the inherent irony of the phrase “anti-Semitism tsar.”)

Her study found that recorded anti-Semitic incidents in schools in England have nearly trebled over the past five years. But a mere 47 schools have any kind of formal, written policy that “might make staff more aware of the vicious forms of anti-Semitic bullying”—such as making a hissing sound when Jewish pupils enter a classroom in a reference to the Nazi gas chambers.

[In fact], some of those who think of themselves as being profoundly anti-racist nonetheless harbor stereotypically anti-Semitic thoughts about Jews—that they are rich, they control the media, they stick together, and so on. They won’t even recognize that these are racist ideas, seeing them merely as statements of fact. This explains how you can teach the Holocaust and yet not make any impact on dealing with living, breathing anti-Semitism. Or, to put it another way, the bar for anti-Jewish racism is set at the level of killing Jews.

Read more on CapX: https://capx.co/to-tackle-the-oldest-hatred-its-not-enough-to-just-teach-the-holocaust/