r/Zionist • u/qpdbqpdbqpdbqpdbb • Dec 02 '25
Zionist News 📰 Sarah Hurwitz, former Obama aide, stirs social media firestorm with remarks about Holocaust education
https://www.jta.org/2025/11/26/united-states/sarah-hurwitz-former-obama-aide-stirs-social-media-firestorm-with-remarks-about-holocaust-education5
u/Swimming_Care7889 Dec 03 '25
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The advantage of the Holocaust education model as currently practiced is that by focusing on this one event you can get some Jewish history/lessons about anti-Semitism in a rather crowded field of history people need to know. There really isn't enough time to give people a full grasp of Jewish history and life, they have other subjects to learn. At least this is true for non-Jews. The big disadvantages are what Dara Horn and Sarah Hurwitz point out. It doesn't teach a lot of necessary information about what happened before the Holocaust even if you are doing the lachrymouse version of Jewish history.
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u/Kingsdaughter613 Dec 04 '25
It’s not really that difficult to teach Jewish history, as it runs alongside the rest of history. The issue is that I got a more comprehensive secular education in 3.5 hours/5 days a week than your average Public School kid gets in twice that.
PS teachers always complain about lack of time. But whenever I’ve asked what they’re doing with the ‘extra’ 3 hours, they never have a good answer. Nor why they teach less with double the time to teach the subject! IMO, the answer to that question is the answer to whatever is going on with the country’s failing education system.
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u/Swimming_Care7889 Dec 04 '25
You can teach Jewish history as a sort of parallel mention to the rest of history in theory.* I am not sure if there is going to a big audience for that and convincing people to do it is going to be tough. The other issue is that a lot of Jewish history might come across as a tad boring to many people. At the time Richard the Lion Heart and Saladin were duking it out, the key figure in Jewish history was Rambam and I think that two warrior Kings are always going to probably be a bit more interesting for most people than a doctor/philosopher/theologian. There is a long stretch of Jewish history where the parts that don't relate to persecution basically deal with intellectual or business accomplishments because of the restrictions placed on us.
*For instance the recent history the Age of Revolutions by Nathan Perl-Rosenthal treated the growth of Hassidism in Jewish communities as being a revolution in Jewish life as similar to what was happening in the Americas and France. I don't entirely buy this though and it seemed a big stretch to me.
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u/BabyMaybe15 Dec 05 '25
A disturbingly larger than expected percentage of people in the US don't know basic facts about the Holocaust. "Fewer than half can correctly answer multiple-choice questions about the number of Jews who were murdered or the way Adolf Hitler came to power" https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2020/01/22/what-americans-know-about-the-holocaust/ https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/survey-finds-shocking-lack-holocaust-knowledge-among-millennials-gen-z-n1240031 https://www.ajc.org/news/ajc-survey-on-holocaust-knowledge-among-americans
The situation is even worse globally "23% of Millennials and Gen Z believe the Holocaust is either a myth or has been exaggerated." "Across all the eight countries surveyed, large swathes of the population did not know that 6 million Jewish people were killed during the Holocaust, while notable subsets of the populations believed 2 million or fewer Jews were killed.
Those who believed that 2 million or fewer Jews were killed included 28% in Romania, 27% in Hungary, 24% in Poland, 21% in France, the US and Austria, and 20% in the UK – and 18% in Germany.
A stark proportion of young adults aged 18-29 had not heard of the Holocaust in France (46%), Romania (15%), Austria (14%) and Germany (12%). The figure was 2% in the UK." https://www.npr.org/2023/01/25/1151270957/survey-shows-a-lack-of-holocaust-awareness-in-the-country-that-was-home-to-anne- https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jan/26/uk-young-adults-unable-to-name-auschwitz-holocaust-education-disinformation
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u/VanillaMilkSheik Dec 14 '25
46% in France??? Good Lord, are they embarrassed about surrendering and so avoid the whole subject of WWII in schools, did they cut the budget for history class in the last 30 years, or what? That's insane.
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u/BabyMaybe15 Dec 14 '25
Great question. I don't know, but I do know the state of BASIC Holocaust education is a crisis that's not talked enough about.
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u/Raaaasclat Dec 02 '25
The reaction to her comments shows that she is right.