In 20 years of teaching, Marie Tierney says she has seen colleagues undermine unique historical horror of the Holocaust
As an assistant teacher for 16 years, I encountered numerous examples of antisemitism being taught — sometimes unknowingly — in England’s classrooms. Nearly all of the teachers I encountered had uncritically absorbed antisemitic tropes at their universities and teacher training colleges, much of it dressed up as “anti-Zionism”.
For instance, Year Sevens are taught about the Black Death in RE, a lesson I often observed. Children were nearly always told that the Jews were blamed at the time for the plague, but this was rarely presented as an example of an antisemitic falsehood. Indeed, the teachers usually left open the question of whether the Jews really were responsible.
That meant that when the children were taught about the Holocaust in Year Nine, it was not uncommon for children to respond by saying, “But Sir! The Jews DID give us the Plague though… ‘coz you said so in Year Seven!”
For instance, Year Nines are often taught about the Holocaust in the context of why the Jews have been hated throughout history. But unless carefully presented, this “context” can often seem like an apology for Nazism, as if the Jews did something to deserve their misfortune.
Nearly all the teachers I have worked with who were born in the 1980s habitually excuse Hitler and undermine the unique historical horror of the Holocaust. The usual response to Hitler’s genocidal antisemitism is to explain that it was not just the Jews. Others suffered too. In the interests of “balance”, the teachers often point out that Hitler did good things as well as bad — he created jobs and made Germany great again, for instance.
When I suggested to a teacher that we first talk about the positive influences of Judaism before introducing the Holocaust, she dismissed it on the grounds that “learning how successful they are might irritate some people”.
In GCSE History, antisemitism often slithers into students’ subconscious in ramshackle debates about the aftermath of the First World War. “You can understand why the German people were so angry with the Jews after the First World War, because if you fought in the trenches, lost your jobs and your businesses and you saw that the Jews were having an easier time of it, you’d be angry too,” explained one teacher, helpfully.
Because, of course, German Jews did not fight in the trenches, German Jews did not lose their savings, their jobs and their businesses. So, all Jews are cowards, all Jews are rich, all Jews have no right to get angry.
Visiting a school as a guest speaker once, I tried to explain to some teachers in the staff room how ridiculous Jewish stereotypes were. They immediately launched into a tirade about the “arrogant Jewish princesses” they had encountered growing up who got everything they wanted on “Daddy’s money”. A self-professed ‘lefty’ even complained that a street near her university was “wall to wall Jewish businesses”. One of these teachers boasted to me that she had taught the whole Holocaust ‘module’ without showing “one of those atrocity pictures once”. When I relayed this to a Jewish friend whose mother survived Ravensbruck, he said, “How can people know how bad it was without showing them how bad it was?” This same teacher, who claimed the Holocaust was “absolutely fascinating”, whispered to me, “we have to ask this question” and, instead of saying it aloud, wrote it down on her planner and showed it to me: Did they deserve it?
I was shocked. Do we ask this question about the Middle Passage? Do we ask it about the victims of 9/11? We do not. Incidentally, she had already taught her students about Israel and why its existence was so “controversial” and, as she explained to me, that’s why the desert question had to be asked. In her brain, the Holocaust and Israel had somehow become chronologically juxtaposed, with the foundation of the state of Israel in 1948 somehow causing the murder of six million Jews by the Nazis.
Alas, this kind of prejudice is not confined to the state sector. A young acquaintance of mine who attends a posh private school told me his history teacher joked that “Jews won’t fight” after he was asked if Jews had fought in the First World War. I armed the pupil with facts: the Roman Legion Regi Emeseni Iudeai; Cleopatra’s two generals; how, in the First World War, Jews were the largest ethnic group to fight for either side; how Anne Frank’s father, as well as the young lieutenant who awarded Hitler his Iron Cross, had fought for Germany. The boy told the class, the teacher smirked and said, “Well, you learn something new every day.” Maybe so, but very rarely do you learn anything about antisemitism from teachers.
As someone who went to a high school in the UK in the early 2000’s, this is really disturbing to me because its completely at odds with my experience of learning about anti-semitism in school. The government announced a few years ago that they were changing the curriculum to be “more patriotic”…
