Comments
A STUDENT’S VIEW -
“Isn’t the Holocaust when the Jews made everyone hate them and got themselves killed?”
A classmate said that to me casually during lunch.
He did not know I was Jewish, so I asked him a simple follow-up question: How many people do you think died?
He shrugged.
“Like 200,000 or something?”
That was the moment I realized something deeply disturbing: Holocaust ignorance is no longer shocking in America. It is becoming normal.
And that should terrify every one of us.
What happened in my school cafeteria was not an isolated incident. It was a warning sign of a much larger national collapse in historical memory, moral clarity, and basic education. According to a major national survey by the Claims Conference, 63 percent of Millennials and Gen Z do not know that six million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust. Even worse, 11 percent believe Jews somehow caused it themselves.
Think about that for a moment.
In the greatest democracy on Earth, millions of young Americans either do not understand the Holocaust or are beginning to blame its victims.
That is not merely ignorance. It is the early stage of historical decay.
The American education system has failed.
It has failed Jewish students like me. It has failed the six million Jews murdered by Nazi Germany. It has failed the hundreds of thousands of Roma, disabled people, political dissidents, and innocent civilians erased from existence. It has failed the American soldiers who fought and died liberating concentration camps and defeating fascism.
And now, as Holocaust survivors disappear, the consequences are becoming impossible to ignore.
As of 2026, only a small number of Holocaust survivors remain alive in the United States. For decades, survivors visited classrooms and auditoriums to tell students exactly what happened. Their voices carried a moral authority no textbook could ever replicate.
But time is running out.
As survivors leave us, a dangerous vacuum is opening and social media is rushing to fill it with conspiracy theories, irony, misinformation, and hate disguised as humor.
My generation scrolls through memes trivializing Hitler, mocking Jews, and turning genocide into edgy entertainment. Too many students no longer recognize antisemitism when they see it because they have been conditioned to consume it as content.
That poison does not stay online.
It walks directly into classrooms, cafeterias, and conversations like the one I experienced.
But despite how dark this moment feels, I have seen firsthand that education still works when it becomes personal.
Over the past year, I participated in student-led classroom presentations about Jewish identity and Holocaust remembrance. I spoke honestly about what it means to be Jewish today. I shared stories about my own grandparents fleeing persecution. I brought in a physical book containing the word “Jew” printed six million times page after page after page.
The room always changes when students hold it.
The Holocaust stops being an abstract statistic and becomes horrifyingly real.
Then something else happens curiosity replaces ignorance.
Students ask questions. They engage. They listen.
And yes they absolutely destroy the challah I bring every single time.
That matters more than people realize.
Because when Jewish history is taught through actual human connection rather than sterile paragraphs in a textbook, walls begin to fall. Students stop viewing Jews as political symbols or internet caricatures. They start seeing us as people.
That is how hate begins to lose.
But peer education alone is not enough. Schools themselves must do better.
If your history class spends more time discussing industrial machinery than the Holocaust, ask why. If antisemitism is treated as a side topic instead of one of history’s greatest warnings about where hatred leads, challenge it.
Students have more power than they think.
Recently, I approached the head of my school’s history department about strengthening Holocaust education. Together, we helped develop new lesson materials and classroom discussions. The process took only a few hours, but the impact could last for years.
That is the frustrating reality: many schools are not hostile to better Holocaust education. They are simply passive. And passivity is dangerous.
Yom HaShoah has already come and gone this year. Social media feeds briefly filled with memorial posts before instantly moving on to the next outrage cycle.
But remembrance cannot become performative.
The Holocaust is not content.
It is not a hashtag.
It is not a once-a-year assembly followed by silence.
Education remains the single most powerful weapon against hatred and extremism. If we want future generations to remember what happened and prevent history from repeating itself then we must keep telling the truth loudly, relentlessly, and unapologetically.
We have to show up.
We have to speak.
We have to teach.
And yes, sometimes, we have to share our challah.
Because if America’s next generation forgets what happened to the Jews once before, there is no guarantee history will not find a way to repeat itself again.
(Shoshannah Kalaydjian is a young Jewish student who writes about education, identity, and the challenges facing the next generation. Growing up in today’s climate, she has witnessed firsthand how rising antisemitism affects young people in classrooms and on college campuses. She is committed to sharing the perspectives of Jewish youth, amplifying student voices, and encouraging leaders to create safer, more inclusive environments for all students.)
