Teach the Holocaust -- without mentioning Jews -- says NEA

Remember the Holocaust, but forget the Jews, advises the nation's largest teachers' union. The National Education Association's 2025 handbook calls for "recognizing more than 12 million victims of the Holocaust from different faiths, ethnicities, races, political beliefs, genders, and gender identification, abilities/disabilities, and other targeted characteristics" on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, reports Alana Goodman in the Washington Free-Beacon, The proclamation is remarkably Judenrein, as the Nazis would say.

The handbook calls for educating students about the Palestinian "Nakba," the "forced, violent displacement and dispossession of at least 750,000 Palestinians from their homeland in 1948 during the establishment of the state of Israel."

"On the same page, the NEA outlines as another priority the task of teaching its members that anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism," writes Goodman.

Hitler's "No. 1 target was Jews," said Howard Libit of the Baltimore Jewish Council, reports Jonathan M. Pitts in the Baltimore Sun. It was known as "the final solution to the Jewish question."

“Should the NEA mention that the Nazis killed many more people in addition to Jews? Of course,” Libit said. But it’s appalling to see that [the NEA] would be pushing a Holocaust education concept that doesn’t mention Jewish victims."

At the July meeting, NEA delegates passed a resolution to boycott the Anti-Defamation League's Holocaust education materials. Union leaders did not approve the boycott.

Why is the NEA so eager to minimize Jewish suffering? I think it's a byproduct of the competition for victimhood points. Those who think everything is a question of oppressed vs. oppressor think Jews get too many points for the Holocaust. (And that's without points for the Inquisition and the pogroms and all the other persecution they know nothing about.) So they're trying to give the Holocaust the "all lives matter" treatment.

I was born a few years after the concentration camps were liberated. I went to school with kids whose grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins died in those camps. I'd rather see the genocide taught as part of World War II history than as a special unit that can be highjacked by the political fads of the moment or universalized into irrelevance.

"In the total absence of any education about Jews alive today, teaching about the Holocaust might even be making anti-Semitism worse," writes Dara Horn in The Atlantic. The only thing students learn about Jews is that they're hated. Some think they must have deserved it.