If schools devote just 45 minutes to a lesson that situates the Holocaust in the broader history of antisemitism and its impact on Jews, they can go a long way to dispelling harmful conspiracy theories, according to new research from the Anti-Defamation League’s Center for Antisemitism Research.
“This research is significant in that it features evidence from real classrooms,” stated Matt Williams, vice president of the center. “We now have data showing that a single, well-designed lesson, taught by educators with no special training, can measurably shift how teens think about antisemitism.”
“That’s a solvable problem for schools,” Williams stated. “Based on our research, districts don’t need a semester-long unit or a major new investment to make progress. They need the right 45 minutes, and now we’re closer to knowing what that looks like.”
In the study, 372 middle and high school students from nine schools in a larger school district in the southeastern part of the United States were randomly assigned either a control lesson or the one that researchers wanted to measure. They found that those who learned the latter were 14.4 percentage points more likely to disagree with the statement that Jews have too much power in the United States.
They were also 15.5 percentage points less likely to say that Jews are more loyal to Israel than to America and 13.6 percentage points less likely to minimize Jew-hatred, per the study.
The study’s importance goes beyond showing that students can respond to lessons about antisemitism, according to Williams.
ADL researchers previously tested dozens of approaches to Holocaust education in laboratory studies, allowing them to identify strategies that appeared more promising before bringing one into actual classrooms.
“The way that this kind of research works is you start with your big questions, you study them in the lab, you see which has measurable effects there, and then you bring it into the field,” Williams told JNS.
“The reason why we went into a field study with this one is that teaching the Holocaust as an example of antisemitism, and grounding that in the effects that it has on the Jewish population, seemed like the more promising, among the more promising strategies for Holocaust education overall,” he told JNS.
The classroom study found no evidence of a backlash. Some students didn’t change their attitudes, but researchers didn’t detect students becoming more antisemitic as a result of the lesson, according to Williams.
Specialized knowledge of Holocaust education is valuable, but the study demonstrates that the approach can produce an effect without extensive professional development, he said.
“What we’re looking at is something that’s a little bit more off-the-shelf, which actually makes it a potentially more scalable program,” he told JNS.
The findings come as Jewish students across the country face increased Jew-hatred in schools.
“We’ve long believed that education is one of our most powerful tools in the fight against antisemitism and hate, and this research confirms it,” stated Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO and national director of the ADL.
“As Jewish students across the country are experiencing increased antisemitism, we believe we can provide a clear, practical path forward for schools to address this scourge everywhere,” he stated.
The findings also demonstrate that schools can intervene in a way that produces positive outcomes.
“We’re relatively confident that there is an available avenue to surface the conversation about antisemitism in schools, and ways that causally produce positive outcomes,” he told JNS.
He discouraged seeing the lesson as a standalone solution to antisemitism, though.
“There’s no single intervention or magic bullet that’s gonna take us out of the particularly complex, and frankly, crisis period that we’ve been in for the past few years now,” he told JNS.
The research is part of a broader effort to identify interventions that work and give schools evidence to guide their decisions.
Schools don’t need to universalize the Jewish experience or connect antisemitism to other forms of hatred to get students to care about antisemitism, according to Williams.
“It is impactful, on its own, to teach about the Holocaust in the context of Jewish experiences with antisemitism,” he told JNS. “We don’t need to persuade people to care about antisemitism by appealing to how it matters to them.”
Educators don’t need to convince students that antisemitism matters, because it could eventually affect them or because it is one example of a broader category of hate. The Jewish experience can be the basis for teaching students about antisemitism.
Comparing antisemitism with other forms of hatred or universalizing the lesson can sometimes have the opposite effect, according to Williams.
“We don’t need to compare, or to universalize, or to have the same effect, and in some cases, that comparison can actually activate competitive victimhood and produce a backlash, which we don’t want to see right now,” he told JNS.
