My research this semester was sparked by the witnessing of a major historical event, the storming of the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021. Live news images of anti-Semitic and racist symbols flooding the halls of this sacred building made me question the state of Holocaust knowledge and historical awareness in the United States. I knew that anti-Semitism was on the rise as there had been an unprecedented number of attacks upon Jewish communities during recent years. In 2019, the Anti-Defamation League reported 2,107 hate crimes against Jewish people in the United States, the highest number of hate crimes since the organization had started to keep track of such crimes in 1979. I thus decided that I wanted to investigate the relationship between the alarming rise in Holocaust denial within the context of an alarming rise of white supremacist rhetoric and actions in America.

Recent manifestations of Holocaust denial has been accompanied by an equally vehement denial of the validity of rational thought and the importance of evidence, the latter of which have been replaced by a growing support for far-fetched conspiracy theories and widespread paranoia. Over the last decade or so, the acceptance of a rhetoric of ethnic and racial intolerance has also correlated with an alarming decline in an interest and depreciation for the humanities. I thus decided to investigate how the government and social media platforms should respond to Holocaust deniers assault on the truth and historical realities given the fact that a public dedication to the freedom of speech remains a staple in American public discourse. I learned that social media apps can block Holocaust denial content, which Facebook has already taken steps toward, but those measures prove hardly sufficient in stopping right-wing conspiracy theorists who can use a plethora of platforms to congregate and spread misinformation. As a result, I began to look for a public realm in which I could reach the most amount of people from vastly different social and political backgrounds.

The men and women storming the Capitol today were the public school students of yesterday, and therefore a product of the American public education system. While Americans increasingly live in parallel worlds, segregated by age, race, region or political orientation, there still remains one life experience shared by a majority of American citizens. Although there has been a decrease in the number of students in the public school system, in Louisiana, for example, 83% of students are enrolled in a public high school, while only 17% of students are enrolled in a private high school. Since the public school system is accessible to all students and the only place a majority of citizens gather to learn, it is the ideal place to begin the processes of informing impressionable minds. My ambition was to make an educational intervention that would go beyond the classroom by not just researching the history of Holocaust denial, but by exploring how the lessons of the Holocaust can be made relevant to present and future generations of public school students. Originally, I had planned to intervene by creating resources that educators could use to teach high school students in Louisiana mostly factual information about the Holocaust as a past reality, it’s relation to a wider history of racism and discrimination, and the dangers associated with distorting the narrative of this particular past. However, I discovered that there are countless resources and materials out there for educators to use, and the main issue is that the Louisiana state curriculum for public schools does not require these resources to be utilized in classroom instruction.

This led me to examine the Louisiana curriculum regarding World War II education and to compare it to New Jersey’s curriculum. Unlike Louisiana, the state of New Jersey requires by law all public schools to teach the history of the Holocaust. Incidentally, New Jersey also ranks as the top state for public education in 2021. I found that even though Louisiana requires more years of history education from its students to graduate, the fact that the Holocaust is not a requirement in World War II education is doing Louisiana students a disservice. In my view, all United States citizens bear the personal responsibility to fight against racism and hatred. I consider it a central mission of our public school system to foster a civic culture that lays the foundation for our democracy. I then planned to intervene by contacting those at the Louisiana Department of Education and reforming the World War II curriculum for Louisiana high school students. I ultimately realized that this challenging task is unattainable for a college student because large companies and curriculum specialists play the most dominant role in curriculum reform.

Right now I am currently trying to find the right audience for my intervention and I am planning on trying to present my research calling for the creation of a Holocaust educational requirement in Louisiana to the governor or trying to find the right specialist to push this project further. Congress has also recently responded to a perceived decline or simple lack of civic culture and Holocaust education in the United States with the proposal of the Civics Secures Democracy Act and the passing of the Never Again Education Act. Current events, such as the anti-Asian attacks, Black Lives Matter movement, and the Capitol riot, prove that this moment in time is the most susceptible for curriculum reform to occur and in order to be in a position to begin the process of healing. I hope that my intervention can eventually make a tangible difference in the way public school students are taught the present through the past.