FREE PRESS
We Misunderstood the Nazis
Matti Friedman
July 9, 2024

…The failure of Holocaust education has been most sharply observed by the writer Dara Horn, particularly in a prescient essay for The Atlantic last spring and before that in a 2021 book, People Love Dead Jews. After visiting numerous museums and speaking to educators who teach Holocaust curricula, she concludes in the essay, “The bedrock assumption that has endured for nearly half a century is that learning about the Holocaust inoculates people against antisemitism. But it doesn’t.”
By turning the Holocaust into a generic story about prejudice, Horn argues, Holocaust education left its recipients without any understanding of the specific problem facing Jews—or even much sympathy for real Jews in the present.” READ MORE

THE ATLANTIC Dara Horn: Why the most exucsted people in America fall for antisemitic lies At Harvard and elsewhere, an old falsehood is capturing new minds.