The World Jewish Congress is pushing US lawmakers to make Holocaust education mandatory in all schools, citing statistics from a 2018 poll revealing half of millennials can’t name a single Nazi concentration camp.
The WJC started a petition calling on Congress to “make Holocaust education mandatory in every school in the United States,” that has garnered 8,500 signatures so far. The petition points to a rise in antisemitism and warns that “the horrors of the Holocaust are fading from our collective memory, especially among millennials.”
It refers to statistics found in the 2018 Holocaust Knowledge and Awareness Study which surveyed 1,350 Americans aged 18 and over and found 49 percent of millennials and 45 percent of adults couldn’t name a concentration camp or ghetto in Europe during the Holocaust. It also revealed that 41 percent of millennials think the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust was two million or less, rather than six million.
‘The Never Again Education Act’ would create a grant program run by the Department of Education to provide teachers with training and tools to teach students about the Holocaust “and the repercussions that hate and intolerance can have on our society.”
The bill was reintroduced in January by Representative Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) after failing to be enacted at a previous session of Congress. California, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, and Rhode Island already have laws requiring schools to teach students about the Holocaust.