For more than two decades, Risha Eingsian has taught English in the New York City public school system. In the early 2000s, she created a full-year Holocaust studies elective, writing the curriculum herself, recruiting students and inviting survivors into her classroom to share their stories. It was one of the highlights of her career, she said.
Today, that class no longer exists. Budget cuts, scheduling changes, and a decline in student interest have pushed Holocaust education to the margins, despite New York State's requirement that schools include it in the social studies curriculum for eighth, 10th and 11th grades.
“It’s very easy for a student to go through the New York State public school system without knowing what the Holocaust is,” Eingsian said in a recent Zoom interview.
While Eingsian worries about the shallow treatment of Holocaust history, in other parts of the country, the concern is whether students will encounter the topic at all. In 11 states, including Louisiana and Maryland, students can still graduate from high school without any formal Holocaust education. Despite the Holocaust being the largest genocide in human history, and claiming the lives of six million Jewish people and millions of other victims, many states have yet to mandate it in their public school systems.
That reality is especially difficult to accept for educators like Sally Frishberg, who helped lay the foundation for Holocaust education in the United States.
Now 91 years old, Frishberg spent her childhood in hiding, crammed into the attic of a Polish Catholic household with 15 others as they evaded the Nazis. They slept on haystacks and survived on plain beans and potatoes, rationed carefully to last out the winter. After the war, she immigrated to the United States at age 13. Although she arrived without knowing a word of English, the kindness of her teachers made her feel welcome, and she quickly fell in love with school.
After graduating from high school, Frishberg worked for several years as a legal secretary before deciding to pursue a career in education. Early in her teaching career, at Fort Hamilton High School in Brooklyn, N.Y., her department head asked her to create a course on the Holocaust. She agreed, and the class became one of the first elective Holocaust courses in a U.S. public school.
“I think we can live much, much better when we learn,” Frishberg said.
The class quickly gained popularity, and Frishberg would go on to teach multiple generations of students. One of them was Denise Kritikos, who took the class at age 17 and now serves as assistant principal at the same school.
“I am forever changed as a human being because she was my teacher,” Kritikos said.
Kritikos later took Judaic studies coursework in college and brought Holocaust literature into her own English curriculum as a teacher. She also invited Frishberg back each year to speak with her students.
But like Eingsian’s elective, Frishberg’s class is no longer part of the curriculum. The school stopped offering it during the COVID-19 pandemic, and it has yet to return.
FFor Eingsian, the decline of such programs underscores the limits of even well-intentioned policy. While Holocaust education may be required by law in New York, she said, it is often inconsistent and surface-level in practice.
“Maybe it's a couple of days, and it's thrown in with the discussion of World War II,” she said. “Maybe kids have read 'The Diary of Anne Frank' or 'Night' in ninth grade,” referring to two widely taught personal accounts of the Holocaust.
She added that unless students grew up in families who spoke about the Holocaust or attended Hebrew school, their exposure to the subject is typically minimal.
“I started to get concerned with the lack of a real depth of investigation into the topic, that it was really surface-[level], and that kids really just knew numbers,” she said, referring to how students often learn statistics, like death tolls, without understanding the human stories behind them.
A 2020 Pew Research survey found that while most American adults knew what the Holocaust was, fewer than half could correctly answer basic multiple-choice questions about it. Fewer than 70 percent could identify the years it took place or explain what Nazi ghettos were, and less than half knew how many Jews were killed or how Hitler came to power.
TThis lack of basic knowledge has prompted some states to take action. In January 2024, Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne issued a directive requiring all public schools to comply with a state law mandating Holocaust and genocide education.
“I got a law passed that requires two times in the high school years, at least,” said Horne in a phone interview. As a Jewish American whose extended family was killed by the Nazis, Horne said the issue is deeply personal to him.
However, when asked how schools are held accountable for following the law, he paused. “That's a good question. I hadn't thought about that,” he said. “We'll have to think of some way to check it.”
History of Holocaust Education in the U.S.
Due to these gaps in state-mandated Holocaust education, many states depend on the initiative of individual educators who voluntarily teach the subject out of personal commitment.
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One of those teachers is Logan Greene, who teaches at Berry Middle School in Hoover, Ala.
Last December, the Alabama Board of Education, including Gov. Kay Ivey, unanimously voted to adopt the state's first update to social studies standards since 2010. This update includes the requirement to teach the Holocaust. However, schools are not mandated to implement these standards until the 2026–2027 school year.
According to 1819 News , the curriculum will introduce age-appropriate Holocaust studies for fifth graders and provide more comprehensive descriptions of the violence and death associated with the Holocaust for students in grades nine and 11.
Greene, who helped write some of the state’s new standards, began teaching about the Holocaust long before it became mandated in the curriculum. Eighteen years ago, he started his teaching career at Pinson Valley High School, located just outside Birmingham, Ala., with around 1,000 students. He introduced the Holocaust during his modern world history lessons for ninth graders, mainly while covering World War II.
While Greene is not Jewish, he has long been interested in the Holocaust. His passion deepened after he met Marion Blumenthal Lazan, a Holocaust survivor and co-author of “Four Perfect Pebbles,” a memoir about her experience in Nazi Germany. In his second year of teaching, Greene assigned the book to his students and soon learned that Lazan was scheduled to speak in Birmingham, though at a different, more affluent school.
He recalled five students approaching him and asking, “Why can’t you have her here?” Greene explained that bringing her in would cost about $1,500 and that they would need to raise the money within a few weeks. The students took on the challenge, standing in the lobby during school basketball games with handmade signs asking fans for just one dollar. After three games, they had raised more than enough to bring Lazan to their school.
She came to speak, and Greene said that moment revealed the impact Holocaust education could have on students. Since then, he has incorporated lessons on the Holocaust into every class he teaches, even if it is not part of the formal curriculum. Greene has brought it into modern world history, AP U.S. History, and other classes he teaches.
A few years later, Greene transferred to West Blocton High School, a smaller and more rural campus with just 400 students. There, he was offered the opportunity to teach an elective for the first time. He created a year-long class that explored the Holocaust from both historical and literary perspectives, structuring it as a history course in the first semester and an English course in the second.
During the first half of the year, students studied the historical context and ideological foundations of the Holocaust. In the second half, they analyzed literature related to the Holocaust. Greene noted that this portion of the course lacked formal academic standards and was supported primarily by materials from the Alabama Holocaust Education Center and the local educator network.
This year, Greene is teaching Parallel Journeys by Eleanor H. Ayer, a lesser-known book that follows the true stories of two young people who lived through World War II. One was a Jewish teenager who survived the Nazi camp system; the other, a high-ranking member of the Hitler Youth, later immigrated to America, where he came to understand the extent of his indoctrination and began speaking publicly about it. The book opens with the moment their paths cross.
“For the kids, it's a very powerful story,” Greene said. “It shows them a very honest telling of the other side, and they need to hear that.”
Despite Alabama’s loose curriculum requirements regarding the Holocaust, Greene seems more hopeful about his state's teachers than Eingsian did about New York's. When asked if an Alabama student could graduate from a public high school without knowing about the Holocaust, he responded, “If they get through all grades, something has gone amiss in at least two grades.”
That same commitment to Holocaust education can be found far away in Rexburg, Idaho, where longtime teacher David Reeser established a Holocaust class at his school.
At the end of this school year, he plans to convert a trailer classroom at his school into a mini Holocaust museum, where he will display these projects from over the years.
Reeser is also not Jewish. His interest in the Holocaust was sparked early in his career after he heard a Holocaust survivor speak at a conference for teachers in Washington, D.C. He later had the opportunity to travel to Germany to deepen his understanding of the subject.
Nearly two decades later, Reeser continues to teach his Holocaust class at Madison High School, the same school he once attended as a student.
In Idaho, Holocaust education is not mandated by law. Still, a legislative measure passed in early 2024 encouraged the Idaho Department of Education to adopt age-appropriate Holocaust lessons in social studies classes.
“If they're not taking an elective like mine, they're probably not getting much at all, especially in my school district,” said Reeser. “In our district, it's really kind of feast or famine.”
Reeser cannot speak for other school districts, but based on his experience, he believes students will only receive substantial Holocaust education if they are interested.
“I was in high school here at Madison. I remember talking about it, but again, it was pretty superficial. It wasn't a major part of the curriculum,” he said, reflecting on how he primarily learned about the Holocaust due to his father's interest in history. They often talked about it at home and watched historical films together.
Greene and Reeser were inspired to teach about the Holocaust after hearing survivors share their experiences. The youngest Holocaust survivors are currently around 80 years old, as they were born during the final days of the war. In January 2023, a survey reported that there were 245,000 survivors still alive across the globe.
“By opening our eyes to the crimes of the past, [survivors] create a lens for the future,” wrote Robert Williams, CEO and Finci-Viterbi chair of the USC Shoah Foundation, in a Time Magazine op-ed published on Yom HaShoah 2025. “If we ever hope to truly learn from the Holocaust, we must engage with the history as it was lived by those who experienced it.”
“The Holocaust happened to real people with hopes and dreams, flaws and challenges, and an intrinsic humanity,” he added.
As the number of survivors continues to dwindle, Frishberg, now 91 years old, said, "You don't have to have lived it to know it."
Kritikos, her former student, also sees widely taught Holocaust education as a necessity: “We have to continue telling their stories.”
Now, hear the voices of students who took Holocaust classes at schools outside the U.S., including Brazil, Russia, the U.K., and Israel.
