Research suggests that schools often address diversity in superficial ways (Roegman et al., 2021), such as through world food days, rather than through sustained culturally relevant teaching (Ladson-Billings, 1994; 2014) that develops students’ multicultural competence and critical consciousness of larger social inequities. Jewish culture and antisemitism are often missing entirely from curricula that address diversity (Marcus, 2021). This omission is particularly worrisome as the ACLU (2013) reports that over 79,000,000 harbor antisemitic views in Western Europe. Within the US context, American Jews experience extremely high, and rising, rates of antisemitic hate crimes (ADL, 2021), with many reported antisemitic incidents occurring on school grounds (Adler, 2021). Violent antisemitic hate crimes are also rising in Europe; the UK saw a 34% increase in antisemitic attacks in 2020 (Goodwin & Greene, 2022).

Education, beginning with teachers and educational leader preparation programs must take responsibility for teaching children about antisemitism and also for addressing antisemitism within schools (Marcus, 2021). When schools teach about antisemitism at all, they often focus on the Holocaust, which suggests that antisemitism is no longer a problem. Even when schools do teach the Holocaust, it may only receive very brief coverage, such as reading the Diary of Anne Frank (Himmelstein, 2020), and focusing on Jews who were more culturally similar to their Christian neighbors, suggesting that Jews who spoke Yiddish or dressed differently may have been less deserving of empathy (Horn, 2021). Holocaust education often focuses on individual experiences rather than the social, political, and economic conditions that allow antisemitism to flourish.    

This paper uses culturally relevant teaching (Ladson-Billings, 1994; 2014) as a framework for examining the UNESCO (2020) curricula on addressing antisemitism in schools. UNESCO offers four curricula in their Addressing Anti-Semitism in Schools series: for primary teachers, secondary teachers, vocational teachers, and for school directors. These curricula were developed to assist educators globally in training teachers to prevent and respond to antisemitism in schools (UNESCO 2020).

We ask, how do the UNESCO Antisemitism curricula promote academic achievement, cultural competence, and sociopolitical awareness in both Jewish and non-Jewish students? 

 The UNESCO curricula can help promote academic achievement through clear links with existing international curricula and standards, e.g., clear connections to existing social studies and language arts curricula.

 Developing students’ cultural competence requires schools, including institutions of higher education, to teach positive, accurate representation of Jews, Jewish culture, and Judaism, including diversity within the Jewish people. Yet, research suggests that Jews are often omitted from multicultural curricula (Marcus, 2021; Rubin, 2013), or that they may be represented inaccurately, e.g., lumped inappropriately into a “Judeo-Christian” umbrella that is primarily Christian (Joshi, 2006). 

 Developing students’ sociopolitical awareness requires teachers to explicitly teach students how to recognize and understand antisemitism, including ways in which it looks and sounds different from other forms of discrimination. Antisemitism is, fundamentally, a conspiracy theory that Jews hold too much power over, e.g., the government or media (SPLC, 2023). Antisemitic statements, then, may sound different from deficit-based forms of discrimination and oppression, such as anti-Black racism, that position certain groups as inferior (Author, 2022). A culturally relevant curriculum addressing antisemitism should help students understand how and why Jews were scapegoated for economic and political crises in mid-twentieth century Europe based on age-old stereotypes of Jews controlling the economy in particular, and the government more broadly. As Europe, the U.S., and other countries and regions with long histories of antisemitic ideology face economic and political turmoil related to the COVID-19 pandemic, conditions are ripe for scapegoating Jews again rather than addressing the root causes of existing problems.

Our paper addresses the conference them, “The Value of Diversity in Education and Educational Research” by examining how Jews, Jewish culture, Judaism, and antisemitism are addressed in education. Our data for this paper were the four UNESCO curricula addressing antisemitism. These curricula are freely available and posted on the UNESCO website as four documents ranging from 100-116 pages. Curricula cover topics like, “Defining Anti-Semitism” and “What are the diverse ways Jews express their Jewishness, Judaism and Jewish identity?” [note: the curriculum uses the term “anti-Semitism” but we prefer “antisemitism,” which acknowledges that antisemitism refers specifically to Jew hatred, not to general animosity towards “Semitic” peoples. We use “anti-Semitism” when quoting directly from sources that use that form, but otherwise use “antisemitism”]. Many topics appeared across curricula, but were tailored to different settings. Our research team, consisting of two Jewish teacher educators one from the United States and one dual citizen living between England and the US with experience teaching early childhood and secondary education, coded each curriculum according to our theoretical framework. We looked for examples of the curriculum promoting academic achievement through clear links to existing curricula rather than presenting antisemitism education as a separate add-on. We also looked for examples of the curricula promoting students’ cultural competence through positive, accurate representation of Jews, Jewish culture, and Judaism, including diversity within the Jewish people. Finally, we looked for examples of the curricula promoting students’ critical consciousness through explicit discussion of what antisemitism is and how it manifests in different settings. We looked for themes, and for tensions within themes—ways in which the curricula took up the same ideas in different ways (Bogdan & Biklen, 2007) across grade-levels or within the same grade band. Overall, we found examples of the curricula attending to students’ academic achievement, cultural competence, and critical consciousness. Due to space limitations, we focus briefly on how the secondary curriculum offers recommendations for developing students’ critical consciousness since that is often missing from diversity-focused education. In the final paper, we will address all three tenets from across all four curricula.

We found that the UNESCO curricula showed promise in addressing sociopolitical awareness by articulating a need for recognizing bias and stereotypical thinking and by explicitly identifying ways in which antisemitism and antisemitic beliefs manifest, including ways in which antisemitism is both similar to and different from other forms of discrimination. In the secondary curriculum, the authors began by giving a rationale for teaching about antisemitism: ““Research suggests that successful interventions to address biases need first to increase awareness of the problem, such as awareness of the links between unacknowledged implicit preferences or conscious, explicit preferences and discriminatory behavior” (UNESCO, 2020, p. 30). The secondary curriculum identifies explicit elements of antisemitic “narratives” such as conspiracy theories about Jews (p. 6). It offers specific examples of stereotypes of Jews “controlling the world” and “money-grabbing” (p. 84). ​​The curriculum also supports teachers in addressing antisemitism based in the claim that Jews killed Christ. Despite these clear, specific examples, the curricula focus primarily on individual attitudes and actions, e.g., incidents that might take place between students on school grounds. The curricula offer less support for addressing systemic biases or examples of structural Christian normativity in schools, such as organizing the school calendars around Christian holidays like Christmas and Easter (Blumenfeld, 2006).

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