Recent interviews conducted with members of Finland’s Jewish community reveal a profound gap between international guidelines on antisemitism education and the realities experienced by Jewish individuals in Finnish society. Although the 2024 interview study by Czimbalmos and Pataricza shows that Finland, like many other European countries, has not implemented a systematic or context‑responsive approach to teaching about antisemitism, Judaism, and Jewish life. Interviewees described daily consequences of these gaps: misconceptions about Jewish culture, limited awareness of the diversity of Jewish life, and insufficient understanding of antisemitism as both a historical and contemporary European phenomenon. These findings mirror research from Sweden, Germany, and Norway, where Jewish communities similarly report that educational shortcomings contribute to stereotypes and social exclusion.

This proposal addresses the research question: What kind of antisemitism education does Finland need today, and how can art‑based pedagogies, particularly Forum Theatre, respond to these needs? The study aims to identify key educational needs expressed by Finnish Jews regarding how antisemitism should be addressed in formal and informal settings, and to examine the potential of Forum Theatre, a method within Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed, as an embodied, participatory, and narrative‑based approach aligned with UNESCO’s guidelines and the needs articulated in the interviews.

The theoretical framework integrates four interlinked components.
1. Narrative Pedagogy: Interviewees emphasized the importance of personal stories, lived experiences, and cultural visibility in countering stereotypes. This aligns with UNESCO’s emphasis on authentic narratives to humanize learning and promote self‑reflection. Jewish communities across Europe report similar issues of misrecognition; thus, narrative pedagogy offers a strategy suited for diverse European classrooms and helps combat epistemic and affective injustice.

2. Cultural Encounter and Normalization: Respondents highlighted that personal encounters with Jewish individuals reduce prejudice. This need for visibility and normalization echoes findings from other European contexts with small Jewish populations. Encounters grounded in cultural practice, storytelling, and open dialogue were seen as essential to reducing social distance and dismantling othering processes.

3. Practice‑Based and Embodied Pedagogy: Interviewees stressed that education must move beyond knowledge and empathy to equip learners with the skills and confidence to intervene. They linked this to democratic participation, noting that antisemitism (and racism) requires active resistance. While UNESCO acknowledges behavioural competencies, its guidelines remain largely discussion‑based. Forum Theatre, by contrast, offers a practical way to rehearse real‑life interventions, shifting learners from passive spectators to active “spect‑actors.”

4. Holocaust Education: Although central in Finland, Holocaust education is widely critiqued by interviewees and researchers as limited, overly focused on victimhood, and disconnected from contemporary antisemitism. Many students appear desensitized or perceive the Holocaust as distant. UNESCO recommends grounding Holocaust education in personal narratives and societal context while highlighting antisemitism beyond the Second World War.

Both the interviews and wider European scholarship underline the need to integrate cognitive, emotional, embodied, and behavioural learning domains. While UNESCO promotes interactive and experiential approaches, such methods remain underdeveloped in many European systems. 

Forum Theatre offers an interactive structure in which participants move from observers to “spect‑actors,” rehearsing interventions into discriminatory scenarios. Boal’s concepts of metaxis, embodied reflection, and collective problem‑solving make the method particularly suitable for addressing sensitive topics such as antisemitism. Bárbara Santos’ feminist expansion further emphasizes relational and intersectional elements relevant across European contexts.

Taken together, this study proposes that Forum Theatre can serve as a critical pedagogical bridge, responding to the educational needs identified in Finland and offering a transferable model for other European countries. With its emphasis on embodied rehearsal and learner agency, Forum Theatre holds particular promise for shifting students from passive empathy toward active responsibility.

This paper uses a qualitative, interpretive methodology, combining grounded theory analysis of interview materials with theoretical and pedagogical analysis of Forum Theatre. The primary dataset consists of interviews conducted by Czimbalmos and Pataricza with forty two Jewish adults residing in Finland between March and June 2024. Interviews were semi structured and focused on experiences and perceptions of antisemitism, definitions of antisemitism, and suggestions for educational or societal interventions. Thirty eight interviews included references to education. All transcripts were pseudonymized. Grounded theory (Strauss & Corbin 1990) guides the coding and categorization of themes emerging from the interviews. Key codes identified include: the limits of information based education, the role of personal stories and cultural encounters, emotional (mis)recognition and affective injustice, bystander inaction and responsibility, the need to teach the diversity and contemporaneity of Jewish culture and Holocaust education and its challenges. For the coding, NVivo software was used. These themes are compared systematically with UNESCO’s Strategies to Counter Antisemitism (2025) and Training Curriculum for Secondary Education Teachers (2020). The second methodological component is a conceptual and pedagogical analysis of Forum Theatre grounded in Boal (1979, 2006), Santos (2023) and other contemporary practitioners’ researches (eg. Kaptani et al., Alon et al.). The analysis focuses on how Forum Theatre’s structural elements, such as embodied rehearsal, metaxis, spect actor participation, and facilitated dialogue, align with the educational needs identified through grounded theory.

A Map of Educational Needs Identified by Finnish Jews that could be implemented in other European countries as well: Analysis of interview data will clarify what community members view as essential components of antisemitism education. Preliminary findings indicate strong support for: 1, narrative and experience based pedagogy, 2, visibility and normalization of Jewish culture 3, training supporting bystander intervention and 4, nuanced approaches to Holocaust education Findings will highlight divergences between UNESCO’s recommendations and the Finnish national curriculum, which currently lacks explicit content on antisemitism and largely frames Judaism only as a religion rather than a culture. The study articulates how Forum Theatre’s embodied, participatory, narrative driven nature responds to the four educational dimensions that emerged from the interviews: Forum Theatre’s metaxis enables participants to reflect on lived experiences while maintaining protective distance, making it particularly suitable for sensitive topics. The study will propose models for integrating Forum Theatre into (Finnish) schools and teacher training, including scenebased workshops and community collaborations with Jewish organizations. Overall, the expected result is an argument that Forum Theatre has the potential to be the critically needed pedagogical response to contemporary antisemitism in Finland.

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