As the first state to mandate teaching on the Holocaust and genocide 41 years ago, California has provided funding to initiatives like the California Teachers Collaborative for Holocaust and Genocide Education’s Summer Institute to help educators sharpen their knowledge and insights they need to inform students about these sorts of atrocities.
The program gathered 110 California K-12 educators from more than 75 schools and educational organizations in June for its fourth annual event, where scholars, content creators and survivors presented their points of view, historical lessons, and guidance on how to combat antisemitism and other discrimination.
Among surveyed attendees, 30% had taught the Holocaust or genocides for one year or less, all said they had received resources they planned to use, 98% said they found the curriculum and instructional resources relevant, and 87% felt more confident about teaching the subject matter, according to data from the Jewish Family and Children’s Services San Francisco Holocaust Center, which co-hosted the event.
“If a student remembers that Poland was invaded on Sept. 1, 1939, that’s great. But more importantly, what was the experience of the people when Poland was invaded by the Nazis?” said Morgan Blum Schneider, director of the JFCS Holocaust Center. “And how can I take the lessons of the resilience and the courage of those individuals and apply them today?”
Past attendee Haydee Rodriguez — a history and journalism teacher at Central Union High School in El Centro, California, who has also served on JFCS’ Educator Leadership Council in 2024-25 and 2025-26 — said the experience has helped her to draw parallels to authoritarian regimes that start taking actions like stifling the free press.
When students encounter fringe ideas like Holocaust denialism on social media, for instance, the experience has helped her counter them, Rodriguez said.
“I want them to question. But there are things that are just absolutes for me,” she said. “I went looking for conversations with colleagues and sessions where I could learn to combat misinformation. I feel like I came away with a lot of resources to do that.”
Presenting firsthand accounts and experiences
Rodriguez said she teaches “The Book Thief” — a novel set in 1939 Nazi Germany — even before her class studies the Holocaust. Her aim, she said, is to set a tone and give students a sense of characteristics of authoritarian or fascist regimes — including banning books, harkening back to past national glories, and promoting the idea that “one person can save us.”
“I plant the seeds so that when the students get to the Holocaust, they’re able to identify those patterns: We start losing truth to propaganda, we start losing access to multiple sources” of information, she said.
“We see those patterns in tyranny and authoritarianism over time," said Rodriguez. "I love the stories of the resistance from the sessions I’ve attended at the collaborative." They show "how people are watching these threats, and they’re doing what they can” to push back.
Summer Institute attendees have heard from survivors of the Tutsi genocide in Rwanda, Muslim ethnic cleansing in China and the Holocaust itself, Blum Schneider said.
“We’ve been strategically focused on not only framing people as the victims of the Holocaust and genocide, but lifting up humanity and celebrating peoplehood,” she said. “Whether that’s Jewish peoplehood, Armenian peoplehood, Cambodian peoplehood and so on … their language, food, culture, values, all the different parts that make somebody a person.”
For example, she added, one lesson at the Institute focuses on Armenian Bird Letters, which helps students understand through manuscripts and letter art how Armenians held onto their heritage before and after the genocide carried out by the Ottoman Empire in 1915-16.
For the coming school year, Rodriguez has invited the Los Angeles-based Museum of Tolerance to bring its mobile exhibit to her campus. In addition, she said she plans to continue connecting with her cohort of teachers from the Summer Institute through group texts and get-togethers to yield ideas and resources that sharpen her approaches to teaching, she said.
“That’s one of the highlights of the collaborative,” she said, explaining that it helps combat the isolation that teachers sometimes can feel in their classrooms.
Correction: In a previous version of this article, Morgan Blum Schneider was misidentified. She is director of the Jewish Family and Children’s Services San Francisco Holocaust Center.
