“Isn’t the Holocaust when the Jews made everyone hate them and got themselves killed?”

A schoolmate remarked this casually to me during a lunch break. He did not know I was Jewish, so I decided to test his historical knowledge. I asked him how many people he thought had died.

He paused, shrugging. “Umm, like 200,000 or something?”

That is exactly when I knew I was looking at our next politician.

You see, unfortunately, in our reality, my little experience in the high school cafeteria is no longer a rare anomaly. It is a glaring symptom of a much larger and quieter crisis unfolding in our schools, and it’s terrifying to say the least. According to a comprehensive national survey by the Claims Conference, a staggering 63 percent of Millennials and Gen Z do not know that six million Jews were murdered. And it’s even more disappointing to say that 11 percent of my own generation believes that Jews actually brought it upon ourselves.

The American education system has failed us.

It has failed me as a Jewish student. It has failed the six million Jews who were murdered, the 500,000 Roma and Sinti who were killed, and the 300,000 people with disabilities who were wiped off the face of the earth. It has failed our American soldiers who sacrificed their lives and their innocence to free the world from tyranny.

How can the greatest democracy in the world fall so far behind when it comes to ensuring these sacrifices do not fade into a figment of our imagination?

The answer is deeply tied to the specific moment in time we are living in. As of early 2026, only an estimated 31 thousand holocaust survivors are still with us in the US. For decades, their firsthand testimonies in school auditoriums served as an undeniable anchor to the truth. As their voices physically leave us, a dangerous vacuum is left behind.

I have noted before how our generation’s habit of masking hate with internet irony creates a severe blind spot for antisemitism. As my lunchtime conversation proved, this historical amnesia does not stay confined to our screens. It bleeds directly into our real lives, filling the silence left by survivors with casual apathy and misinformation.

I am not entirely sure how to fix the entire educational infrastructure of the country overnight. But I do know a few localized, grassroots methods that actually work.

The most immediate antidote begins with how we educate each other. I do not mean wasting energy shouting into the void of the internet. You are never going to change the mind of Instagram user @hi1lerwasright. However, as a high schooler, I have the distinct ability to understand how other high schoolers think.

Over the past year, I went to several classrooms through the Student-to-Student program to give presentations. I spoke about being a Jewish student, shared our traditions, and gave my peers a chance to hear about the Holocaust from someone exactly their age. I tell them how my own grandparents had to flee their countries due to violent persecution. I also show them a physical book where the word “Jew” is written six million times. Each page has 4,800 words, spanning 1,250 pages. I watch their eyes widen as they physically feel the weight of those numbers.

Then, we shift to celebrating Jewish joy. I let them taste challah, which gets absolutely devoured every single time, with kids eagerly asking where they can buy their own.

When this history and culture comes from a peer rather than a flimsy textbook, students stop treating it as just another mandatory lecture. It becomes a shared human reality. The statistics suddenly have a face.

Yet peer dialogue is only half the battle. We also have to demand more from the institutions where we learn. We cannot sit around and wait for state legislatures to slowly mandate better educational standards (because if we do that, we might as well watch paint dry). You must demand more from your curriculum.

If your history class spends two weeks on the Industrial Revolution and only a passing paragraph on the Holocaust, raise your hand and ask your teacher why. Don’t stop at asking questions; offer to help fix the problem. 

Recently, I approached the lead teacher of our history department about this exact issue. We ended up working together to create a streamlined Holocaust education lesson plan and presentation for classes. He actively wanted a Jewish student’s perspective, and the entire project only took a few hours of work. You can take similar steps. Go to your principal and suggest bringing in recorded testimonies from the Shoah Foundation. Advocate for school assemblies that feature local community leaders or the children of survivors.

Yom HaShoah recently passed, and the obligatory memorial posts have already vanished from our social media feeds. But remembrance cannot be a one-day event that we simply check off our calendars to feel good about ourselves.

Education is the most effective vaccine against hate. 

If we want to make sure our friends remember, we have to keep showing up, voicing our stories, and sharing our challah. We owe it to the past, and we desperately need it to protect our future.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)