Everyone seems to agree that Israel education is complex. But all too often, the concept of "complexity" becomes a euphemism for the existence of unpleasant truths about Israel that challenge students' preconceived notions. I propose that instead of focusing on cultivating attachment to Israel, Israel educators should offer students an…

Australian Holocaust museums are at a crossroads regarding their exhibitions and educational programming. Originally survivor driven initiatives, they now face the dual challenge of negotiating the loss of the survivor generation and interpreting the goals of Holocaust education in light of their absence. To do so, they must confront the question…

This essay opens on the streets of Rome in 2019 among displays of fascist relics, architecture, and memorial sites. Each display speaks to Italy's violent colonial and fascist history, one that continues to be entangled with and to overdetermine Italy's contemporary restrictive citizenship laws and anti-immigrant policies. Here, Paula M. Salvio…

Over the past decade, scholars from a variety of epistemological and theoretical backgrounds have begun to engage more deeply with history as a form of difficult knowledge. It is difficult to comprehend and can be traumatic for different groups for different reasons. History as a school subject has largely been used as a tool of hegemony by…

This timely book examines how fascist ideology has taken hold among certain segments of American society and how this can be addressed in curriculum and instruction. Vavrus presents middle, secondary, and college educators and their students with a conceptual framework for enacting a critical multicultural pedagogy by analyzing discriminatory…

Convinced of the value of a good textbook as a teaching and learning resource, Alex Diamond set out to understand teachers' thinking about Holocaust textbooks and what it would be for a textbook to represent Holocaust history adequately. As Diamond's discussion shows, this is a multi-faceted issue. Evaluating textbook representation involves…

It is generally agreed that learning about the Holocaust has some impact on students. However, discussions about the nature and magnitude of impact tend to be intuition-based rather than evidence-based. This is exacerbated by studies giving insight into how Holocaust education is related to salient variables rather than studies which demonstrate…

In this paper, we analyse the Second World War (WW2) and the Holocaust as genocide during WW2 as sensitive topics in history teaching as perceived by 719 teachers from Austria, Belarus, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, Serbia and the Netherlands. Using the thematic content analysis of open answers to an online questionnaire we…

This article examines the key category defining multiculturalism in Israeli history education: the representation of North African and Middle Eastern Jewry, aka "Mizrahim." Applying Nordgren's and Johansson's conceptualisation, the article explores the changes in this subject from the establishment of Israel to the present day. The…

Modern historical research challenges religious education by undermining the arguments in favour of the existence of a supreme power who is responsible for patterns of reality. This article explores how the new generation of history textbooks of Religious Zionism, one of Israel's ideologically most influential populations, cope with this dilemma.…

The paper focuses on representations of Shoah and Holocaust terms in selected curriculum documents ("Framework educational program for basic education" and Israeli curricular documents for primary and secondary school education). Emphasis is placed on the Israeli curriculum, which can be considered exemplary in its structure due to the…

New 21st-century circumstances in the Jewish world--including the changing nature of Jewish identification, the retreat from identity and continuity as singular aims of Jewish education, the democratization of Jewish learning opportunities, increased emphasis on informal and experiential Jewish education activities, and demonstrable interest among…

The article explores how the Holocaust is represented in history textbooks for Palestinian pupils in the Palestinian and Arab-Israeli curricula from a pedagogical perspective. Since no mention of the Holocaust was found in Palestinian Authority textbooks, the study seeks to explain why this is so, while examining representations of the Holocaust…

This article explores the relationship between the philosophy of ethics, history education, and young people's historical ethical judgments. In the last two decades, "ethical judgments," which focus on making decisions about the ethics of historical actions, has been acknowledged as a second-order historical thinking concept in history…

This essay explores classroom dynamics when students identify and connect their own painful experiences to structural racism or ethnocentrism exhibited in the Holocaust or parts of Jewish history. The intrusion of this proximal knowledge can be an obstacle to student learning. If engaged by professors, however, I argue that proximal knowledge can…