Sa'ad Khaldi and Trudy Gold
The Failure of Holocaust Education

Trudy Gold | In Discussion with Sa'ad Khaldi: The Failure of Holocaust Education

- Okay, it’s now my great pleasure to introduce my friend and my colleague, Sa'ad Khaldi, and he has presented before. Sa'ad is an extraordinary educator. He has been a head of a school, he’s been a school’s inspector, and he is the only Palestinian person to be an accredited fellow of Yad Vashem. He has trained people in the teaching of Holocaust. He has a fascinating background and those of you who haven’t heard it before, he has talked about it on Lockdown, you can get the programme. But because both he and I have spent so much time in this, and my own background is, I was part of IHRA, I was one of the original British delegates and has spent much of my working life teaching the Shoah, both at home and all over the world, and we felt that it was very important. And although it’s got a very negative title, we’re hoping that we are going to do more than just be negative. And what I want to do first is to read you the Stockholm Declaration. Back in the 1990s, the Prime Minister of Sweden, Pearson, he realised that there still was anti-Semitism in Sweden, and he called together a few other government people. And what they decided to do was to bring together the first ever conference of the third millennium was held in Stockholm, the 29th of January, 2000 and of course, 27th of January is of particular significance because it was the day of the liberation of Auschwitz to actually address the whole issue of can we do something in education to make people more aware and more sensitive to the Holocaust, but not only to the Holocaust, but also to racism. So what I’m going to read now, the conference lasted for three days. It was attended by many heads of states and foreign ministers, educators. The great Yehuda Bauer was the intellectual head of what became known as the Task Force, later IHRA. In fact, Anita Lasker-Wallfisch with her son and her grandson performed at the event. And all I can tell you is that we really did believe there were people from, as I said, many different countries.

The original seven countries were Sweden, France, Israel, Poland, Germany, and Italy. And the belief was that if we in America, if we all came together with the best educators that we could find in every country, that we would make a difference. We’d make people more sensitive. So I’m going to read to you quickly the Stockholm Declaration, which was mainly put together by the great Yehuda Bauer. The Holocaust, Shoah, fundamentally challenged the foundations of civilization. The unprecedented character of the Holocaust will always hold universal meaning. After half a century, it remains an event close enough to time that survivors can still bear witness to the horrors that engulfed the Jewish people. The terrible suffering of the many millions of other victims of the Nazis has left an indelible scar across Europe as well. The magnitude of the Holocaust planned and carried out by the Nazis must be forever seared in our collective memory. The selfless sacrifices of those who defied the Nazis and sometimes gave their own lives to protect or rescue the Holocaust victims must also be inscribed in our hearts. The depths of that horror and the height of their heroism can be touchstones in our understanding of the human capacity, the evil and good. With humanity still scarred by genocide, ethnic cleansing, racism, anti-Semitism and xenophobia. The international community shares a solemn responsibility to fight those evils.

Together we must uphold the terrible truth of the Holocaust against those who deny it. We must strengthen the moral commitment of our peoples and the potential commitment of our governments to ensure that future generations can understand the causes of the Holocaust and reflect upon its consequences. We pledge to strengthen our efforts to promote education, remembrance and research about the Holocaust, both in those of our countries that are already done much and those who choose to join. We share a commitment to encourage the study of the Holocaust in all its dimensions. We’ll promote education about the Holocaust in our schools and universities, in our communities, and encourage it in other institutions. We share a commitment to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust and to honour those who stood against it. We encourage appropriate forms of Holocaust remembrance, including an annual day of Holocaust remembrance in our countries. We share a commitment to throw light on the obscured shadows of the Holocaust. We’ll take all necessary steps to facilitate the opening of archives in order to ensure that all documents bearing on the Holocaust are available to researchers. It is appropriate that this is the first major international conference of the new millennium declares its commitment to plant the seeds of a better future amidst the soil of a bitter past. We empathise with the victim suffering and draw our inspiration from their struggle. Our commitment must be to remember the victims who perished, respect the survivors still with us, and reaffirm humanity’s common aspirations for mutual understanding and for justice.

And I should mention that it has of course been amended and in 2016, there was a working definition of anti-Semitism developed by the Task Force. Anti-Semitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred towards Jews, and accusing Jews of being more loyal to Israel or to the alleged priorities of Jews worldwide than to the interest of their own nations, claiming the existence of Israel is a racist endeavour. Now, Sa'ad as you said to me very strongly, that we live in a world now where there are over 300 Holocaust museums, where Holocaust studies is on the core curriculum in majority of countries. There is a day of Holocaust remembrance. There have never been so many books, even fiction around the study of the Holocaust, believe it or not, things like “The Boy in the Stripe Pyjamas.” You cannot switch through the channels without being assailed by something to do with the Holocaust. So you called it the elephant in the room.

• I did, I did.

• Yeah. But what is that elephant in the room, it’s obvious, go on.

• Well, the elephant in the room is the rise in anti-Semitism and that has certain roots. It has historic roots. So one of the historic roots is due hatred and due hatred goes back many, many centuries. But if we look at it carefully, Jew hatred transformed itself in the 19th century.

• Can we see the next slide?

• Yes, if we could go. A journalist and politician by the name of Wilhelm Marr is the actual creator of the German word antisemitismus, was the word that he came up with. You can spell it with an S or you can spell it with a Z. And he actually created The Antisemites League. He’s a very strange person. He actually married three women of Jewish background. Now, and some were fully Jewish, some were half Jewish. But at the same time he was himself Lutheran and he is the person who transforms Jew hatred. Simple Jew hatred.

• Theological hatred.

• Yes, theological hatred into a form of racist hatred and he says that the Jews are a race, and this is latched onto by the German public, and also to some extent by the science community. So all of a sudden we’ve got eugenics, we’ve got the science of race being created across the western world and we’ve also got a political league. But the bizarre nature of Wilhelm Marr’s life is that towards the end of his life, he regrets what he’s done, but it’s too late. He’s literally let the genie out of the bottle.

• Could you talk a bit more about race, these theories?

• Yes, yes, so from a scientific point of view, race doesn’t exist. We are just homo sapiens, we are just one race. Ethnicities exist and there are actual scientific, valid genetic scientific laws that govern this. But in almost all secondary education, this is poorly taught or not taught at all, or taught in a lightweight way or worst of all because it involves genetics, and in the more advanced form, occasionally a little bit of mathematics and which involved quadratic equations, all of a sudden the politicians got scared. And if you like, probably with anti-Semitic notions, it got suppressed. It’s not even in the national curriculum in our country. So can I turn to the next slide please? So I’m not surprised that we are generating what I call Israelophobia at present. I’ve just been reading this book. It’s a very well-written book. It’s actually written by the editor of the Jewish-

• He’s spoken on, we had him on Lockdown.

• Right, yes. Its, if you like, come to the surface, but it is having an impact within schools. It’s having a cultural impact and you’ve got things like, as you can see in that image, you’ve got the Star of David. And one of the most difficult things that is happening at the moment is that you’ve got young Muslim students, if you like, picking on Jewish students, because they either visibly decide to wear a Star of David emblem or have a way of showing their Jewish identity. But there’s something bizarre about this because the Star of David actually also was a Muslim emblem. So could we have a look at the next slide? This is a historic amulet. It’s to be found in a particular museum. It’s found in, let me just find the name of the actual museum there, push that to one side.

• We believe you.

• Right. Yes, there it is. It’s found in the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology. Now in Muslim cultures, it was either a five pointed star or a six pointed star, it didn’t matter. It’s known as the Seal of Solomon. It’s found almost in every mosque, or it used to be. It’s probably been defaced in many mosques now. But an older generation who were, if you like more, what we call more Sufi, the Sufi generation generally knew their Torah particularly well. They knew the 26 prophets who are in the Quran itself, 23 of which are Old Testament prophets. And they had a sort of binary understanding. And so I find it almost surprising that it’s almost a figure of aversion. But let’s talk a little bit more about the history of the Star of David. So could we have the next slide? David was a king in the Bronze Age. In the Bronze Age, you tended to carry a very large shield. Now I’ve chosen a Greek shield from a Greek ancient history. We’ve got the famous story of the 300 Spartans. Unfortunately, the image that I could find has got the Greek letter lambda, which is more like a sort of upside down Y, the actual warrior is carrying the shield to show that he is a warrior, one of the 300 Spartans who fought with a general who was Leonidas. So it is the letter L in Greek. But David chose to create an image of two inverted triangles and it’s what you did in Bronze Age warfare. You had to recognise your friend from your foe. So it became the warrior image of David, and it became the image of the Jewish people. But because also Solomon is greatly respected and was the son of David within Islamic culture, it also became the emblems, Solomon’s Seal, the emblem of justice within Islamic culture. But it’s also the Star of David in Jewish culture. It is co-culture. It’s as simple as that.

• And the muddle and the lack of understanding.

• Yes, yes.

• What I want to do now is to link what we’re talking about, the rise of Islamophobia and the rise of anti-Semitism and how at the same time, what is on earth has this got to do with antisemite, what has anti-Semitism got do with the Holocaust? And where is the dissonance? Because if you go back to the original thing, I read the… The problem is that one of the main purposes was to fight anti-Semitism and xenophobia through Holocaust studies. And as we said, it’s on the core curriculum, but many, many things have gone wrong. And before we go any further, I want to give you Yehuda Bauer’s causation. You see, we will never, ever, I believe, be able to answer the question, why did it happen? The best we can do is to say how it happened and it’s the why that’s floating in the ether and it’s the why that I think has caused so much pain. And also there’s a huge muddle about what the word Jew means. I mean, you’ve already very succinctly talked about it as a racial thing. But if you think about it, Jews would’ve been regarded right up until the modern period as a nation in exile.

That’s how they regarded themselves and then of course, beginning with modernity, the modern age, Jews were emancipated under the ideas of the enlightenment and in France, they became French citizens of the Jewish religion, in Britain, British citizens of the Jewish religion, the same in Germany, et cetera, et cetera. So the notion was, give up your nationhood and then as Sa'ad has already told you, in the middle of the 19th century, that century of such change and such difficulty for so many people, the rise of nationalism, and as he said, the rise of racism. The question is, can a Jew really be British, French, Italian, et cetera, especially at a time when this tiny minority kind of exploded into modernity. So consequently, there’s a huge muddle and then of course, very much as a response to anti-Semitism, secular Jewish thinkers, outsiders, many of them said, look, the emancipation contract has failed and the word Zionism is invented. And later on in the 20th century, the anti-Semitism is going to lead to the worst catastrophe in Jewish history.

• Trudy, as you know, my father was a historic Palestinian leader. But I am Jewish on my mother’s side and from a European Jewish family, and actually I had conversations, very interesting conversations at Yad Vashem. And though the Jewish side of my mother’s family didn’t follow Herzl’s Zionism, as they are now described as proto Zionists who were culturally still looking at Palestine. They were very, very influential in what occurred in the 19th century before Herzl’s Zionism.

• For sure, because it was the political response that made it happen. But the point was it could only be-

• It was cultural, it was deeply cultural.

• And you see that’s where the word Jew is such a muddle.

• Yes, yes.

• Because is it a peoplehood, is it a religious observance? Is it cultural? Is it nationhood or although you’ve already said, it’s a totally spurious idea, or is it a race?

• But in many people’s mind, Holocaust, the education has been almost set up. It’s been set up in such a way that they’ve sort of looked at it with a simplistic formula and said, well, if we do Holocaust education, then automatically people shouldn’t be anti-Semitic and the issuer has been that it is an important part of young people’s ethical education. But it can be very easily marginalised. You’ve got political radicalization. And when I worked in an official government capacity, because I was for 23 years a senior ofsted-inspector, I was having to track what was happening in schools. I was actually towards the end of where I was working, I was actually tracking extremism in schools and was given that brief. So I have a quite a deep understanding of extremism. And one of the things about extremism is that it’s a two stage process. First of all, you’ve got to be radicalised. So if you are marginalised in any sort of way, then you are probably more vulnerable. And you are open to the extremisms to turning you towards their extremist views. But the other part of the process is that the powers that be must let it happen more. So you can get people who have got extreme views, but if you’ve got good governance, if you’ve got good laws, if you’ve got good enforcement, then it’s not going to happen.

Because you can push against it, you can control it, you can make sure that we have a free society and there is a paradox to freedom. I am free because good laws exist. I am free to cross the road because good laws exist that limit the speed that people can drive at. Therefore, I can cross the road safely. And it is the same in society, so it is a paradox. If you get rid of all laws, you’ve got chaos, you’ve got the wild west and unfortunately the internet, if you like, there are very few laws.

• Yeah, I think it’s very important.

• And so we are now having to cope and we’re having to educate a generation to cope with this paradox of freedom and yes, Holocaust education may seem to fail, but it had a lot successes as well in this country and I think it still has an important role to play in generating the ethical mind.

• You see that’s very important and I want you to come onto that later on. But having said that, I’ve had lots of conversations with survivors and tragically many of them now have passed. But their view is that when they go into schools and universities to speak, people feel great sympathy for this little old lady, or this is old man, that’s how they described themselves. And I think the other problem is that the Holocaust has been dejudaised. One of my biggest criticisms of Holocaust education. It’s ripped out of its Jewish context now. Many people are particularly on the extreme left argue for genocide day and they equate the Shoah with Dafür, with Cambodia and any other atrocity. Now we’ve got to be very careful here because every one of these atrocities are appalling. Having said that, they are different with different causation. And I think the other issue is that the years between 45 and 48 are totally neglected in the British school system. They do not know how Israel, in many ways, how many of the survivors went to Israel. They do not know what happened to so many of those survivors who went back to their homes in Eastern Europe and many were murdered.

They don’t understand how Zionism became a majority movement. And the other problem is that they don’t know who the Jews are. They know how the Jews die, but they don’t know how the Jews live. And now it’s more or less, they don’t know how these people live or die. To me, it’s been terribly dejudaised. I always had the luxury of teaching within the context of Jewish history. But that was very, very rare. And the other thing that I think is a huge problem, Sa'ad, is the teachers themselves are ill-equipped to teach something like the Shoah. I mean, Yehuda Bauer came up with certain points of causation and I’m going to read them to you. One of the problems I think in Holocaust education also is we concentrate on the Nazis. There is a fascination, let me read these points though, because these, as I said, are Yehuda Bauer’s points. And he believes you’ve got to understand all of this before you can even begin to teach, you’ve got to understand the history of the Jewish people.

This restless, nomadic, people persecuted from country to country to country in the western world, mainly for religious reasons. I mean, I’ve just come back from Salzburg and I was enjoying Hoffman , “The Tales of Hoffmann.” And of course, one of the characters talks about the evil Jewish money lender. It’s so much a part of European culture and I’m sure many of you know there’s not a positive image of a Jew anywhere before the enlightenment and then Lessing’s play, the first play fails ‘cause no one can imagine a Jew as a hero then. So he says the 2000 year old Jew hatred, the negative stereotype of the Jew, then he talks about the great success story, the visible success story in the 19th century, which conflates with the rise of nationalism, which we’ve already talked about. Social Darwinism, Wilhelm Marr.

• Yes.

• Also the late unification of Germany, World War I and the ramifications of that. We have to take on board just how devastating World War I was.

• Yes, can I come in there on World War I because we had Jews actually fighting on both sides.

• As Brits and as Germans.

• And in Germany, the High Command actually had a Jew count. It’s called the Judenzählung. And the generals in charge insisted on counting how many Jews they had because could they be talking to the enemy?

• Yeah, you see, this is the problem. And if you think about it, a hundred thousand Jews fought for Germany. 35,000 of them won the Iron Cross over the years 'cause I’ve been teaching since the early 80s.

• Including Anne Frank’s father.

• Yeah, I mean, I’ve seen so many people bring their father’s Iron Crosses in, they were German. And then of course, but also I think when you’re dealing World War I, the brutality, the cheapening of life. And then of course, what happened in Weimar, economic, social, political collapse, the need of a scapegoat, and then the election into power of Adolf Hitler and I think for anyone who believes in the enlightenment or used to believe in the enlightenment, that is for me, the most painful because Germany was probably the best educated nation in the world. Certainly the most cultured. And this is the sort of thing educators have to grapple with. Also the indifference of the world to what was happening to the Jews. And this is so important in order to understand Israel. One just has to think of the Évian Conference of 1938, A total war which masks that terrible monstrosity. And then Bauer adds these two clauses, modern technology, modern bureaucracy. Now for a teacher to be able to absorb all of this in able to teach younger people is absolutely extraordinary. So the point is, my problem with Holocaust education and Holocaust museum, I think quite often they’re well-meaning, but what I’m observing is the dejudaisation, and the other point, of course the role of Israel. Because in 1967, Israel won a victory. And as Roth wrote, if Israel had lost, blankets would’ve been sent to the thirties to thousand surviving orphans. Now I know you’re three quarter Palestinian.

• My father actually surrendered the city of Jerusalem to the three Israeli generals. But afterwards, he actually knew one of the generals personally. He’d been something of an acquaintance, a friend, as they developed a very strong friendship afterwards. And he had actually fought with Jewish soldiers in the Second World War and the regiment that he belonged to, 40 members of that regiment became Israeli generals. Most of those Israeli generals knew my father. It’s quite ironic, and for a brief period of about five years after the 67 war, there was an enlightenment period. Palestinians opened their homes to leading Jewish intellectuals and vice versa. There was just a sort of brief blossoming, and particularly on the West Bank and encouraged by people like my father and other Palestinians, some 12,000 Palestinians actually served in the British army. So it’s strange that we’ve gone through and all the misinformation that goes on nowadays.

• Can I ask you a question? And it must be so painful for you because nobody can deny that a tragedy happened in the Middle East in 1948, 49. To what extent do you believe that the other Arab nations were culpable?

• They were quite culpable and they were self-interested. And if you like, almost Palestinians were used as pawns, and particularly the Palestinians who weren’t middle class or educated. So they were the ones who were pushed into refugee camps, initially out of a sense of welfare. But the welfare then deteriorated because they were forced to sign up as refugees and officially be stamped as refugees and they were never ever allowed to forget that and places like the Lebanon then pass laws. There were about 75 professions that you could not practise if you were a Palestinian refugee and that was by law in the Lebanon. So there was huge discrimination. They wanted them to stay in the camps, they wanted them to be a sort of weapon against Israel. There was this total rejection, and it was only the Palestinian middle class that escaped. And they mostly escaped to the Gulf and actually became lecturers and teachers and so on, and helped to set up the Gulf states. But again, when they were there, they weren’t allowed citizenship. They weren’t allowed ever to become a citizen of a Gulf state. That level of discrimination was… And so ultimately, many of them ended up fleeing to America because they could speak, the one thing that they got out of the British was the British education. So because they spoke the lingua franca of the West, they have now become a Palestinian diaspora. The Palestinian diaspora is now almost as large as the Jewish diaspora, it’s ironic.

• Okay, so we both agree, that you believe the Shoah should be taught, but you do believe there’s an awful lot of problems.

• Yes, well, there are issues. It’s only taught in this country over a period of about half a term or six weeks, you’ve got about two lessons a week. That’s about 12 lessons. How are you going to squeeze, if you like, or the best head teachers will lead on that and say, this is an ethical issue and I will not allow my students to forget this issue. Write the way through their secondary education.

• Is there a way, is it too late-

• But only the best in education-

• Yeah, I know and is it too late because Israel’s now become the pariah of the world, this association that I just… Come on.

• Well, it’s become the focus. It becomes the focus in news and you’ve got the radicalization. You’ve got people immediately jumping on the bandwagon. You’ve only got to have a look at what recently happened in Southport. And we’ve got Musk and Twitter, X or what you call it, saying that, oh, we’ve got an English civil war because of all of that misinformation and those riots that did occur. But actually the rioters mainly rioted against the police. So it was bizarre, the rioting itself. And they were mostly people who use the internet, some of them were drug dealers to be honest or minor drug dealers. They’re on the fringes of society. But as I said, the whole business of extremism, you can be radicalised. But will the state allow you or institutions allow that to affect society?

• Well, it does seem.

• So you’ve got to create that protection and that’s where we have to be vigilant. And extremism is very subtle, it’s like a sea. Sometimes it’s high tide. Now at the moment it is high tide. It’s almost neat tide, it’s the most aggravating spring or autumn tide. It’s practically flooding the land and then sometimes it’ll go out to be low tide and you’ll think to yourself, well, why is anybody bothering? And I think that’s where you need to be, if you are in a leadership role, you’ve got to be vigilant. You’ve got to realise that the tides can change. Extremism can go from one extreme to another, from a very low level where you almost don’t notice it, next minute you are on the front line.

• Well, this is what’s happening now.

• Yes, this is what’s happening now.

• We’ve got a tsunami.

• Yes, yes.

• And what attracts people to extremism?

• Well, the classic phrase is radical loners. But you’ve got to try to integrate into society and then somehow be rejected and feel rejected and then the extremists bring you in. Like they’re fissures and they bring you in with their nets and give you validation. But that’s the classical form.

• So you are talking about that being a real problem in Holocaust education now.

• So to sum it up, I’m saying to you, I think it’s being dejudaised, particularly by the left. I think the other problem is this extreme left view that all the evils in the world are being created by white colonials and to see Israels as a white colonial-

• The one thing I find in British education that’s missing is scientific teaching that race doesn’t exist, ethnicity does and there are scientific laws about ethnicity and genetics, but they’ve just been brushed to one side. We’re supposed to have a national curriculum, but it’s not that. It’s like a photocopier. We’re just producing another generation of races and even in public media, the place like the BBC, some leading journalists talk about race actively.

• So okay, we’ve pinpointed the issue.

• Racism exists, but races do not. We are just simply the human race.

• And I should point it out in his first career, Sa'ad is actually a scientist. So let’s try and pull this all together now 'cause we were talking about has Holocaust education failed? I think if one of the aims of the Stockholm Declaration was to fight anti-Semitism, I mean, what did Jonathan Sack say? First they hated our religion, then our race, and now our nation. Then it’s failed. You are saying though, it still could work in terms of ethical, if it is probably the one place on the . Having said that you can’t dejudaised the Shoah. I don’t think either of us want that. There are parallels in human behaviour. That’s where you can go into the universal. But do you want to talk a bit more about, no, let’s give them a bit of hope. Let’s talk about…

• If I could have the next slide please. Hannah, may I have the next slide, thank you. What is missing is teaching about something called Hardy Weinberg. Now Hardy Weinberg, in science teaching, Hardy Weinberg is how we create ethnicities. Now ethnicities do exist and probably a typical nation because we’ve got what about 200 odd members of the United Nations, 200 nations, typically, a medium sized nation has got 40 ethnicities. There are 22 ethnicities in the Arctic alone and that was confirmed by the British Museum just a year or two ago when they did their Arctic exhibition. So how do they form? Well you form, if you like a community, a very large commuter, a large population. And if that population becomes stable, there’s no gene outflow. Nobody comes in if you like, and no natural selection, no new mediations, scientifically random meeting occurs, and normal birth and death rates. And then all of a sudden that population coalesces, it develops a culture and it develops a very often language. So you get an identity. So we might talk about the Welsh. Actually, ethnically the Scots are about a combination of… The Welsh are largely Celtic. If you go to Cornwall, people were at one time largely Celtic. So you get ethnicities across the whole. There are four and a half thousand ethnicities, we think. Nobody’s bothered to do a proper study. But we think the number is about four and a half. Typically a country has got about 40 ethnicities. So actually for even a country to be united is difficult. So we start talking about Yorkshire and Lancashire and in this country we’re a whole blend of ethnicities and our cities are. And when I was a head teacher, we did a survey of how many languages we had in London schools. And given that London schools have got a population from across the world, we surveyed home languages, we had 210 home languages that were being spoken in London schools and obviously we’re teaching them in English. But their home language may not be English.

• Is that a problem in education?

• No, well, it’s a challenge, it’s not a problem. It’s a challenge and we’ve got to relate to that. So, these things. But what’s missing, I’ve never seen a politician who’s had the courage to put the genetic basis of Hardy Weinberg into the national curriculum to explain that to pupils, to explain that we’re racist don’t exist.

• Okay, but can we go on to, I think, 'cause I want to give a bit of hope. I want you to talk about the Gardner now, can we?

• Yes, yes, could I have the next slide, please? Right, well, a long time ago I read a book when I was at Yad Vashem, it had just been published. “The Holocaust is Over, We Must Rise from its Ashes,” it’s written by Avraham Burg, who was the speaker of the Knesset. He was speaker for the Labour Party when the Labour Party was in power.

• But the Jews must not define themselves by the Holocaust.

• Exactly, but that there must be a transition.

• Yeah.

• And I remember listening to the chief rabbi of Minsk talking about how much over identification there was via the Holocaust with Judaism rather than the religion itself. How it had become a modern trend and the primacy of what it meant to be Jewish rather than through Holocaust identity.

• So really you’re saying the Shoah is to be taught to the non-Jewish world.

• It needs to be taught ethically. It’s about ethical education. It’s about understanding how extremism can rise up, how that tide can suddenly go from low tide to tsunami.

• Okay, go on.

• Thank you, next slide please. I was involved in a minor way in supporting the revision of our Holocaust galleries. Every year I was attending as a fellow for five years helping James Bulgin, who was the lead person. And our Holocaust galleries have been totally revised with a view to what is authentically Jewish, what is additional information and these are differentiated within the galleries itself. And the galleries opened, I was there when it opened. There’s my ticket. The gallery’s opened in 2021. They’ve done a wonderful job in terms of, and the children who are fortunate enough to visit the galleries, but we try to put it across two floors. So we got one floor about the Second World War, but the other floor, we deliberately created a space so you can look down and look up-

• And also, it’s about Jewish life before. And that’s important.

• Yes, yes. And we even have a DVD that we can send out to schools, which is called the “Way We Were.” What Jewish life was about before the Second World War.

• And you see that’s part of giving the Jew back.

• Yes, that is the very best-

• Because I want to open for questions, but I do want your last slide.

• Go on, please.

• Next one, Hannah, if you don’t mind.

• Right, we’ve done research. There’s a lot of it and there’s an over focus on Hitler. That’s the main message, so next slide please. Thank you, one of my father’s great friends was Amos Oz and they used to meet at the Hebrew University and my father could speak fluent Hebrew as a Palestinian leader, but he deliberately registered to do advanced Hebrew lessons.

• I’m going to call you . Sa'ad believes that every student should be studying Hebrew. Don’t you?

• Well, I think it should be on the curriculum. So you’ll come up with one of my recommendations.

• Of the British curriculum.

• Next slide, please.

• I can’t see that happen.

• Next slide, please, Hannah.

• Can they all see this?

• Well I’m going to try and explain it to you. In 2008, a remarkable book came out. It was published, well, it was written by the professor of education of Harvard University.

• Of German-Jewish origin.

• Oh, right, Howard Gardner, who I am a great admirer. He’s the person who gives you multiple intelligence theory. And he tried to predict what it would mean to educate a child into the 21st century. And he comes up with this idea of five minds for the future. And one of those minds is the ethical mind. You have to develop the ethical mind. And he even predicts that we’re going to be snowed under with fake information. He is writing in 2008 telling us what is going to happen and we’re flooded with it.

• And the point I think is that it’s Holocaust education more than anything else, which is the place for ethical education and that’s the whole point.

• And continuing ethical education. So he comes up with these five minds, the disciplined mind, the synthesising mind, the creative mind, the respectful mind, and the ethical mind and he says, it doesn’t matter what country you are in, you’ve got to shape your curriculum so it reflects your society, the needs of your society and these five areas.

• So basically what we’re saying is that it’s failed at the moment. If we hoped out of it, to an extent, if we’d hoped out of it that it could help fight anti-Semitism and racism because anti-Semitism has taken shape, I believe it’s broken the Stockholm Declaration into anti-Israel propaganda. And that’s not saying that there isn’t sometimes a case to answer in Israel, by the way. Having said that, it’s the biggest question now is how on earth do you get governments to see they’ve got to change the system. And on that note, we’re going to open for questions, aren’t we?

• Oh, well, I have got recommendations.

• Go on quickly, recommend, go on, yeah.

• Next slide please, thank you.

• So I have got six recommendations, which I’m going to read out to you. First Holocaust teaching, particularly for older students, needs to start with Wilhelm Marr. There’s a wonderful short, and I’m talking short in terms of five, 10 minutes on YouTube about Wilhelm Marr by Moshe Zimmermann. It gives you a very brief biography and it also allows students to see how it’s transformed into racism and it actually, to some extent, you’ve got tracks which you can see in terms of Hitler’s writings, which are copied from Wilhelm Marr. Schools need to address community cohesion. We have moved into an era where all the funding was taken away. That funding was taken away to have a project called Prevent, but Prevent was hated by certain communities because you got reported to the police and other authorities. And we really need to focus on bringing communities back together. We need to amend the science teaching. I’ve talked about that. We’ve got to uphold Holocaust institutions with governments under a lot of pressure now, particularly budgets and funding. We’ve seen tapering funding. But one of the ideas that I’ve come up with is start teaching modern Hebrew in schools. You know, it’s a modern language. It was created prior to the creation of the state of Israel and it was created out of an essentially religious language. Jews did not speak Hebrew to each other. They spoke the local language or a Jewish version of the local language. And actually in Palestine, they were to speak Aramaic, and we’ve got to promote, and that way we can get cultural understanding of Israel. We’ve got to guard against IT much more. You’ve got to make it an additional duty on governors if there is a crisis, a student is going on the internet, the tutor finds out, we’ve got to create a support register. We’ve got to get them away from the extremists. And we’ve got to, particularly with older students, understand truth and reconciliation, have much better knowledge of Israel-Palestine and I’m happy to go into schools. I’ve already started to do that, work with sixth form students.

• Look, I think in a way we’ve just started the dialogue. Thank you, Sa'ad, and Hannah, can we look at the questions, if you don’t mind.

• Trudy, Sa'ad, I just want to jump in quickly and just say thanks for an excellent presentation.

• Wendy, what did you think of his last point about truth and reconciliation commission as a South African? Because it worked there, didn’t it?

• Well, we have to bring Dennis David in. I think it definitely had some success without a doubt. But I just wanted to add, Sa'ad, and actually it’s time to have another Lockdown university presenter dinner. At one of our dinners, I have a very close friend of mine, her name is Leslee Udwin. She did a documentary, or she produced a documentary called “India’s Daughter,” which I would highly recommend and to everybody who’s on online. And she was a producer, a journalist and now after researching what went behind the rape of that Indian girl, do you remember a couple of years ago?

• Yes.

• She spent two years working with psychologists and clinicians to see what it was that created a generation of men that were so inhumane and she came up with a theory and she’s developed a programme and I am going to get her to talk on Lockdown. I’ve been threatening for a long time to do it and we keep shifting it. But I want to introduce you to her and basically the bottom line was that children between the ages of three and six who are not exposed to compassion and ethics and love lose that neuro pathway and have no conscience. Are able to justify certain behaviours. So I think in terms of education, I think it needs to start much younger.

• That’s interesting .

• I think Holocaust education is starting too late. So maybe education needs to be started when the kids are still very young, but integrated into a syllabus and we’ve got so many brilliant people who are also so many brilliant listeners who are on our programme right now. Maybe we could ask them to write in ideas because right now we are really at a crossroads.

• I think Wendy, you are totally right. We’ve got enough people now around on Lockdown and friends and all the rest of it. We’ve got to the stage now where we’ve got to have a shot at it because frankly, the syllabus just isn’t working. We’re not creating the kind of society we dream of.

• It’s not reaching, as Sa'ad said, it’s not reaching the population it needs to reach. And I read somewhere, I have to get my statistics right, but over 50% or more, 60% of young teenagers and young adults in England have never ever heard of the Holocaust.

• Well, they by law should have encountered it as secondary students. So by the time they are 14, they should have had this six weeks of teaching. But it is only 12 lessons. As I said, in the best schools, it continues, it’s all the way through. But in the most challenging schools, it’s just residual. And it’s shocking.

• And do you know the other problem, Wendy, is that it’s so difficult to teach.

• Yes, it’s a matter of training teachers, of equipping them with good materials and they have to be up for the challenge. What makes a good teacher? Well, it’s also personality sometimes.

• Yes, you see teaching is very much… It’s downgraded against the other professions. And not only that, we used to run a lot of teacher training, Wendy, but that was when schools would release teachers. And now because of government cutbacks, it’s almost impossible.

• Yeah, it’s more difficult, yes. Schools almost have to pull together to create possibly one day when they can get things to happen. But I’ve worked with some good, well it’s the better schools that create a good collective, they help each other out.

• [Trudy] And there are magic, there are still pockets of excellence and magic. But unfortunately it’s a bit of a tsunami, as you said. But I think your point about younger education, having someone on to talk about this because in a way, it’s important that Lockdown become a bit activist.

• And it’s about storytelling with younger children, empathetic stories.

• [Wendy] That’s right, that’s right.

• It’s about paving the way.

• Yes.

• It’s about paving the way.

• Yes.

• [Wendy] She’s developed an excellent programme called Think Equal. And I’m going to call her again tonight. I’m going to set up a session for Lockdown.

• Perfect.

• [Wendy] And Sa'ad I’d love you to meet her when I’m next in London, we’ll all get together. So that’s enough from me, I’m going to hand over back to you, sorry about that.

Q&A and Comments:

• Thanks, Wendy, okay, I’m looking at Mernev’s question. I understand that many programmes have been named Holocaust and Genocide education.

• Well, yes, given the title, there is so much there that you can’t… The title, it’s only if you like a headline, it can’t pretend to deliver all of that. I could end up studying for my whole life and I would never get to the bottom of many things. So, what I would say, Yad Vashem has actually documented, an amazing achievement, four and a quarter million Jewish lives. They have detailed family histories now of four and a quarter of the six and a quarter million. So, and they’re still working at it.

• But that’s another issue. What will happen when the survivors pass?

• Yes, a slight misunderstanding.

• Can you read the question?

• Well, may we please see that quadratic equation of anti-Semitic, it isn’t a quadratic, it’s a quadratic equation that is sometimes used to explain genetic effects. And that’s what the Hardy Weinberg law and principle is able to explain. So if I can just show you a very simple effect with my own face, I can roll my tongue like this. Other people can’t, they aren’t able. And it’s a single gene that you either inherited it or you don’t, and your tongue remains completely flat. So you are a roller or a non roller and the Hardy Weinberg equation can quadratically, using very simple algebra, predict how many children in a class can actually, as a rough prediction, roll their tongues or not roll their tongues. It’s fun in a classroom, it’s not difficult.

• Oh, what have I done, I just lost.

• Okay.

• Okay, there’s a couple of questions on Germany. Francie, I feel it ironic today’s lectures on education to minimise anti-Semitism when apparently it hasn’t worked in Germany as evidenced by yesterday’s election. Sheila, the areas where the extreme writer are actually getting large representation in Germany are in former East Germany and during the existence of… Germany was a communist state behind the Iron Curtain and the focus of the Soviets defeating fascism, memorials didn’t mention. I think this is such an important issue that rather than talk about it, I think we should have-

• Well, I can offer-

• There’s a lecture on that.

• Yes, I agree, just a simple explanation. Yes, correct, its happened in, particularly in the former communist areas, and Holocaust education be much, much more successful in what was the former West Germany. There is a declining birth rate in East Germany. And when a large number of immigrants came into Germany, they were dispersed across Germany. So they are seeing many young people who are immigrants and they are an elderly generation. They have very much fewer young people who they can immediately identify with and that you’ve got the rise of the AFD.

• Yes, I think we will have a-

• But it’s a complex, yeah, yeah-

• It’s very complex. I’ve just got back from Munich and Salzburg and boy, I’ve got so much to say about that. Now this is , yes. This is from Judith, who is a Holocaust educator, at Generation to Generation and the Northern Holocaust Education Group, we always speak about our parents’ lives before the Holocaust. Last year’s HMD theme was the fragility of freedom. This was an excellent message, which I should keep to, meeting a Jewish person helps combat anti-Semitism.

• Well, yes.

• Does it?

• Because well actually, if having been an inspector across practically all of English schools, I could have grouped schools into three groups. Those who are multicultural, those who are not only multicultural but have to be actively anti-racist and those who are, if you like, almost they’re living in little England, they don’t encounter anybody of any ethnicity other than their immediate surroundings. And so they’re monocultural and you got these three groups and hopefully, the purpose of the national curriculum was to make schools more multicultural.

• We did have lovely dreams, didn’t we?

• But yeah, it hasn’t succeeded.

• Yeah, but we’re not going to give up. This is from Sharon. I’ve been trying for almost a year to incorporate anti-Semitic awareness training alongside Islamophobic Awareness month in October without success, how can we include modern anti-Semitism awareness and education?

• Right, well you can do it through… Sometimes you can do it very subtly through art.

• But then you are talking about the complete syllabus, aren’t you?

• Yes, yes. And I think actually some of these questions are so important. I’m going to keep notes of them because we’re going to have more presentations on some.

• Yes, I could do-

• And Shelby, yes, he did say that Wilhelm Marr changed his mind about his theories. Rod, whilst Holocaust education is important in the fight against anti-Semitism, what I believe is perhaps more important than even critical in the fight is the teaching of Jewish history centuries before the Holocaust. This is what needs to be taught. So the world who better understand, I totally agree with you Rod on this, but the question as Sa'ad has said, it’s time on the syllabus, but I’m going to say something that I find-

• But there will be time on the syllabus if you are teaching Hebrew as a modern language, because you are going to assimilate things about Jewish society.

• There’s a problem and you and I both know.

• And well, but nobody has risen to the challenge at the moment. And I think we need-

• We need activism.

• I did Latin at school, but then when I did it out of some old fashioned textbooks, but I knew that the year afterwards, they bought in the Cambridge Modern Latin course and that revolutionised Latin teaching. So in particularly in schools. So, if good educationalists can focus on how to just get children because it’s an economic skill. If you can speak modern Hebrew, then you can talk, Israel is a modern nation, and the Arab world.

• I can just imagine that, imagine trying to sell that one.

• 20% of Israeli population is ethnically Arab. So, if you want to-

• Tell that to the anti-Semites.

• If you want to talk to them, you’re going to be talking them not only in Arabic but also in modern Hebrew.

• Okay, and the other point I want to know, what really makes me angry Rod, is the majority of Jewish kids don’t know their Jewish history. And actually, I’m going to give myself a plug starting this Thursday. I’m going to teach four sessions on Jewish history. And I know we’ve been doing lots of them. I’m going to do the four overview lectures because if you can get your kids to listen, it will be very helpful because I really think in order to understand today, I want to get over to you before we get off before the Yomtobian, so that Yomtobian we’re going to start a whole new series of presentations. But I just thought it was important to have a shot at it. Now this is from Aria. As a second generation, I’m shocked to learn about a third of the young aged under 35 in the US cannot name even one concentration camp. A failure, yes.

• Yes, a lot of teaching in America. Well, I know science teaching, they do a lot of earth sciences because you are a continent. So they tend to focus on, if you like, the continent of America. I was invited by the American Science Association. I flew to Philadelphia so I know what the differences are. And they are not very okay with Europe. And when they had the Iraq war, they were asked to put their finger on the world map and say where Iraq was and most put their finger on Germany.

• This is from Denise. Mr. Khaldi mentioned that we have laws in place to control anti-Semitism. However, what happens when laws are there, but they’re not even enforced. This is a problem, I think I’m going to say it, I think there is two tier policing and this is also to do with wokeism, but that’s going to be another discussion.

• Policing is a challenge at the moment.

• Sandy liked it and she goes on, or he, Sandy, compounding the effect of the internet is one of the underpinnings of democracy, free speech, which the extremists can abuse because of the very laws that should be providing safety that Sa'ad should be providing. Yes, Tommy, and this is Tommy Kamnoli, who I’m going to be interviewing him on Lockdown. His father, his uncle, I beg your pardon, was in fact Knesset’s boss. He was a great hero who was head of the rescue committee in Budapest. And he said, this is fascinating, since October the seventh, the invitation in the UK to Holocaust survivors to be speaking schools has dramatically dropped off. Is this a teacher’s responsibility? This is absolutely shocking.

• Well, it will boil down to the leadership of the school. I have been a school leader, I’ve been a head teacher, principal, if you like, of a major school and it comes from the top. And you’ve got have the courage.

• It is courage today, isn’t it?

• It is courage, it is courage.

• It unfortunately-

• And what is the purpose of assembling the whole school? Yeah, you give the daily notices and so on, but you are a moral leader. You are a moral leader and its your duty to lead morally and to approach sometimes difficult issues. But I was never going to have an extremist come and talk to my students. I’m sorry, and it’s called boundary management. Sometimes you have to defend your school. There was one case of somebody who I wasn’t going to have and I went to my governing body and I said, look, I am not going to have that person in my school because of their views. Yes, there is freedom of speech, but some of the students aren’t ready for it.

• And I think the other problem is that a lot of people are kowtowed by violence and also they’re bystanders. They’d rather not get involved and we’ve got to the stage where we’ve got to be braver. Now why do some say there’s no such thing as a Palestinian?

• Alright, well, Palestinians are, well, if you like, ethnically diverse. So they have a very strong culture. But because they were essentially an Ottoman province and the Ottomans, if you like, had a amalgamated different ethnic groups. But there is a strong sense of Palestinian identity. And it has been forced-

• There is now, there is now.

• But there is also, as I mentioned to you, that Trudy, now a Palestinian diaspora. It’s almost as large as the Jewish diaspora.

• It’s fascinating, isn’t it?

• Its amazing. People are just not aware of it.

• And this is from Joel, I’m a docent in the Dallas Holocaust Museum. I’ve grappled with this very issue for some time. What would you have me do in the course of my tours. He’s a guide in Dallas.

• Right, right, well, keep guiding, be prepared. I work in a museum. I volunteer in a museum. Yeah, I’m not employed, I’m retired now. But I volunteer two days a week and I get lots of visitors and if you like, I would keep to some extent to the script. You’ve got a team, a script if you like, that you’re there to answer questions and the museum I work in, we answer questions particularly on slavery. So slavery comes up and we answer as openly and honestly. We’ve sat down as a team and discussed this and actually on the Jewish side of the family, my great-great-grandfather was a member of Lincoln’s government. So I think the impetus on the Jewish side was they were working, they wanted to become part of the American government that was fighting against slavery.

• I think what we’re saying is say what you believe to be true.

• Yes, -

• I’m jumping a bit now.

• [Sa'ad] imperative, yeah. Be true to yourself, yes.

• didn’t like it. Anyway, this is from Susan, hi Sue, a friend of mine. Real point that Holocaust educators in school do not have sufficient knowledge of Jewish history. I was astonished to learn that a German friend of mine who taught Holocaust education in German schools thought that Judaism was a branch of Christianity. Nevertheless, I agree with Mr. Khaldi that Holocaust education in schools has an important role to play, especially from an ethical perspective. That’s an interesting point, Susan. Okay, I’m no longer a member of a race, but an ethnicity. No doubt I will suffer ethnicism rather than racism. That’s what I love, I love Jewish humour. Is there any other people? Ruth Deech, hi Ruth, there’s no mention of what in my experience was the biggest cause of anti-Semitism, the teaching of Christianity in schools to young children that Jews killed Jesus. I don’t know what Muslim children are taught. Religious teaching should be revised. Now, Ruth is, remember the House of Lord, she’s such a force for good in education. This, do you want to answer that?

• Well, yes, it varies across. Within state schools I can talk about what children are taught and Muslims pupils are allowed to practise their own religion and very often some of that religious learning is not taking place within schools. It’s taking place in special sessions after schools and in areas controlled by the Muslim community. Now some Muslim communities, there is extremism. I know that there was recent action to get rid of a particular imam in a London borough, south of the river. And if you like, when I was working for ofsted, that was one of my duties was to look for what was going on. And but also to talk to the children themselves. I would interview them, ask them questions. It’s a good conversation, it’s not an interrogation.

• How many people like you though?

• Well, it’s supposed to happen if you are well trained. I don’t know, I don’t know. Well, I have colleagues and and so on, but I’m retired now. But it was about, first of all, making them feel comfortable because children are children. You’ve got to treat them as children. But very gently talking to them, trying to understand what their perspectives are and ultimately if you have concerns, feeding that back to the school saying, look, this is what I found. And you’ve got act on it.

• There’s a lot of cowardice, isn’t there.

• Well, you know-

• [Trudy] We have to go on.

• [Sa'ad] Yeah.

• Too many American school boards have become conservative. They didn’t want their children to be exposed. Moses Zimmerman is well known in Canada, at least in Toronto. He is really interesting radio station in Rochelle, Ontario and other Canadian provinces mandate in teaching of Holocaust in public high schools. Yes, it’s mandated in most of the countries that are part of the IHRA, yeah. Sheila doesn’t think you’ve got any chance of getting a Jewish or Hebrew in . Ideas for young children and Sharon looked idea for young children, cartoon of a young child and how her life is shattered by the Holocaust and how her life leading up to it. Yes, there are ways, and this is Yona, a fundamental problem. Failure to intervene in matters of bullying. Often elementary school system, not only not geared, but in fact are instructed not to intervene in schoolyard oppression. Elaine, I think basically most people just don’t care. It’s a me society and that’s the problem. Let’s just see, I think we’ve got so many, let’s go. Wouldn’t it make sense to get the churches to educate everyone? Well, there are some churches I would not like those to educate, sorry, I mean.

• I was sent to Sunday school. I had a Christian stepfather who-

• You are a muddle of a person.

• Yeah, okay, okay. His brother was the head of the Lutheran church in the Middle East. And there could be within the Lutheran church, some quite antisemitic views.

• And the Methodist.

• He himself wasn’t, yeah.

• Look, this is the problem. The so-called organs of the church. It’s like we’ve got a problem. And maybe out of some of this we can start. Who knows, we’ve got to do something. Roleplaying is a useful educational tool, yes.

• And this is Art Gallery.

• When I was a training teachers, we used South American Theatre. So you’ll have a hot seat and you have a team of people behind the two opposing hot seats and if you want to sit in the hot seat and say something, you touch them on the shoulder and they have to move away and you constantly play that person. So it was an adversarial thing. But if you want to have a theatre of adversity, that’s a wonderful technique.

• Yeah, drama, art. I mean, Peter’s saying are proposing to teach children the contribution of all immigrants over the centuries of to Britain, there’s been lots of dreams of doing something called living with difference. But don’t forget, one of the biggest problems we are facing in Britain at the moment is the poor white working classes, who’ve been completely neglected in anti-racist education.

• Yes and are found in the former industrial areas. So it’s a real issue.

• [Hannah] Trudy, Trudy, we have another lecture coming up.

• Oh my goodness, I forgot. Yes, and its a very important lecture, so I’m sorry. I think we could have gone on for a long time if we hadn’t on, oh my goodness. What I’m basically saying is that I think we should invite Sa'ad back in a couple of months to go further with this. And meanwhile, let’s hope we’ve created a few activists.

• Yes.

• That’s what we need to do now.

• And giving some hope to people.

• Yes, yes, it’s not all. And look, I’m sitting with Sa'ad, who is three quarters. Well, you are-

• Arab, yes.

• Three quarters Arab and one quarter Jewish and he is a man of peace and reconciliation. And so was his father who actually surrendered Jerusalem in 1967. And whilst there were people like him around, I believe in hope. He was the first person to call me after October the seventh. And I want to say that publicly.

• Thank you, Trudy.

• Thank you. So thank you Sa'ad for giving us and for your bravery as well. And God bless everyone and sorry Hannah, we have overshot. I’m so sorry.

• [Hannah] Thank you both so much.

• [Trudy] , isn’t it?

• [Hannah] We’re all good on timing where everything’s perfect.

• Let me just check the next lecture tonight. Mark Malcomson, this is going to be a brilliant series. He is a brilliant educator and as a run up to the American elections over the next couple of months, he’s going to give six presentations on the important American elections, starting with Truman and Joey in 1948. And Hannah, thank you, god bless.

• [Hannah] Thank you, have a good evening and afternoon everyone, bye-bye.

• [Trudy] Bye.