The City University of New York is launching a new faculty fellowship designed to develop and strengthen Holocaust education across disciplines at three of its campuses.
The CUNY Faculty Fellowship on Holocaust Distortion will bring together six faculty members from Baruch, Hunter and Queens colleges for a year of seminars, monthly meetings and experiential learning, including a study trip to Holocaust sites in Poland and the Czech Republic.
The fellows will develop new courses or revise existing ones to incorporate Holocaust history and examine how the Holocaust is represented in academic and contemporary contexts, according to CUNY. The program will culminate in a 2027 spring summit showcasing the new courses and teaching approaches.
The initiative aims to address what CUNY describes as the growing problem of Holocaust distortion, including the minimizing, exaggeration or misrepresentation of Holocaust terminology, imagery and analogies. CUNY said the fellowship is a first-of-its-kind consortium among the three colleges.
CUNY, despite its name and its role as New York City’s public university system, is funded primarily by New York state. About 60% of the operating funding for its four-year colleges comes from the state, while New York City and the state share funding for CUNY’s two-year community colleges.
The Sandra K. Wasserman Jewish Studies Center at Baruch College is leading the fellowship. Sarah Valente, director of the center and a professor at Baruch, is the project’s principal investigator.
“This fellowship stands to empower CUNY faculty to combat Holocaust distortion through innovative scholarship and firsthand study in Eastern Europe,” CUNY Chancellor Félix V. Matos Rodríguez stated. He thanked the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany for supporting the initiative.
The Claims Conference is funding the fellowship through its Rabbi Israel Miller Fund for Shoah Research, Education and Documentation. The grant is $200,000 for the first year of the initiative, Gideon Taylor, president of the Claims Conference, told JNS.
The nonprofit, which advocates for Holocaust survivors and administers compensation and funds social-service programs, distributed about $530 million in reparations from Germany and Austria to survivors in 2025 and allocated another $960 million for survivor welfare needs, including home care, food and medicine.
“Antisemitism and Holocaust denial and distortion are flourishing around the world,” Taylor stated. “We know all too well how words of hate quickly escalate to acts of violence. The public today—80 years after Holocaust survivors were liberated—worries that something like it could happen again.”
“The Holocaust cannot be a static discipline that is discussed and forgotten,” he said. “We must not only remember the 6 million Jews murdered but also learn from the acts that allowed this horror to happen.”
‘A priority project’
Taylor told JNS that while the Claims Conference funds academic Holocaust research at universities, the CUNY fellowship is the first project of its kind that the organization has supported.
“With everything happening on college campuses” in terms of anti-Jewish hate, Taylor said, “we felt that this is a priority project. We are especially interested in developing infrastructure and capacity” to potentially expand the initiative.
The fellowship is intended to serve as a model that could eventually be expanded to additional CUNY campuses and potentially other universities, organizers said.
The Claims Conference has cited gaps in Holocaust knowledge among younger Americans as another reason for strengthening education. Its 2020 U.S. survey of millennials and Gen Z found that 56% could not identify Auschwitz-Birkenau, while 48% could not name a single concentration camp or ghetto.
“Colleges and universities are so important to shaping the next generation of this country’s leadership,” Taylor told JNS. “The Faculty Fellows project is exciting. And needed.”
CUNY, the nation’s largest urban public university system, has 26 campuses across New York City and serves about 247,000 undergraduate and graduate students.
