I didn’t learn about the Holocaust from a textbook. I learned it from the silence in my grandparents’ voices, the missing names in our family tree and the stories of ancestors that ended without explanation. Being a Jewish teenager in 2025 means knowing that genocide isn’t ancient history; it’s recent memory. And watching antisemitism rise again isn’t shocking. It’s familiar.
Right now, antisemitism is continuing to explode on college campuses. Students are chanting “From the river to the sea” and waving signs defending Hamas. Professors are posting conspiracy theories. Jewish students are getting assaulted, harassed and told they deserve it. This isn’t a campus culture war, it’s open hate.
In response, President Donald Trump did what no one else was willing to do: He took real, measurable action. During his first term, in 2019, he signed an executive order applying Title VI civil-rights protections to Jewish students, forcing colleges to take antisemitism seriously or lose federal funding. That wasn’t symbolic. It was a concrete step that made schools suddenly accountable for what they’d ignored for years.
When Columbia University allowed antisemitic protests to escalate over the last 18 months without consequences, Trump responded by cutting funding. This isn’t just about one school; it is a warning to all of them. If you enable antisemitism, you lose support
Still, the outrage on campuses didn’t start in college. That’s the part no one is talking about, and it’s where the real failure lies. By the time students get to institutions of higher learning, their views on Jews, Israel and the Holocaust are already shaped. And in most American schools, those views are shaped by silence.
Holocaust education in the United States is broken. In a 2020 survey by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, also known as Claims Conference, 63% of American young adults, ages 18-39, didn’t know that 6 million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust. Nearly half couldn’t name a single concentration camp. One in 10 believed Jews caused the Holocaust. That’s not a knowledge gap. It’s a national scandal.
In many schools, the Holocaust is a brief sidebar in a textbook. One class period, a few images of barbed wire and a sentence about “Never Again.” Students don’t learn how Adolf Hitler rose to power legally, how propaganda turned neighbors against one another or how entire bureaucracies were built to erase a people. Students aren’t taught that genocide happens in steps—slow, quiet and fully documented.
Worse, young people are rarely taught how those same warning signs—dehumanizing language, conspiracy theories, mob violence—are showing up again. So when students see mobs outside synagogues or professors calling Hamas “freedom fighters,” they don’t connect the dots. Instead, students repost and cheer; not necessarily because they are hateful, but because they were never taught how to tell the difference between activism and hate.
That’s why now is the moment to fix Holocaust education.
Trump wants to overhaul the Department of Education. If he’s serious about protecting Jewish students, that has to start long before college. We need a national mandate for Holocaust education: detailed, age-appropriate and required in every public school.
It should begin in middle school and expand each year, the same way we teach U.S. history or civil rights. Holocaust education must include survivor testimony, primary sources, propaganda analysis and clear instruction on how antisemitism spreads—and what it leads to.
And just like he did with higher education, Trump could enforce these standards using funding. He already made clear to universities: If you don’t take antisemitism seriously, you won’t get federal support. The same principle should apply to other educational systems as well.
If a state refuses to implement real Holocaust education, it shouldn’t receive federal education funding. It’s that simple. Schools that ignore this issue shouldn’t be rewarded; they should be held accountable.
Right now, we’re trying to fight antisemitism after it’s already rooted. That’s backward. If you want to change how students act at 20, you have to change what they learn at 12.
Democrats say Trump’s actions on antisemitism have been extreme. They say cutting funding or deporting foreign students who glorify terror is a threat to free speech. Maybe those concerns are worth discussing, but the left misses the larger truth: Speech that calls for genocide is not intellectual. And if our campuses are protecting that kind of hate, they’re not places of learning but places of danger.
We need real action and real education. Not one or the other. If we want to stop antisemitism in college, we have to start fighting it in middle school. Not after it’s already too late.