The Curriculum Gap

The premise

A history with no in-between.

The starting observation is straightforward and can be tested by anyone: open a sixth-grade or ninth-grade or tenth-grade global-history textbook used in a typical American public school and look at how the Jewish people appear. They appear in the unit on the ancient Near East as the Israelites, alongside Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Persia. They reappear, more than two thousand years later, in the unit on the twentieth century as the victims of the Holocaust. The Babylonian exile, the Second Temple, the Talmud, the medieval Jewish communities of Iraq and Spain and the Rhineland, the Ottoman Sephardi diaspora, the Cairo Geniza, the Hasidic world of Eastern Europe, the Jewish communities of Yemen and Morocco and Iran, the founding of modern American Jewish life beginning in 1654, and the long evolution of antisemitism that made the Holocaust possible — almost none of this is taught.

Many of these omissions are not the product of any ideological project. They result from the practical realities of curriculum design: limited instructional time, textbook length, and the challenge of fitting world history into a single school year.

The Makor Project does not impute motive. It documents the pattern and supplies the historical material to close the gap.

Integration map

Where this fits in courses you already teach.

Each column is a course teachers already run. Under it are the Makor Topics that drop into that course's existing chapters — with the chapter they belong to. Where a course has no natural fit, the column is left open rather than forced. This is a guide for integration, not a claim that every page maps to a standard.

NYS Key Ideas (SS.9.1, SS.9.2, SS.9.3…) follow the New York State Grades 9–12 Social Studies Framework. Art History and ELA fits are noted by theme; confirm against your district's specific course outline. Topics not listed in a column have no forced fit there — they remain part of the site's standalone history.

What the gap looks like in practice

Two reference points, no connective tissue.

The shape of the gap is consistent across the textbooks reviewed. Coverage of the Israelites typically runs three to ten pages — monotheism, the patriarchs, the Exodus, the kingdoms of David and Solomon, the Babylonian exile, and a brief gesture toward the Second Temple. Then Jewish history disappears from the textbook until the rise of Nazism in the 1930s. A 10th-grade Global History textbook in active use in New York State public schools devotes a single page to Judaism in the unit on world religions. The Holocaust receives a chapter. Between them, in many editions, there is no Jewish content of any kind — no medieval Jewish life, no Sephardic civilization, no early-modern Jewish thought, no nineteenth-century mass migration, no documented record of how antisemitism evolved from a religious accusation into a racial ideology over a thousand years.

The textbooks currently in use are themselves part of the gap — not as the failing of any single title, but as a pattern across publishers: Jewish history is typically introduced in antiquity, ended at the Babylonian exile, and not resumed until the rise of Nazism. We document specific examined resources, with citations and suggested corrections, in In the Margin.

The Holocaust, when it is taught, frequently begins in 1933 with the rise of the Nazi Party. The roots — early Christian theological hostility toward Jews, the medieval legal architecture of Christian Europe that segregated and expelled Jewish communities, the blood libel, the ghetto system, the development of racial pseudoscience in the nineteenth century, and the long propaganda traditions that the Nazi regime inherited rather than invented — are typically absent. Without these roots, the Holocaust appears in the curriculum as a sudden eruption of unexplained hatred. It was not sudden. It had a beginning. Students deserve to know what that beginning was.

The post-Holocaust period is the second silence. The 1948 founding of the State of Israel, the flight and expulsion of approximately 850,000 Jews from Arab and Muslim-majority countries between 1948 and the 1970s, the Soviet-Jewry movement, the postwar reconstitution of European Jewish life, and the position of contemporary Jewish communities in the United States and elsewhere — these subjects are mostly missing from secondary-school instruction, with the result that students arrive at college with the Holocaust as the most recent piece of Jewish history they have been taught.

The equal-treatment standard

The benchmark is how the curriculum already treats other civilizations.

The Makor Project does not argue for special treatment. It argues for the same treatment New York State and other states already extend to other civilizational and regional histories. The New York State Global History and Geography framework devotes sustained instructional time to the founding of India, to the long history of China and its dynastic transitions, to the development of Islam from seventh-century Arabia through the medieval caliphates and the Ottoman period, to the decolonization narratives of Algeria, Vietnam, and Indonesia. These are taught not as ancient origin stories that disappear after antiquity, but as continuous civilizations whose medieval, early-modern, and modern phases all receive instructional attention. The benchmark for Jewish history is the same standard, applied consistently.

The same applies to comparative religion. The 10th-grade Global History framework's unit on world religions teaches Christianity through its early formation, the medieval church, the Reformation, the Counter-Reformation, the Wars of Religion, and the spread of Christianity through European colonial expansion. It teaches Islam through the Prophet's life, the early caliphates, the medieval intellectual flowering, the Ottoman Empire, and the modern Muslim world. Judaism, in the same unit, is typically covered in a single page or a single class period — origin, monotheism, end. Parity would mean teaching Judaism with the same chronological reach the other two Abrahamic traditions receive.

And not only here

The gap is global, too.

The pattern is not only American. Most national curricula worldwide reduce Jewish history to the Holocaust, and the deeper arc — the medieval ghettos, the expulsions, the centuries of Jewish life — runs thin even in the places where it happened: Venice, where the word “ghetto” was coined in 1516; Rome; the Spain of 1492. Roughly two dozen U.S. states require Holocaust education, and dozens of countries do as well — but almost none specify the fuller history that gives it meaning. See where the mandates stand, and how Makor aligns →

Why it matters

What students do not learn, they cannot recognize.

Two consequences follow from the gap, and both are visible in the discourse that American students enter when they leave high school.

The first consequence concerns the Holocaust. When the Holocaust is taught without a beginning, it presents as historically isolated — a singular event that exploded out of nothing in mid-twentieth-century Germany. This framing makes the Holocaust easier to dismiss as ancient or remote, harder to recognize in its early stages, and difficult to relate analytically to the propaganda, the legal architecture, and the ideological inheritances that made it possible. A century of historical scholarship on the long arc of European antisemitism — from the writings of the early Church Fathers through the medieval blood libel, the expulsions, the Inquisition, the emancipation debates, and the racial theories of the nineteenth century — has produced a documented record. The curriculum does not currently transmit it.

The second consequence concerns the present. When students have learned no Jewish history beyond the Israelites and the Holocaust, they are not prepared to evaluate contemporary claims about Jewish identity, Jewish history, or the modern Middle East. They have not been taught that Jewish communities existed continuously in Iraq, Iran, Yemen, Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, Libya, Algeria, and Syria for more than two thousand years — in many cases predating the arrival of Islam in those regions by centuries. They have not been taught that approximately 850,000 Jews were forced to leave those countries between 1948 and the 1970s. They have not been taught the long Sephardic civilization of medieval Spain, the Jewish presence in the Land of Israel through every century from antiquity to the present, or the arc of American Jewish life from 1654 forward. Equipped only with two reference points and no connective material, students are asked to evaluate a body of contemporary discourse for which they have no historical frame.

The petitions

Two civic petitions, submitted to officials at every level.

The platform began as a citizen advocacy effort. In April 2026, two formal petitions were submitted to roughly twenty recipients across local, New York State, and federal offices.

Both petitions are written in a partner voice rather than an activist voice. They do not assign blame to teachers, textbook publishers, or curriculum designers. They document a gap, propose a remedy, and offer to supply the material to close it. The full submission packages, cover letters, and follow-up correspondence are public.

The legal landscape

What the law requires — and what it leaves open.

Holocaust education is already required by law in roughly half the states — about twenty-five in all. New York is one of them, under Education Law §801, which directs the State to provide curriculum materials and districts to deliver the instruction. At the federal level, the Never Again Education Act, signed into law in 2020, funds the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum to develop classroom resources and train teachers nationwide.

What these laws share is a limit. They require that the Holocaust be taught; almost none specify what to teach, in which grade, or to what depth, and very few reach either the pre-Holocaust roots that made it possible or the postwar decades that followed. None requires a particular set of materials. They set a floor, not a syllabus — which is why a mandate can be satisfied by a single assembly or by a sustained unit, and why the gap this page documents persists even in states that already require the subject. The fuller legal picture — the state-by-state mandates, the federal act, and the international framework — is laid out in The Memory Architecture.

Filling that gap takes no new law. Responding to one of the petitions, the New York State Education Department confirmed in writing that districts already “have the flexibility to incorporate instruction on pre-Holocaust historical context,” and that curriculum decisions are made at the local level. The authority is already there; what is missing is the material — which is what this platform supplies.

What the platform offers

Curated, free, source-grounded classroom material.

The Makor Project is the educator-facing companion to the petitions. It is a curated and growing platform of classroom-ready material — thirty-four Topic pages across six Units, plus a cross-platform reference architecture (Timeline with 140 dated entries, Glossary with 114 terms, Misconceptions reference with 39 entries, Maps, Field Trips, Films & Video, Museum visual essay assemblage, Sources directory, and a dedicated K–5 portal). Everything is grounded in primary sources, university-press scholarship, or archives, and everything is free to use. The platform does not claim to cover everything. The platform describes itself as curated and growing, with last-updated timestamps on every page and in-production placeholders where modules are still being built.

The platform does not replace the existing Holocaust curriculum. It supplements it. It does not replace state standards. It maps to them. The Makor Project is designed to be the source teachers can reach for when they want to teach the material the existing framework leaves out.

The six Units

How the platform is organized · 34 Topics across 6 Units.

The opportunity