Editorial Standards

The nine-point standard

What every page must meet.

The platform's editorial discipline is organized around nine binding commitments. Every page published on the platform must meet all nine. Pages that do not meet the standard are revised before publication or removed from the public site until revision is possible. The standard exists so that teachers and schools can use the platform's material with confidence that it is accurate, sourced, and aligned with established education standards.

1. Primary-source grounding. Every factual claim is traceable to a primary document, a peer-reviewed scholarly source, a university-press monograph or essay collection, or an established archive.
2. Citation visibility. Citations appear on the page where the claims appear, with sufficient bibliographic information for verification.
3. Partner voice. The platform speaks to teachers, curriculum designers, textbook publishers, and officials as colleagues. The platform does not impute motive, use loaded vocabulary, or treat omissions as conspiracies.
4. Civic, not political. The platform does not reference current events, current wars, contemporary campus controversies, or political figures. The historical record and the educational record are stable across the news cycle and the platform is built to remain useful across both.
5. Historical, not theological. The platform is an educational resource. It does not advocate religious positions. It treats Judaism, Christianity, and Islam with parity and at historical depth.
6. Equal-treatment benchmarking. The platform asks that Jewish history be taught with the same continuity, chronological span, and instructional weight the curriculum already extends to India, China, Algeria, Vietnam, Christianity, and Islam. Parity is the standard the platform applies to itself.
7. Honest scoping. Material in development is marked as in production. The platform never claims to be comprehensive or definitive — it describes itself accurately as curated and growing.
8. Standards alignment. Unit and Topic pages map to specific NYS Social Studies Framework standards, Common Core ELA-Literacy standards, and C3 Framework analytical standards. Teachers in other states can locate the parallel standards from the mapping provided.
9. Last-updated timestamps. Every page carries a visible last-updated date, allowing readers and educators to see when the material was reviewed.

Sourcing and evidence

What counts as a citable source.

The platform's sourcing hierarchy, in order of preference:

• Primary documents — surviving texts of the period, archaeological evidence, epigraphic material, official records, and the manuscript and archival materials preserved in collections.
• Archives — Yad Vashem, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Library of Congress, the National Archives (US, UK, Israeli State, German Federal, French National), the British Library, the Israel Museum, the Center for Jewish History, YIVO, and parallel scholarly archives. UN documents and the records of intergovernmental bodies.
• University-press scholarship — monographs and edited volumes from major university presses (Cambridge, Oxford, Yale, Princeton, Harvard, Chicago, Columbia, NYU, Penn, Johns Hopkins, Brandeis, JPS, Brill, Routledge academic).
• Peer-reviewed journals — the established scholarly journals of Jewish studies, Middle East studies, European history, ancient history, religious studies, and the related disciplines.
• Established educational institutions — the curated educational materials of major Holocaust memorial museums, established Jewish-studies centers, and recognized educational nonprofits (USHMM, Yad Vashem, Echoes & Reflections, Facing History and Ourselves, JIMENA, ANU, Unpacked for Educators where the specific resource has been individually reviewed).

The platform does not cite: Wikipedia, anonymous online sources, advocacy publications presenting one-sided contested material as established fact, content-farm articles, or commercial educational platforms whose source-grounding cannot be independently verified. Tertiary references (encyclopedias, textbook summaries) may be used as orientation but are not cited as the underlying evidence for factual claims.

Voice and discipline

What the platform does — and does not — say.

Historical disagreement

How contested questions are handled.

Some historical questions remain actively debated among scholars. Where significant scholarly disagreement exists, the platform identifies the competing interpretations and cites representative scholarship rather than presenting contested conclusions as settled fact.

Corrections policy

How errors are handled.

Accuracy is the whole point of a source-driven platform, so corrections are welcomed and taken seriously. To report an error, write to editor@makorproject.org with the page, the specific text, and the correction with its source. Every correction is acknowledged and reviewed against the platform's sourcing standard, and substantiated corrections are made promptly.

Corrections are made openly, on the page where the error appeared, with the date noted. The platform does not quietly revise material to hide an earlier version; the record of how the work has been corrected is part of how the platform earns trust. The corrections process is independent of any funding or partnership relationship.

Editorial independence and funding

What pays for the work — and what does not influence it.

The Makor Project is funded by its founder. It carries no advertising and has no funder, donor, or partner with control over its content. No outside party determines what the platform says about any subject in its scholarly purview; editorial control rests fully with the platform.

If that changes — if the platform takes on funding or formal collaboration in the future — the relationship will be disclosed here, and the same editorial standard will continue to apply to everyone who contributes, the founder included.

Use license

How the platform's material can be used.

All original material on The Makor Project — text, design, lesson modules, primary-source curations, and original visual material produced by the platform — is licensed for free educational and non-commercial use. Specifically:

• Educators may freely use, adapt, and integrate the platform's material into classroom instruction at any grade level, in any school setting, public or private, in the United States or internationally. No license fee, no permission requirement, no notification requirement.
• Students may freely use the platform's material for educational projects, research, and personal learning.
• Parents and community members may freely use the platform's material for personal study, family education, and the adaptation of the petition campaign to other school districts.
• Non-commercial educational publishers — including school districts, scholarly bodies, and educational nonprofits — may adapt material with attribution to The Makor Project (makorproject.org). The platform requests, but does not require, notification of substantive adoption.
• Commercial use — including commercial textbook publishers, for-profit educational platforms, and commercial media — requires advance written permission. Write to hello@makorproject.org.

The platform reproduces third-party materials — historical photographs, museum images, archival documents — under fair-use educational practice or under the public-domain or open-license status of the underlying material. Where the platform reproduces material under license from a source, the source is credited and the license terms preserved. The platform does not relicense third-party material; users wishing to reuse third-party material reproduced on the platform should consult the underlying source for the applicable terms.

Linking and attribution policy

How the platform credits and links.

External links. The platform links externally to sources, scholarly works, and curated educational resources that meet the platform's sourcing standard. Inclusion in the platform's links does not constitute endorsement of every position taken by the linked institution; it constitutes recognition that the institution is a legitimate scholarly or educational source on the specific subject under discussion.

Banner credits. Every Unit, Topic, and reference page carries a visible credit line for the banner image used on the page. The credit identifies the image, the creator or source, the date of creation where known, and the license status (public domain, museum collection, photographer credit, etc.).

In-text attribution. Scholarly works are attributed in standard citation form on the page where they are referenced and in the citation list at the bottom of every Unit and Topic page. Quotations from scholarly works are kept brief and are clearly attributed.

Image and object provenance. Where the platform reproduces images of historical objects (manuscripts, archaeological finds, ritual objects, photographs), the provenance is given — the holding institution, the catalog number where available, the date of the object, and the geographical origin.

Submissions policy

How outside contributions are handled.

The platform welcomes scholarly correspondence, source recommendations, and material contributions from educators, scholars, and partners. The platform does not currently operate as an open-submissions publication; all material published on the platform passes through the platform's editorial review under the nine-point standard.

The platform welcomes the following:

• Source recommendations. Scholarly suggestions for primary sources, scholarly works, or archives that should be incorporated.
• Lesson plan contributions. Lesson plans and pedagogical material developed by working educators, submitted for editorial review and possible inclusion in the platform's library.
• Topic recommendations. Suggestions for Topic pages, expanded coverage areas, or modules the platform has not yet developed.
• Corrections. Factual corrections — see the Corrections Policy above.

All submissions are reviewed by the platform's editor. The platform reserves the right to decline contributions that do not meet the editorial standard, with the reasons for declination communicated to the contributor where possible. Contributions accepted for publication are credited to the contributor with the affiliation disclosed.

Submit to editor@makorproject.org.

Accessibility statement

Commitments and ongoing work.

The Makor Project commits to ongoing improvement of accessibility for users with disabilities. The platform's current accessibility commitments include:

• Semantic HTML. Pages are built using semantic HTML5 structure to support screen readers and assistive technology.
• Alt text. Substantive images carry descriptive alt text where the image carries pedagogical content. The platform's commitment is to provide meaningful alt text rather than placeholder text.
• Color and contrast. The palette is chosen to give readable contrast for low-vision readers, and is reviewed as the site grows.
• Keyboard navigation. The platform's navigation is operable by keyboard.
• Text-based core content. The platform's substantive content is delivered as text rather than as image-embedded text, allowing screen-reader access and user-controlled text scaling.

The platform acknowledges that accessibility is an area of ongoing improvement rather than a completed achievement. Users encountering accessibility barriers are invited to write to editor@makorproject.org with specifics, which the platform treats with the same priority as factual corrections.

Privacy

How reader data is handled.

The platform does not collect personally identifying information from readers beyond what someone chooses to share through email or a subscription form. It does not sell, share, or trade reader data. If lightweight, privacy-respecting analytics are used to measure aggregate site usage, that use is disclosed here. Questions about privacy can be sent to editor@makorproject.org.

Copyright

Image and source rights.

The platform reproduces historical photographs, museum images, and archival documents under public-domain status, open licenses, or fair-use educational practice, and credits each source. If a rights holder believes a specific use is not appropriate, they are invited to write to editor@makorproject.org, and the platform will review the use and respond.

Last updated: June 2026.

Keeping the standards current

How the standards themselves are maintained.

These standards are reviewed at least once a year, and sooner if the platform's structure or circumstances change. When they are revised, the page's last-updated date reflects it.