A growing number of states now require students to learn this history. Almost none supply a curriculum. State mandates and commissions point teachers to lists of resources and leave the assembling to you.
The Makor Project is different. It presents the whole history as a single, organized online textbook, the complete arc before, during, and after the Holocaust: Jewish civilization and the evolution of antisemitism from antiquity, through the catastrophe, to Jewish life today. Source-based, and built to teach from. That is the gap it fills. See The Curriculum Gap, and where the mandates stand.
Who it’s for. Classroom teachers across subjects, college instructors, and educators in religious and faith-based schools and institutions of all backgrounds; the leaders who shape what schools teach: superintendents, principals, deans, and curriculum directors; and the professionals and community members who need to understand this history and recognize antisemitism, in schools, workplaces, and public life.
Judaism as a living civilization. One of the world’s oldest continuous cultures, and one that does not seek converts, has no central authority, and never spread by conquest. Students meet a people, a language, and a body of law and thought before they ever meet them as victims.
Where the word “antisemitism” comes from. The hatred was ancient and, for centuries, religious; a convert could escape it. In 1879 it was renamed to sound like modern science, and that new name closed the exit. Makor teaches the history of the word, so it carries its full weight in class, not just a definition.
Start hereHow to use Makor
Every Topic page works like a chapter in a textbook you already trust: free, kept current, and grounded in primary sources you can click through yourself. Open any Topic and you will find:
- A readable history. The chapter itself, written to be taught or assigned.
- Primary sources and images. Each with its credit and holding institution, so students work from the record rather than a retelling.
- Further reading and curated materials. The strongest existing work on the subject, from museums, archives, and scholarship.
- Questions for discussion and thought. For reflection, writing, and debate.
- Classroom Connections. Where the Topic fits the courses and chapters you already teach, with its standards alignment.
- A printable PDF. The whole chapter, ready to hand out.
Teach a Topic in a single class or build a unit around it. For a short guide you can keep, request the Teacher Guide below.
For students working on their own, point your class to For Students, a guided entry to the same material for research papers, essays, and evidence-based projects. No login, no account.
At a college or university? For Colleges lays out how the same material serves courses, an incoming-student primer, and the campus community, for faculty and administrators alike.
Ready to teachLessons and materials
The lessons are the Topic pages themselves, the 34 chapters described above. Alongside them, we add stand-alone supplements and lessons over time, among them:
- Printable “missing chapter” readings, Ancient Israel and Judah and Judea in the Classical World.
- A critical-thinking, source-literacy lesson, The Primary Source vs. the Headline: compare how outlets frame the same source, with no answer key.
- A Recognizing Propaganda handout, and more in Makor Originals.
Also on the site, tools built to teach with:
- The Museum, this history read through objects, artifact by artifact.
- Hate Symbols, a reference for recognizing the imagery of hate as it appears today.
- Misconceptions, common myths answered from the record, and The Recurring Cycle, the pattern antisemitism repeats across time.
- An interactive Timeline of the whole arc, a Films guide, and Virtual Field Trips to institutions worldwide.
- The K–5 program for the early grades, and a Glossary of key terms.
Fit it to your syllabusBring it into a class you already teach
You do not need a new course. Makor slots into the books and units already on your syllabus.
- Books you assign. Read Night, The Diary of a Young Girl, or Maus against the long history behind the Holocaust. Set The Merchant of Venice beside the medieval expulsions it inherited, The Crucible beside the blood libel, and 1984 or To Kill a Mockingbird beside the making of modern antisemitism.
- Units you already cover. Early civilizations and world religions (The Jewish World), ancient Rome and the Diaspora, medieval Europe, US immigration and civil rights (American Jewry), World War II (The Holocaust Era), and today’s Middle East (the modern State of Israel).
For the complete course-by-course map with standards alignment, see the Teacher Guide below.
Free · register to receive itGet the Teacher Guide
A guide to teaching with Makor: what it is, how to use it by grade, and a chart mapping where each Topic fits the courses and standards you already teach. Download it now, mapped to the New York State Framework, with ready editions for New Jersey and Texas. For a version mapped to your own state or country, fill out the form below and we’ll email it to you. Registering also keeps you posted as new material arrives.
The courseProfessional development with Makor
Teaching Jewish History and the Roots of Antisemitism, a free, self-paced course for educators, built entirely from content already on this site. About six hours, taken at your own pace, in any order.
How it works. Work through the six parts below. As you go, note how you will use Makor in your own classroom; that becomes your integration plan. When you finish, submit it through the completion form below and we email you a certificate documenting the hours.
- The gap, and why context matters. The curriculum gap: why teaching the Holocaust without its “before” leaves students unable to recognize how hatred is built.
- The long arc: Jewish civilization and communities. Unit 1 and Unit 2, the continuous record and the communities across the world, with a guided primary-source close-read.
- The evolution of antisemitism. Unit 3, Adversus Judaeos, the blood libel, the 1879 racial turn, the Protocols; tracing a trope across time.
- The Holocaust in context. Unit 4, meeting the Holocaust as the culmination of a story, not its origin.
- Continuity, contribution, and memory. Unit 5 and Unit 6, a people few in number yet present across world history, and the reckoning and remembrance that follow. The course ends here, on responsibility rather than catastrophe.
- Teaching with sources, and integrating into your courses. Makor’s primary-source method and each Topic’s Classroom Connections; fitting it into the world-history, ELA, and civics units you already teach (see Standards & Mandates). You finish by building your own integration plan.
A certificate of completion documenting six hours is available when you finish. Submit your plan through the form below. This is self-directed professional development, not accredited continuing-education credit, and districts vary in how they recognize it, so check your local policy.
Finished the course?Submit your completion
When you have worked through the course, send us the classroom integration plan you built and a short reflection. We review each submission and follow up with your certificate.
How to teach this historyTen principles
These guide how this history is taught with care and rigor, and they run through the course above. They align with the USHMM Guidelines for Teaching About the Holocaust and the IHRA Recommendations.
- Teach Jewish life, not only Jewish death. Students meet Jews as a living civilization first, texts, communities, contributions, so Jewish identity is not encountered only through victimization.
- Context, not inevitability. Nothing was bound to happen. Teach the long build-up so students see hatred as constructed over time, and learn to recognize the mechanism.
- Precision of language. Define terms, antisemitism, Holocaust, genocide. Avoid euphemism, avoid “the Jews” as a monolith, and name perpetrators as people who made choices.
- Move from statistics to people. Six million is a number students cannot feel; individual stories and survivor testimony restore the human scale.
- No simulations of victim experience. Never have students role-play victims, “hide,” or reenact a camp. Analyze sources; do not reenact trauma.
- Use imagery with restraint, no sensationalism. Be mindful of images of war, violence, and atrocity. Graphic imagery shocks without teaching. Choose images that inform, prepare students, and never use suffering for shock effect.
- Respect for the dead. The victims were individuals, not statistics, not spectacle, not entertainment. Treat their names, images, testimonies, and deaths with dignity. This history is taught in remembrance.
- Teach through inquiry, and resist simple answers. Give students the source and the question, not just the conclusion. The history is complex: no single villain, no tidy moral.
- A safe, age-appropriate space. Set norms, anticipate strong emotion, match depth to grade, and provide follow-up.
- Connect to the present, carefully. Help students recognize antisemitism today without flattening a specific history into a generic lesson, drawing false equivalences, or ranking suffering against other atrocities.
Europe and beyondSurvivor testimony
Survivor testimony is the Holocaust told by the people who lived it, in their own voices. It restores what a number cannot, the individual life behind the statistic. As the last survivors pass, their recorded words become the closest a student will come to hearing this history firsthand, which is why preserving and teaching it matters.
Makor is built from documents and objects, and testimony belongs beside them. Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center, holds a vast archive of survivor testimony and the teaching resources built around it. Start there.
Other collections that make testimony classroom-ready: USC Shoah Foundation IWitness, Echoes & Reflections, the USHMM oral history collections, and the National Holocaust Centre (UK) Forever Project.
The Holocaust was not only a European story. Jewish communities had lived across the Middle East and North Africa for more than two thousand years when the Nazi era reached them. It arrived in the Farhud, the 1941 pogrom in Baghdad, in Vichy France’s antisemitic laws and Saharan labor camps across Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, and in the German occupation of Tunisia in 1942 and 1943. Most of these communities were later uprooted, and roughly 850,000 Jews left Arab lands and Iran. Sephardi Voices and JIMENA preserve firsthand accounts of that world, before and after.
Go deeper, and get accreditedThe wider field
Makor is free and source-based, built to use on your own. The institutions below offer a different set of resources (live workshops, accreditation, in-person programs, and survivor testimony) that complement it. Makor links to them; it does not run them. Training lists are alphabetical; museums are grouped by region.
Professional development for educators
- Echoes & Reflections, free webinars and online courses. Free · Virtual
- Facing History & Ourselves, workshops and self-paced professional learning. In-person & virtual
- Illinois Holocaust Museum, Summer Institute and year-round workshops. In-person & virtual
- Museum of Jewish Heritage, teacher seminars (a CTLE sponsor). In-person & virtual
- USHMM, the Belfer National Conference and educator programs. Free · Virtual
- Yad Vashem International School, free online courses and teacher seminars. Free · Virtual
Antisemitism awareness & training, schools, administrators, workplaces
- American Jewish Committee (AJC), Center for Education Advocacy and the Translate Hate glossary. Free
- Anti-Defamation League (ADL), antisemitism training for the workplace, and school programs. Free · Virtual
- Illinois Holocaust Museum, “Courageous Conversations” for educators, administrators, and corporations. In-person & virtual
- USC Shoah Foundation, Countering Antisemitism Lab, drawing on testimony. In-person & virtual
Testimony and heritage, Middle East and North Africa
- Sephardi Voices, filmed oral testimony of Jews from the Middle East, North Africa, and Iran, organized by country, with teacher resources. Free · Virtual
- JIMENA, Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa; history, testimony, and classroom materials. Free · Virtual
Museums & memorials worldwide
- Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial & Museum (Poland), the ICEAH education center.
- POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews (Poland).
- Anne Frank House (Netherlands), free digital lessons.
- Mémorial de la Shoah (France).
- House of the Wannsee Conference (Germany), source-analysis workshops.
- Jewish Museum Berlin (Germany), “Antisemitism: Past & Present” teacher training.
- Arolsen Archives (Germany), 40+ million documents and an online learning platform.
- The Wiener Holocaust Library (UK).
- Montreal Holocaust Museum (Canada).
- Melbourne Holocaust Museum (Australia).
Makor draws on many more archives, museums, and organizations than can be listed here. For the full directory, see Sources.
Standards, mandates & policyGovernment resources
The frameworks and bodies that set the requirement to teach this history, from your state to the international level. Makor is mapped to these; see Standards & Mandates for the full picture.
International IHRA (working definition & teaching recommendations) · UNESCO · OSCE / ODIHR · EU Coordinator on Combating Antisemitism United States, federal National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism (2023) · Dept. of Education, Office for Civil Rights (Title VI) · State Dept. Special Envoy · Never Again Education Act United States, state commissions New Jersey · Illinois · Texas · Florida · New York Other national governments United Kingdom (Holocaust Memorial Day Trust) · Germany (bpb) · Canada · Australia
Bringing Makor to your school? Pass it to your department or district in one click. It is free, aligned to the units you already teach, and built to support state standards and the Holocaust mandate.
✉ Share Makor with your district
Quick answersCommon questions
Is The Makor Project free?
Yes. Every lesson and primary source is open to any teacher, student, or school, with nothing to buy and no login.
What does it cover?
The full arc of Jewish history and the history of antisemitism, from antiquity through the Holocaust to today, across Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa, drawn from primary sources.
Who is it for?
K–12 classrooms and college courses, with materials by grade band and a dedicated K–5 program.
Does it help meet state Holocaust-education mandates?
Yes. It supplies the history around the Holocaust, the civilization before and the story after, mapped to standards.
How is it sourced?
Every topic draws on primary documents and scholarship, with transparent attribution to the archives and museums it comes from.
The Makor Project is original, source-based history you can teach from: topic pages across six units, each built from primary documents. It also points to the institutions and programs above as trusted places to go deeper. Makor links to these but does not run or endorse them, and details change, so confirm each on its own page. See also Sources and Field Trips. Last reviewed: 2026 · Return home