The curriculum gap the platform documents is not confined to textbooks. It extends into public-television educational resources, online learning platforms, museum materials, and state-published curriculum frameworks. Some of these materials are excellent in most respects; many were produced with care; most reach more classrooms than any single textbook. Their patterns matter because their reach is wide.
This page documents instances where Hebrew or Jewish material is omitted, mis-traced, or thinly treated in widely-used K–12 educational resources — and provides the scholarship that would update them. Each entry names the resource by title and host, links to the original, describes the issue in neutral terms, and supplies the corrective material with proper citations. The platform does not impute motive. It documents what the published material says.
Editorial discipline
What we do. Document observations neutrally — naming what the resource says. Provide the scholarship that would correct or supplement the resource. Cite primary sources, university-press references, and named scholars. Link to the original resource so anyone can verify the pattern. Treat resource creators as partners. Invite collaboration.
What we do not do. Impute motive to publishers, broadcasters, or curriculum designers. Use loaded vocabulary — no "erasure," no "indoctrination." Cite Wikipedia as a source for any factual claim. Treat omissions as conspiratorial. Most are not. Mistake patterns for personal failures of individual editors.
A note on scope. The entries below come from resources the project has actually examined — not from a systematic survey of state curricula or every educational platform. Absence from this page is not an evaluation; we welcome suggestions of other resources to review.
Where additions would help · 5 entries
Documented examples.
"The Evolution of Ancient Writing"
View the original on PBS LearningMedia →
What the resource does well. The resource is freely available, well-produced, and classroom-projectable. The core argument — that writing emerged independently in only a few places in human history — is sound. The resource also correctly identifies three independent origins (Mesopotamia, China, and Mesoamerica), which is the scholarly consensus.
What the resource says. The resource — a short instructional film with an accompanying explanatory text, distributed by the Public Broadcasting Service to K–12 teachers nationwide — names "Phoenician, Greek, Cyrillic, Arabic, and even the Roman alphabet" as the descendants of the ancient script that produced today's Western writing systems. It traces those descendants to ancient Sumerian cuneiform of the Fertile Crescent.
What is missing — and what is incorrect. Hebrew is not in the list. Cyrillic — a ninth-century Slavic Christian script developed for the First Bulgarian Empire — is included; Hebrew, with a continuous three-thousand-year tradition and the script of the Hebrew Bible, the Mishnah, and the Aleppo Codex, is not. Beyond the omission, the lineage the resource describes is incorrect on its own terms. Scholarship traces the alphabet family not to Sumerian cuneiform but to Egyptian hieroglyphs by way of the Proto-Sinaitic script developed by Canaanite laborers in the Sinai Peninsula around 1900–1500 BCE. Paleo-Hebrew and Phoenician are sister scripts in the same family at the same moment in history. Cuneiform is a separate tradition that did not give rise to the alphabetic family.
Suggested update. Two changes would strengthen the resource without lengthening it. First, the list of descendants might read "Phoenician, Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic, Greek, Cyrillic, and the Roman alphabet." Second, the lineage might be traced to Egyptian hieroglyphs via Proto-Sinaitic rather than to Sumerian cuneiform. The platform is happy to provide a one-paragraph supplement, primary-source images (the Tel Zayit Paleo-Hebrew inscription, c. 950 BCE; the Wadi el-Hol corpus; the Serabit el-Khadim Sinai mining inscriptions), and citations to Joseph Naveh's Early History of the Alphabet (Magnes Press / Brill, 1982) and Benjamin Sass's The Genesis of the Alphabet (Otto Harrassowitz, 1988) — at no charge, for educational use.
The platform does not assume motive. The Public Broadcasting Service is a valued educational partner. This entry is offered constructively, in the hope that a future version of the resource carries the fuller story.
"Christianity from Judaism to Constantine" (Episode 11)
Watch the original on YouTube (Crash Course) →
What the resource does well. The episode is among the most-watched introductory history videos in American secondary classrooms. It opens with the explicit claim that "any understanding of Christianity has to start with Judaism, because Jesus was born a Jew, and he grew up in the Jewish tradition." At 5:17, the presenter directly debunks the historical libel that Jews were responsible for Jesus's crucifixion: "The Romans crucified Jesus because he was a threat to their authority. Later traditions saying that the Jews killed Jesus? Very unfortunate—also, very untrue." That correction, delivered in a widely-shown K–12 video, is responsible historical work and deserves recognition.
What is missing. Of the episode's roughly eleven minutes, the segment titled "Understanding the Jewish Tradition" (0:33–3:32) runs approximately three minutes and covers Abraham, the Covenant, the development of monotheism, and circumcision. The remaining eight minutes are devoted to Jesus, Paul, and Constantine. For an episode titled "Christianity from Judaism to Constantine" — whose announced timeframe spans roughly 1900 BCE to 312 CE — several pieces of Jewish history that fall squarely within that timeframe are not addressed: The Second Temple period (516 BCE – 70 CE); the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE; the rabbinic transition under Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai (Yavneh, c. 70 CE) and the early development of the Mishnah (compiled c. 200 CE); and the continuation of Judaism alongside Christianity (the Yavneh academy, the codification of the Mishnah, the development of the Jerusalem and Babylonian Talmuds, the establishment of academies in Sura and Pumbedita).
Suggested update. Three changes would strengthen the episode without lengthening it significantly. First, the "Understanding the Jewish Tradition" segment might add a brief reference to the Second Temple period's sectarian diversity — Jesus did not come from nowhere; he was part of one of multiple Jewish movements in first-century Roman Judea. Second, the 70 CE destruction of the Second Temple — which falls within the episode's announced timeframe — should be named. Third, the closing segment might briefly acknowledge that Judaism continued to develop alongside Christianity rather than treating the parent tradition as static background.
Primary and scholarly sources: Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews and Jewish War; Tacitus, Histories Book V; Geza Vermes, Jesus the Jew (Fortress Press, 1973); Shaye J.D. Cohen, From the Maccabees to the Mishnah (Westminster John Knox, 3rd ed. 2014); Daniel Boyarin, Border Lines (Penn, 2004); E.P. Sanders, Judaism: Practice and Belief, 63 BCE–66 CE (Trinity Press, 1992).
New Visions Social Studies · Unit 9.2 Belief Systems
View the New Visions Social Studies curriculum →
What this curriculum does well. The New Visions Social Studies Curriculum is the NYC-DOE-supported implementation of the New York State K–12 Social Studies Framework. It is openly licensed, freely available online, and inquiry-based. Specifically on Judaism, the curriculum implements NYS Framework Key Idea 9.2, which names Judaism explicitly alongside Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, Confucianism, and Daoism in parallel language. It allocates four supporting questions to Judaism in Unit 9.2 (SQ 20–23) and treats Judaism as one of the world's foundational belief systems, with substantive curricular space — not as a footnote.
The framing asymmetry. Three of the seven belief systems in the NYS Framework — the three Abrahamic traditions — receive a parallel "How do we know what we know about…" supporting question in the New Visions implementation. The phrasing across these three is otherwise nearly identical. The single difference is the addition of an epistemic-limit clause to one of them.
Judaism · 9.2 SQ 21: "How do we know what we know about Ancient Israel? How is our knowledge limited?"
Christianity · 9.3 SQ 25: "How do we know what we know about Jesus?"
Islam · 9.4 SQ 13: "How do we know what we know about Muhammad and the founding of Islam?"
Only the Judaism supporting question is paired with the limit clause "How is our knowledge limited?" The Christianity and Islam parallel questions are not. Important scoping: This asymmetry appears in the New Visions implementation. The NYS Framework itself, in Key Idea 9.2, treats the seven belief systems with parallel language and does not include any knowledge-limit clause for any tradition. The framework is even-handed at the state level.
Suggested update — two paths restore parity. Either resolves the asymmetry: (1) Remove the limit clause from SQ 21. (2) Add equivalent limit clauses to SQ 25 and SQ 13. Option 1 is the lighter edit. Option 2 is more rigorous if the curriculum's intent is to apply consistent epistemic discipline across the three Abrahamic traditions. The platform is happy to provide draft language for either option, free of charge, for educational use.
Smarthistory · Curated Guides and Reframing Art History
What Smarthistory does well. Smarthistory is a non-profit OER founded in 2005 by art historians Beth Harris and Steven Zucker. It offers more than 4,500 free resources — essays, videos, and textbook chapters — produced in collaboration with over 800 contributors and 60 partner museums. Its content is peer-reviewed at a scholarly standard and openly licensed for educational reuse. On Jewish topics specifically, Smarthistory does have substantive individual essays — on the Synagogue at Dura-Europos, the Hammath Tiberias mosaics, the painted wooden Gwoździec Synagogue, the Torah and its adornment, Jewish ceremonial art, and Jewish art in the United States before 1900. The platform credits this body of work as a meaningful contribution.
The structural asymmetry. Smarthistory organizes its content into Curated Guides — chronological syllabi that provide pedagogical scaffolding from foundational concepts to specific monuments and objects. The Islamic Art and Architecture Curated Guide is extensive: an introductory essay, a survey of Arts of the Islamic world, dedicated chronological units (Early Islamic, c. 900–1400, the Islamic West, the Sultanate period, Mughal, Ottoman, modern and contemporary), foundational essays on the religion as a tradition (The Five Pillars of Islam, Hajj, The Kaaba, The Qur'an with four sub-articles, Mosque architecture), and essays on specific monuments (Dome of the Rock, Great Mosque of Damascus, Great Mosque of Córdoba, Quṣayr ʿAmra, Great Mosque of Kairouan, Great Mosque of Tlemcen, Qutb complex, Sultan Hasan complex, and many more).
There is no equivalent Curated Guide for Judaism or Jewish art and architecture. Jewish material exists on the site as standalone essays, but does not receive its own Curated Guide — no chronological syllabus, no foundational-concept introductions paralleling The Five Pillars or Mosque architecture, no organized treatment of synagogue architecture across periods comparable to the treatment of mosque architecture across periods.
Specific content gaps in the chronological essays. Smarthistory does have three chronological essays on Jewish history: Jewish history to the middle ages, Jewish history 1750 to WW II, and Jewish history in the post-war period. The ghetto institution (1516–1870) — a 354-year European institution — appears in a single phrase: "boundaries that in some later instances became walled ghettos within which Jews were forced to live." That is the entire treatment in the medieval essay. The displacement of Jews from Arab and Muslim-majority countries (1948–early 1970s) — approximately 850,000 people, communities of between several centuries and more than two thousand years — is not addressed in the available content.
Suggested update — three interlocking additions. (1) A Curated Guide on Jewish Art and Architecture that parallels the Islamic Art and Architecture guide in structure — introductory essay, survey, foundational essays on the synagogue as institution, on the Torah and Hebrew scripts, on the Hand of God in Jewish art, on Hebrew illuminated manuscripts, on micrography, and chronological units treating Jewish visual culture in the Second Temple period, late antiquity, medieval Sephardi Spain, Ashkenazi central and eastern Europe, the Ottoman Mediterranean, and the modern period. (2) Substantive treatment of the ghetto institution and the MENA displacement within the existing chronological Jewish history essays. (3) A rebalanced lead visual for the Judaism entry in Religion in Art: The Basics — leading with a building Jews built, a book they illuminated, or a synagogue they painted, rather than a Roman victory monument depicting the destruction of Jerusalem.
The essays, read in sequence, do carry the arc. Taken together, the Smarthistory essays on Jewish history — the chronological series by Drs. Jessica and Shaina Hammerman (an introduction; to the middle ages; 1750 to World War II; the post-war period) alongside Dr. Steven Fine's essay on the history of Jewish architecture, which frames the subject as "an unbroken chain of 3000 years" — carry the European Jewish story from origins to the present, through the Talmud, the medieval communities, emancipation, and the modern era. This is good, accurate, well-sourced work. The limit is placement: it sits in the AP Art History section, alongside the study of objects and buildings, rather than in the World History course where students first meet the subject. Good material in a specialized corner is not the same as the curriculum reaching it.
The platform is willing to assist with framework development, source recommendations, and scholarly contacts — free of charge, in the spirit of constructive partnership between open educational resources.
"Overview of Early Judaism," Parts 1 and 2
Watch Part 1 on Khan Academy →
Watch Part 2 on Khan Academy →
What the resource does well. Khan Academy's two-part "Overview of Early Judaism," in its World History course, is free, clearly presented, and among the most widely viewed introductions to the subject online. The presenter is careful about historicity, separating biblical narrative from the historical record and noting that historians "view it more along the lines of legend." The videos are openly licensed under Creative Commons (Attribution / Non-Commercial / Share-Alike) for classroom reuse. Together they carry the story from Genesis through the patriarchs, the Exodus, the kingdoms of Saul, David, and Solomon, the First and Second Temples, and the Assyrian, Babylonian, and Roman conquests.
What is missing. The two-video arc ends at 70 CE. Part 2 closes on the Roman destruction of the Second Temple and the dispersion, with the final words observing that afterward "you don't see a significant resettlement of the Jewish people into this area." The narrative stops there — no rabbinic transition, no Talmud, no medieval communities across the Christian and Islamic worlds, no continuous living tradition. A student who watches both videos is left at the year 70 with dispersion as the endpoint. This is not a separate problem from the textbooks below: the videos follow the same curricular organization as the adopted textbooks and frameworks, so the boundary that ends the textbook thread at antiquity ends the video here too. The free resource inherits the cutoff from the curriculum it is built to serve.
Suggested update. A brief closing segment — or a note pointing to the continuation — would carry the arc past 70 CE: the move to rabbinic Judaism, the Talmud, the medieval communities, and the continuity of Jewish life to the present. A fuller arc already exists on Khan Academy itself, in the Smarthistory essays hosted in its AP Art History section (see the Smarthistory entry above) — but a student in the World History course is unlikely to find it there.
Primary resource: Khan Academy, "Overview of Early Judaism," Parts 1 and 2, World History (Creative Commons BY-NC-SA). Closing quotation transcribed from Part 2.
Textbooks in use · the core problem
The books on the desk.
The resources above are optional supplements a teacher might add. Textbooks are different: they are the assigned spine of the course, adopted at the district or state level and used by every student for a year. When the gap is in the textbook itself, it is not a missing enrichment — it is the foundation the whole class is built on. The two titles below are widely adopted, examined directly, and named here because the petitions that this project accompanies name them. The point is not the individual book. It is the pattern, which a 2009 academic survey across publishers documented: of the major religions in world-history textbooks, Judaism received the least coverage, and what coverage it received most often ended at antiquity.
Discovering Our Past: The Eastern Hemisphere (New York Edition)
What the resource is. A widely adopted Grade 6 world-history textbook, published in a New York State edition aligned to the state social-studies framework. It is the assigned text in many sixth-grade classrooms — the book through which a great many students first meet Jewish history.
What is missing. The textbook covers Judaism essentially as the ancient Israelites and ends the thread at the Babylonian exile. The implication a student is left with is that Jewish history is an ancient-world chapter that concludes around the sixth century BCE — with no medieval Jewish life, no Sephardic or Mizrahi civilization, no early-modern thought, no continuous living tradition carrying forward to the students' own Jewish classmates. The First Temple (built under Solomon, c. 957 BCE) and its destruction in 586 BCE are presented as the arc; what a civilization did for the following two and a half millennia is absent.
Suggested update. A brief continuation — even a single spread — showing Jewish life continuing past antiquity: the rabbinic transition and the Talmud, medieval communities across Christian Europe and the Islamic world, and the survival of a continuous tradition into the present. The platform is glad to provide a short supplement, primary-source images, and citations, free of charge, for educational use.
Source examined: McGraw Hill Education, Discovering Our Past: The Eastern Hemisphere, Grade 6, New York Edition (McGraw Hill, 2018), ISBN 9780079037268. The platform does not impute motive; this is offered constructively.
World Civilizations: The Global Experience (7th Edition)
What the resource is. A widely adopted high-school and Pre-AP global-history textbook used in classrooms across the country. In its chapter on early civilizations (c. 3500–600 BCE), it devotes approximately one page to Judaism.
What is missing — and what is inaccurate. Two issues. First, a framing asymmetry: the chapter grounds every other ancient civilization in a named homeland — Mesopotamia between the Tigris and Euphrates, Egypt along the Nile — but locates the Jewish people only as having "settled near the Mediterranean," with no named homeland, and with no accompanying imagery (no Temple, no Jerusalem, no map, no holy site) while other traditions in the chapter receive visual representation. Second, a factual error: the text presents the Babylonian exile as having produced Judaism. The historical sequence is the reverse — the exile (586 BCE) was a catastrophe visited upon a civilization that already existed; it did not create it. The First Temple was built around 957 BCE, more than three centuries earlier.
Suggested update. Name the homeland as the chapter names every other — the land of Israel/Judah, with Jerusalem and the Temple — and supply a parallel map and image. Correct the causal framing so the exile is presented as an event within an existing civilization, not its origin. The platform can supply corrected language, a map, and primary-source images at no charge.
Source examined: Peter N. Stearns, Michael B. Adas, Stuart B. Schwartz, Marc Jason Gilbert, World Civilizations: The Global Experience, 7th Edition (Pearson Education, 2015), ISBN 978-0205986309. Pattern study: Jennifer Cunningham, "The Treatment of the Monotheistic Religions in World History High School Textbooks" (ProQuest, 2009; ERIC ED532538).
The honest answer — and where to turn.
A mainstream K–12 textbook that covers the full arc well. The project has not found one. The 2009 survey above, and the examinations summarized here, point to a gap that is industry-wide rather than the fault of any single title. If you know of a current K–12 textbook that treats Jewish civilization as continuous and accurately sourced from antiquity to the present, the project would genuinely like to see it — and would list it here.
What does exist. Two honest pointers. For textbook accuracy, the Institute for Curriculum Services (ICS) has reviewed K–12 textbooks for accuracy on Jews and Judaism since 2005 and has worked directly with major publishers — including documented corrections to Pearson world-history texts. ICS, not this project, is the established partner for getting an adopted textbook fixed. For a complete model at the college and teacher-reference level, John Efron, Steven Weitzman, and Matthias Lehmann's The Jews: A History (Routledge, 3rd ed., 2018) carries the full span — ancient Near East, the Greek and Roman world, the medieval realms of Christianity and Islam, modern Europe and the Holocaust, and contemporary America and Israel — and is used as a university course text. It is not a K–12 classroom book, but it is a model of what complete coverage looks like.
Where this project fits. This platform does not claim to be the only or best source on textbook accuracy — that work is already underway at ICS. Its contribution is different: assembling the full narrative arc, with sources and classroom-ready materials, in one place — and pointing teachers to the established partners who can help correct the books already on the desk.
ICS textbook-review record: icsresources.org. Model reference text: Efron, Weitzman & Lehmann, The Jews: A History, 3rd ed. (Routledge, 2018), ISBN 9781138298446.
Done well · 2 entries
Resources that get this right.
The omission pattern is real, but it is not universal. Some widely-used K–12 educational resources cover Hebrew, Jewish, and historically present material with appropriate care, accurate sourcing, and editorial discipline. This section names them — both to recognize good work, and to demonstrate that the gap documented above is fixable.
OpenStax · World History, Volume 1: to 1500
View the OpenStax textbook (free) →
OpenStax World History Volume 1, the free open-access textbook used in many AP and dual-enrollment programs, covers the Hebrews and Israelites in Chapter 4 (The Near East) with academic care. It names the Hebrews explicitly and traces their emergence in Canaan, the construction of the united monarchy, and their conflicts with Neo-Assyria and Neo-Babylonia. Engages the Hebrew Bible as a primary source — treated seriously as text — and distinguishes the biblical narrative from the archaeological record without dismissing either. Cites specific archaeological sites by name (Gezer, Hazor, Megiddo). Acknowledges that some narrative elements are not supported by archaeology, while others have material confirmation. Cross-references Hyksos scholarship. Frames monotheism precisely as "the definitive characteristic of the Hebrews," with the worship of Yahweh named directly.
This is the standard the In the Margin page is asking other widely-used resources to meet. Free, openly licensed (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0), and downloadable in full from openstax.org.
National Geographic Education
Visit National Geographic Education →
National Geographic Education publishes a large body of resources on Jewish history and tradition, treated with care, accurate sourcing, and editorial respect. Hidden History (grades 5–12+) — a full article on Crypto-Jews of the Americas, treating the Spanish Inquisition seriously, quoting Rabbi Yosef Garcia, documenting the 600,000 Jewish conversions by the end of the 15th century, tracing Crypto-Jewish migration, describing specific concealment practices (the mezuzah hidden inside Virgin Mary statues). Jerusalem film educator toolkit — presents Jewish, Christian, and Muslim perspectives on the city with three named guides. Culture and Food and Ritual — uses Passover alongside Easter and Eid al-Fitr as three classroom-friendly examples of religious food traditions, with kashrut laws explained accurately.
A small note: in some of National Geographic Education's geography resources, the Abrahamic religions appear in the order "Christianity, Judaism, and Islam" rather than chronologically. Worth noting; not consequential.
More entries in production. Additional case studies — in resources widely used in American K–12 classrooms — are being logged and verified to the same editorial standard. Recommendations welcome at editor@makorproject.org.
For publishers, producers & curriculum designers
If your team would like to update a resource, we will help.
The platform offers free supplementary content, license-cleared primary-source images, scholarly citations, and editorial review to any publisher, broadcaster, museum, or curriculum designer working to update materials. This is not a service we charge for. It is the work the platform was founded to do.
Last updated: June 2026.