New York requires students to learn
how Jews died.
It has never required them to learn
how Jews lived.
Overview
What the petitions ask for, in plain language.
A student can graduate from a New York high school having studied the Holocaust in detail — and never once have learned what Jewish life was, before it was destroyed, or what became of it after. The curriculum begins the story in 1933 and ends it in 1945. These two petitions ask for the beginning and the end to be put back.
In April 2026, two formal petitions were prepared and submitted to officials at every level of education governance that shapes a New York public-school student's curriculum — district leadership, the New York State Education Department, the Board of Regents, the legislative education committees, the State Holocaust Education Council, the Governor, and the relevant federal representatives and the Secretary of Education. The petitions were sent as a single submission package containing the petition documents, executive summaries, individualized cover letters, and a submission guide.
The first petition asks that Holocaust instruction be expanded to include the historical roots that made the Holocaust possible — what came before 1933. The second petition asks that Holocaust instruction be extended to include what came after 1945. Neither petition asks for new legislation. Both ask for the use of existing curricular flexibility, supported by source-grounded classroom material — which The Makor Project supplies.
The standard
Teach Jewish history with the same continuity, the same chronological span, and the same instructional weight already extended in the curriculum to other civilizational and religious traditions — India, China, Islam, Christianity. The benchmark is parity, not exception.
There is a hard lesson behind this. Between 1919 and 1921, pogroms killed at least fifty thousand Jews across Ukraine, Belarus, and eastern Poland — and Jewish scholars documented it carefully as it happened. Within a generation the far greater catastrophe of the Holocaust had drawn the world's attention so completely that the earlier killings nearly vanished from common memory, even though the records survived. That is the clearest reason the Holocaust needs both a beginning and a continuation: without deliberate teaching, even a recorded catastrophe disappears. (See The Pogroms of the Russian Empire.)
Common misconceptions the petitions address
The two petitions argue that specific documented gaps in K-12 Jewish history coverage should be closed through curricular expansion. The Misconceptions reference treats each underlying claim at length — including the ideas that the standard curriculum already covers Jewish history adequately, that existing Holocaust mandates have closed the gap, that expanded coverage would be exceptional treatment of one group, that the Holocaust began in 1933 and ended in 1945, and that antisemitism is primarily a Christian-European phenomenon.
The 1st Petition
The Holocaust Needs a Beginning.
The first petition documents a pattern: in the typical New York public-school curriculum, the Holocaust is taught beginning with the rise of the Nazi party, with little or no treatment of the centuries of religious, economic, and racial antisemitism that preceded it. Students are asked to understand the most documented genocide in history without the historical context that made it possible.
The petition asks that Holocaust instruction in New York State be expanded to include this pre-1933 historical context, and that classroom material be supplied to support it. It does not ask for new legislation — it asks for the use of curricular flexibility that already exists.
Submitted April 28, 2026. Asks that Holocaust instruction be expanded to include the pre-1933 historical context. Read it in brief, or in full:
The 1st Petition · Supporting material
The scholarly architecture that backs the first petition.
The platform documents the pre-1933 historical roots the first petition describes across Topics in three Units. Each Topic is grounded in primary sources, university-press scholarship, and institutional archives. For the full structure and how it maps to existing standards, see The Curriculum Gap.
The Evolution of Antisemitism
- Adversus Judaeos — the early Christian theological framework, from the second-century church fathers through the Reformation and Vatican II.
- The Ghetto System — the European architecture of segregation from Venice 1516 through Rome 1870 and beyond.
- The Blood Libel — the medieval and modern accusations and their continuing life.
- The Racial Turn of 1879 — Wilhelm Marr, the coining of "antisemitism," and the shift from a religious to a racial framework.
- The Protocols of the Elders of Zion — the 1903 fabrication and its continuing twentieth- and twenty-first-century reach.
The Holocaust Era
- 1933–1939 · The Architecture of Persecution — the six-year construction of the Nazi anti-Jewish legal framework from the Reichstag Fire Decree through Kristallnacht.
- Aktion T-4 — the Nazi killing of disabled Germans from January 1940 through August 1941, the program that pioneered the gas-chamber technology and trained the personnel later transferred to the death camps.
The Jewish World — context
- Continuous Presence — the continuity of Jewish life across the more-than-three-thousand-year period the standard curriculum compresses into a few pages.
- The Diaspora — the geographic spread of Jewish communities across that history.
The 2nd Petition
The Holocaust Needs a Continuation.
The second petition documents a parallel pattern at the other end of the timeline. In most New York public-school instruction, the Holocaust is the last piece of Jewish history students learn before they enter college. The 1948 founding of the State of Israel, the expulsion and flight 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, the postwar reckoning architecture — the trials, the restitution, the memorial framework — and the contemporary position of Jewish communities globally are mostly absent from secondary-school instruction. The result is that students leave high school with the Holocaust as the most recent piece of Jewish history they have been taught, and with no historical frame for any contemporary discussion of Jewish life, Jewish identity, or the modern Middle East.
The petition asks that this post-1945 material be incorporated into existing instruction on the postwar period, decolonization, and the modern Middle East — areas the curriculum already covers — so that the Jewish dimension of those subjects is taught with the same parity extended to other regional and religious histories.
Submitted April 28, 2026. Asks that Holocaust instruction be extended to include the post-1945 history. Read it in brief, or in full:
The 2nd Petition · Supporting material
The scholarly architecture that backs the second petition.
The second petition's post-1945 material is documented across these Topics, carrying the arc from liberation through the contemporary information environment.
Memory & Responsibility — the postwar reckoning
- Liberation and the Displaced Persons — the April 1945 Western liberations, Eisenhower's documentation order, the Harrison Report, the DP camps, the Kielce pogrom, the Bricha, Aliyah Bet, Exodus 1947, and the postwar Jewish refugee architecture through the Displaced Persons Act of 1948.
- The Postwar Trials — the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg (1945–46), the Successor Trials, the Eichmann Trial in Jerusalem (1961–62), and the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial (1963–65).
- Hannah Arendt and the Eichmann Trial — the 1963 publication of Eichmann in Jerusalem, the "banality of evil" framework, and the scholarly engagement that followed.
- Postwar Restitution — the Claims Conference, the Luxembourg Agreement (1952), the German Federal Compensation Law, the Swiss Banks settlement (1998), and the broader compensation record across more than seven decades.
- The Memory Architecture — Yom HaShoah, Yad Vashem, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Stolpersteine project, the Berlin Memorial, International Holocaust Remembrance Day, and the federal Never Again Education Act.
- Holocaust Denial and the Response — the denial network from Rassinier through Irving v. Lipstadt (2000) through the contemporary digital era. The Topic students need before they encounter denial content online.
- Nostra Aetate — the Second Vatican Council's 1965 declaration repudiating the Adversus Judaeos tradition, and its consequences.
Communities Across the World — the postwar geography
- Modern Israel — the founding of the State of Israel (1948) and its development across the period to the present.
- Theodor Herzl — the founding figure of political Zionism, from the Dreyfus Affair through Der Judenstaat (1896).
- MENA Departure — the departure of approximately 850,000 Jews from Arab and Muslim-majority countries between 1948 and the 1970s, the parallel to the European refugee crisis the standard curriculum omits.
- Soviet Jewry — the refusenik movement, the American engagement, the Jackson-Vanik Amendment (1974), and the mass migration of approximately 1.6 million Soviet Jews.
- American Jewry — American Jewish history from the Sephardic colonial period (1654) to the contemporary moment.
- Ethiopian Jewry — the Beta Israel community and the Israeli operations Moses (1984), Joshua (1985), and Solomon (1991).
The Evolution of Antisemitism — the contemporary moment
- Contemporary Antisemitism — the post-1945 trajectory through the IHRA Working Definition (2016) and the contemporary architecture.
These Topics sit within the broader platform of six Units. For the full structure and the standards crosswalk, see The Curriculum Gap.
Recipients
Who the petitions were sent to.
The petitions were sent to recipients across the New York State and federal levels of education governance. The submission was designed for transparency — each recipient received both petitions, both summaries, and a cover letter individualized to that office. The list below is the record of submission.
New York State
- Governor of New York
- Commissioner of Education, New York State Education Department
- Deputy Commissioner, P–12 Instructional Support, NYSED
- Chancellor, New York State Board of Regents
- Chair, New York State Senate Committee on Education
- The district’s State Assemblymember
- The district’s State Senator
- Chair, New York State Assembly Committee on Education
- Chair, New York State Holocaust Education Council
Federal
- The district’s U.S. Representative
- United States Senator (senior, New York)
- United States Senator (junior, New York)
- Representative, sponsor of the federal Holocaust Education and Antisemitism Lessons (HEAL) Act
- Senate cosponsors of the HEAL Act (added in May 2026 follow-up correspondence)
- Secretary of Education, United States Department of Education
Responses to date
What has been received, on the record.
The New York State Education Department has confirmed, in writing, that the material in both petitions can be taught in New York classrooms under existing law and the existing Social Studies Framework. No new legislation is required; the Department's position is that adoption rests with local districts.
The immediate path runs through district decision-makers, who can act now. The longer aim is adoption at the state and federal levels, and in time a place for this history in the standards themselves.
The operative finding
New York districts already have the authority to teach this material. What is needed is not new law — it is the material, and the will to teach it. The Makor Project supplies the material, free.
May 2026 follow-up correspondence
The campaign has continued.
Following the April submission, a second round of correspondence went out in May 2026 to reinforce the request, address routing questions, and respond to staff inquiries. Letters were sent to:
- The New York State Education Department — confirming the affirmation now covers both petitions, and introducing The Makor Project as the educator-facing platform now in development.
- The Commissioner of Education and the Board of Regents Chancellor — reinforcing the request at the highest state level.
- The Governor of New York.
- The Chair of the Senate Education Committee and the Chair of the Assembly Education Committee.
- The district’s State Assemblymember and State Senator.
- The Assemblymember chairing the New York State Holocaust Education Council.
- The Secretary of Education and the relevant United States Senators.
- The Senate leads of the federal Holocaust Education and Antisemitism Lessons (HEAL) Act.
All correspondence is archived. Officials and members of the press who wish to see the full record may write to editor@makorproject.org.
Last updated: June 2026.
Where Makor comes in
The petitions name the gap. Makor is how a district closes it.
The authority is already there. What stops a district is time: no teacher has the hours to research the sources, verify the dates and images, write it for a classroom, and fit it into a full year. The Makor Project does that work in advance. Every topic the petitions describe is sourced, verified, written for the classroom, and mapped to existing standards — gathered in one place, free to use, so a teacher can open it and teach. More about the project →
See where Holocaust-education mandates stand — and how Makor aligns →
The path to make it happen
Change happens one district at a time. A school board, a superintendent, or a curriculum director can adopt this material now — no new law required. Two things move it forward:
- Local districts. Bring Makor to your Board of Education, Superintendent, or Curriculum & Instruction office — the people who decide what a classroom teaches.
- State representatives. Ask your State Assemblymember and State Senator, and the Education Committees and the State Education Department, to point districts to ready, standards-aligned material like this.
The authority exists. The material exists. What's left is for a district to say yes.
The State has confirmed districts can teach this today, with no new law, and the material is ready and free. The only step left is adoption. If you decide what a classroom teaches — or you can reach a school board, a superintendent, or your state representatives — this is where it starts.
If you are an official, an educator, or a journalist
How to engage with this work.
If you received a petition and wish to respond, request additional material, or schedule a conversation, write to hello@makorproject.org.
If you are an educator looking for the classroom material that supports the petitions, the platform is the answer. The two supporting-material sections above point directly to the Topics that anchor each petition; The Curriculum Gap provides the framing argument and the standards crosswalk. Everything is free, source-grounded, and mapped to existing New York State Social Studies Framework standards. For classroom-specific materials, see For K–5, Museum, and Virtual Field Trips.
If you are a journalist covering this work, a press contact guide is available; write to hello@makorproject.org and we will send it.
If you are a parent who recognizes the pattern the petitions describe and wants to bring this conversation to your own district, the petitions are public. They are designed to be adapted and reused. Write to hello@makorproject.org.