Facing History & Ourselves was the brainchild of Margot Stern Strom and Bill Parsons, two Massachusetts teachers who were dismayed that the history of the Holocaust was not being taught in US schools. In 1976, they created the organization to develop a Holocaust curriculum for middle and high school students. Parsons and Strom not only created resources for teachers about the genocide of European Jewry, but also linked the Holocaust to contemporary issues, such as the war in Vietnam and the civil rights struggle. In the decades since, “the organization has significantly evolved from its original focus around the Holocaust to doing much wider work that educates about racism, discrimination, and bias, and the importance of addressing those issues in civil society,” said Jonathan Judaken, a member of the board of scholars and a history professor at Washington University in St. Louis. In the process, the nonprofit has become one of the most prominent educational groups in the country, receiving recognition as an “exemplary program” from the US Department of Education, and reaching classrooms in every state. An American Historical Association survey published last year found that 30% of all history teachers in the US had used Facing History resources.
Over the decades, Facing History has continued to advance a progressive approach to history education despite a range of criticisms. The group has been attacked by conservatives, with one political scientist complaining that its curricula were not balanced or objective because the Nazi point of view was not presented. And it has attracted the ire of some Holocaust scholars for drawing connections between the Shoah and other atrocities. “The problem with [Facing History’s] approach is that it elides the differences between the Holocaust and all manner of inhumanities and injustices,” Deborah Lipstadt, one of the most prominent Holocaust scholars in the country and the former antisemitism envoy for the Biden administration, wrote in a 1995 New Republic article. Lipstadt has long argued that the Holocaust was unique and cannot be compared to other genocides, an approach that is at the center of a long-running debate within Holocaust studies. “The field of Holocaust studies has split into two,” said Shira Klein, an associate professor of history at Chapman University who studies the Holocaust. “One camp sees the Holocaust as an exceptional event, and Israel—as the country of Holocaust survivors—as a perpetual victim. These scholars tend to see criticism of Israel as yet another strand of antisemitism, rather than as the result of Israel’s actions.” Over the years, Facing History’s approach has seemed broadly aligned with the philosophy of the other camp, which, Klein noted, “sees the Holocaust as a genocide among others, driven by antisemitism but also by broader factors like nationalism and imperialism. These academics tend to view Israel as a state among others, just as capable of practicing repression and violence as other regimes.”
But while Facing History has consistently embraced a comparative approach and taken on global issues beyond the Holocaust—its website includes model lessons on, for example, the Ukranian refugee crisis and the genocide of the Muslim minority in Myanmar—it has always treated Palestine as beyond the pale. Even before October 7th, this silence was noted by progressive educators. “[The] historically documented injustice of [the Nakba in] Palestine isn’t mentioned anywhere in the organization’s curriculum,” Liz Rose, an Illinois public high school teacher, wrote in Mondoweiss in June 2021. “Its ethos is permeating schools, upholding and normalizing the erasure of Palestine, and ultimately taking advantage of overworked teachers and their students who already have been educated to think Palestinians are invisible.”