CA Gov. Newsom on Holocaust Remembrance Day 2025,releasing findings of West Ed’s report on Holocaust and Genocide Education.

California Governor Gavin Newsom and the Israel lobby have enlisted another partner in the frenzy to promote Holocaust education during nationwide protests over Israel’s genocide in Gaza. In San Francisco’s industrial-chic south of Market neighborhood, a data research and education policy firm named West Ed has released a report lamenting that county offices of education are not offering adequate Holocaust and genocide education (HGE) programs.

West Ed acknowledges that since 1985 California has required HGE as part of the school curriculum. Eighth grade English students read and discuss Anne Frank’s, “The Diary of a Young Girl. Tenth grade history standards require students to analyze the “Nazi policy of racial purity, its evolution into the ‘Final Solution,’ and the resulting murder of six million Jewish civilians.” Forty years after the state mandated HGE, West Ed argues there’s a problem – not the failure to teach Israel’s ethnic cleansing and genocide in Palestine but the uneven presentation across the state of the Holocaust and other genocides.

Timing

West Ed published its report on Holocaust Remembrance Day, a few months before the California Senate’s first hearing in April, 2025, on SB 472 (D-Stern-Calabasas), a bill to provide the infrastructure for direct state funding to school districts for additional HGE curriculum and teacher training. The bill –opposed by Jewish Voice for Peace Action (JVP-Action), CAIR, the Arab Resource Organizing Committee and Liberated Ethnic Studies–would also require county offices of education to submit annual reports on school district implementation of HGE.

In opposing SB 472, JVP Action charges, “The bill’s supporters are determined never to allow teachers to talk about the Nakba (the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians since 1948) and the genocide in Gaza, and they want stronger policing tools.”

According to West Ed, the state has spent $34 million since 2019 to fund Holocaust-centered organizations promoting more HGE in K-12.

Overview

West Ed’s 195-page report entitled, “Holocaust and Genocide Education in California: A Study of Statewide Context and Local Implementation” bases its conclusion on responses from less than a third of local education agencies (LEA’s) who completed West Ed’s questionnaire about HGE implementation in local school districts. West Ed reports that of the 29% who responded only 26% “have systematic HGE in place, signaling a need for greater systemic support to teach these sensitive topics in more school districts statewide.” The Anti-Defamation League, the subject of a nationwide Drop the ADL from Schools campaign, was listed among the top three curriculum resources used by survey respondents. The topics most widely taught were the Holocaust and the Native American and Armenian genocides.

To correct inconsistencies in professional development, curriculum and resources, West Ed recommended additional HGE standards, more state-recommended HGE books, articles, lesson plans, and HGE teacher training to “help develop a more empathetic and morally courageous next generation and a more unified, socially responsible society.”

West Ed report fails to mention Gaza

Despite the emphasis on developing an “empathic society,” school policy researchers at West Ed fail to include a survey question or resource on the current US-backed Israel genocide in Gaza or the crackdown on anti-genocide activists chaining themselves to universities invested in........

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