“Isn’t the Holocaust when the Jews made everyone hate them and got themselves killed?”

A schoolmate remarked this casually to me during a lunch break. He did not know I was Jewish, so I decided to test his historical knowledge. I asked him how many people he thought had died.

He paused, shrugging. “Umm, like 200,000 or something?”

That is exactly when I knew I was looking at our next politician.

You see, unfortunately, in our reality, my little experience in the high school cafeteria is no longer a rare anomaly. It is a glaring symptom of a much larger and quieter crisis unfolding in our schools, and it’s terrifying to say the least. According to a comprehensive national survey by the Claims Conference, a staggering 63 percent of Millennials and Gen Z do not know that six million Jews were murdered. And it’s even more disappointing to say that 11 percent of my own generation believes that Jews actually brought it upon ourselves.

The American education system has failed us.

It has failed me as a Jewish student. It has failed the six million Jews who were murdered, the 500,000 Roma and Sinti who were killed, and the 300,000 people with disabilities who were wiped off the face of the earth. It has failed our American soldiers who sacrificed their........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)