For the past few days, a sentence has been circulating in my inbox: If we want Holocaust education to fight antisemitism today, we must invest in teachers.

I have read it several times. And each time, I find myself stopping not at the end of the sentence, but at the beginning. Do we? Do we actually expect Holocaust education to fight contemporary antisemitism?

I ask this as the granddaughter of four Holocaust survivors, as someone who has spent years interviewing survivors around the world, and as someone whose work now brings their testimonies into classrooms across the country.

For much of my life, I instinctively believed the answer was yes. Teach young people where antisemitism can lead, and surely they will recognize it when it begins again. Show them what happened when Jews were dehumanized, isolated and eventually murdered, and surely they will be less susceptible to the same hatred.

It is a comforting equation. History memory = prevention. But I am no longer sure it is that simple.

I have sat across from Holocaust survivors who still remember the names of the classmates who suddenly stopped speaking to them because they were Jews — “Christ killers,” they were told. I have listened to people in their 90s and even over 100 describe not only deportations and camps, but the smaller moments that came first: a slur in the hallway, spit in the street, an insult, a teacher who looked away, a neighbor who stopped saying hello, a friend who decided that being seen with a Jew had suddenly become inconvenient.

And then I go into schools today. I meet wonderful students. Curious students. Compassionate students. Young people genuinely moved by what they hear. But something has become increasingly clear to me: a student can know exactly what happened to Jews in the 1940s and still have absolutely no idea how to recognize antisemitism in 2026.

That gap should trouble us. We have become very good at teaching antisemitism in the past tense. We teach yellow stars, ghettos, cattle cars, Auschwitz. We teach what hatred looks like once history has already rendered its verdict.

That is essential. But it is also, in some ways, the easy part. Because we are very good at recognizing and teaching antisemitism once history has already told us what antisemitism looks like. A swastika on a synagogue? Easy. A Nazi screaming at a Jewish child? Easy. A yellow star, a shattered storefront, a cattle car, a gas chamber? We know what to call........

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