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When history teacher Gregory Keith heard about how some high school classrooms in Sydney’s west were pockets of antisemitism and Jewish educators feared for their safety, he did not quite believe it.
“I thought, this is not what it’s like in western Sydney,” he said.
So he decided to do his own research. As part of a University of Sydney PhD completed last year, he surveyed teachers across dozens of Sydney and NSW schools about their experience of teaching the Holocaust to high school students.
“It was pretty obvious there is a problem, and it’s in very specific areas, and it takes a very specific shape,” he said.
The research canvassing just over 80 teachers identified how two main types of schools stood out when it came to teacher reports of antisemitism: co-ed and boys’ state schools in south-western Sydney, where Arabic was a major language group in the school; and, private boys’ and co-ed religious schools on the north shore and eastern suburbs.
Eighteen teachers nominated racism or antisemitism as classroom challenges when teaching the Holocaust, or almost a quarter of those surveyed.
One teacher said: “Many of our students are of Middle Eastern background and I have decided not to teach The Diary of Anne Frank this term.” That teacher cited students’ views on Jewish people in the Israeli-Palestine conflict.
Boys were more likely to be behind antisemitism, the research found.
Keith also noted that numerous schools with high Arabic-speaking populations did not report any levels of antisemitism.
What teachers said about the reality of teaching the Holocaust in NSW classrooms:
- In my experience, acts of racism (including language) have disproportionately been performed by male students. Additionally, at my previous school it would be performed by male students in years 8, 9 and 10 of a Middle Eastern background who were locally enrolled (i.e. not selective students) and who did not aspire to engage in tertiary education (i.e. intended to finish school at the end of year 10, not go to university, etc.).
- I think I may have been wearing rose-tinted glasses, or the current events in Israel have had a huge impact, but I would say there is increased antisemitism since I completed the survey initially. Many of our students are of Middle Eastern background and I have decided not to teach The Diary of Anne Frank this term to my year 9 history elective class because of their views on Jewish people in the Israeli-Palestine conflict. I feel it is not the right time to engage in the topic to gain any positive feedback.
- At my previous school which was Greek Orthodox, students were constantly drawing swastikas on the desk. This is despite me telling classes my husband’s grandparents were in concentration camps during WWII and that I found it deeply offensive. A lot of the far-right extremism also contributed to this e.g. Andrew Tate, Kanye West.
- Some of the students of Eastern European heritage have very strong opinions towards why Jews were targeted by the Nazis, i.e. greedy, economically exploitative. They “buy into” negative stereotypes. Leading into the idea that Jews brought German actions upon themselves. Some students also attempt to relate Nazi policies towards Jews to the policies of the far right today in countries such as Croatia towards immigration and multiculturalism.
Another teacher reported how a student had “very strong views about the ‘deservedness’ of what happened to the Jews in the Holocaust”.
In one reported incident, a teacher removed a student from the classroom for making Hitler salutes to a Jewish teacher. The teacher was “admonished” by the school leadership. There were no consequences for the student.
Despite the inclusion of the Holocaust in the NSW history curriculum, more than 10 per cent of surveyed teachers said they did not teach it in years 9 and 10. Just over 30 per cent spend less than two hours covering it.
A NSW Department of Education spokesman dismissed the research as not an accurate “representation of the views or experiences of NSW public school teachers”.
A NSW Education Standards Authority spokeswoman said: “A survey of 75 teachers, out of 180,000 teachers across NSW, does not provide a relative snapshot of the work the profession does in this space.”
Next year, a new history curriculum will bring more substance to teaching the Holocaust, with students to learn about World War II, the significance of the Nuremberg trials and the creation of the Genocide Convention.
It comes as the federal government’s Antisemitism Education Taskforce, led by David Gonski, has been working on strengthening Australia’s curriculum to deepen understanding of Jewish culture and history.
Federal opposition education spokesman Julian Leeser said antisemitism was highly resistant to modern efforts to tackle racism because it was conspiratorial, relying on motifs of coercion, hidden power and control that allow “antisemitic conduct to be dressed up as justice”.
“In part, this helps explain how antisemitic conduct is so widespread in institutions which pride themselves on their progressive attitudes,” he said.
Leeser said that antisemitism education should move away from the Holocaust and focus on the positive contribution of Jewish thought.
“It is not enough to describe the ways Jews are murdered,” he said.
A survey of teachers last month by Rule of Law Education Centre, an organisation that aims to bolster civic knowledge to participate in democratic life, found almost 70 per cent cited student and parent aggression as reasons for not engaging in controversial issues in class.
“A culture of hatred is spilling over into abuse in the classroom – where people are more willing to shout each other down rather than having a respectful conversation balancing differing opinions,” chief executive Sally Layson said.
She said education in schools was the key way democracies promote the tenets of freedom, pluralism and the rule of law.
“Where education systems do not explicitly teach these principles, or fail to provide the skills and conditions needed to practise them, social cohesion is weakened and space is created for ideologically motivated extremism to flourish,” Layson said.
When Keith began to teach the Holocaust 25 years ago, he would start with confronting images of emaciated corpses in concentration camps.
“And if the kids were crying, I would go, ‘Tick, I think we’ve achieved something here’. That’s not how I teach it now.”
Today, he would start by humanising the victims, showing how they lived before the 1930s in Europe, explicitly teaching students about ancient and contemporary antisemitism – including in Australia.
“If I was teaching the Holocaust right now, I’d start with the massacre of Bondi, and the antisemitism behind it.”
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