On October 9th, 2023, two days after Hamas led an attack on Israel and Israel began its bombardment of Gaza, the leaders of Facing History & Ourselves—an educational nonprofit known for its model lessons and textbooks on racism, genocide, war, and human rights abuses—sent an email to their staff about the organization’s plan to address the “frightening terrorist attacks on Israeli citizens.” In the message, which made no mention of Gaza or the hundreds of Palestinian civilians Israel had started killing there, CEO Desmond Blackburn and senior vice president and chief program officer Abby Weiss emphasized that teachers were already turning to Facing History for help meeting the moment in US classrooms. “Our team is developing resources for use with students by the end of the day so that educators can have the support they need when they reach their classrooms tomorrow,” they wrote in the email—which, along with other internal communications, was obtained by Jewish Currents.

The email presaged the types of resources that Facing History would go on to produce in the coming hours and days. The group’s first post-October 7th lesson, for instance, was titled “Processing Attacks in Israel and the Outbreak of War in the Region,” and framed the events of October 7th as “an orchestrated terrorist attack on civilians and members of the Israeli military” while describing the deaths of over 680 Palestinians as the result of Israeli “counter-strikes” as part of a “war on Hamas.” Days later, Facing History edited the resource, re-titling it “Antisemitism, Terror, and War”; the document now characterized October 7th as “an antisemitic terrorist attack designed to murder Jews,” while still relegating mention of Gaza to an oblique note about “the loss of innocent Israeli and Palestinian lives.”

Inside Facing History, a growing number of employees watched this response with alarm. “I was pretty taken aback just by how blatant the exclusion of Palestinians was in the messaging,” said a former administrative staffer, one of four current and former employees interviewed by Jewish Currents (all of whom requested anonymity to protect their careers). The staffer said that they later left Facing History largely due to their opposition to the organization’s stance on Gaza, a position many others shared. By December 5th, 2023, as Israel’s assault intensified and experts began to label it a genocide, more than 80 Facing History employees—around half of the nonprofit’s US-based staff—sent a letter to the organization’s leadership team criticizing what they said was a pro-Israel bias in educational materials, and a shirking of responsibility to “address the risk of genocide against Palestinians.” The letter, which was obtained by Jewish Currents, asked Facing History to be transparent with staff about who and what had shaped the organization’s response to events in Israel and Gaza; it also called on the nonprofit to add context on Israel’s occupation to its educational resources, and to apologize for hosting a webinar featuring a Zionist activist who had previously tweeted that “Muslim & Arab violent Jew-hatred” was the root of the problem in Israel/Palestine.

In response to the letter, Blackburn sent an email to staff saying that the group would produce more resources on Israel/Palestine and undertake a process to better understand what teachers need when discussing the topic. He added that Facing History would also include disclaimers on webinars noting that the speakers did not necessarily reflect the organization’s views, and would invite staff to sessions on “empathetic learning and civil discourse.” Facing History leadership also organized a town hall meeting to discuss staff concerns. However, according to an employee who attended it, the session did not end up facilitating real conversation on the issue of Israel/Palestine. Instead, after some staffers sympathetic to Israel said that they felt unsafe in the workplace in the wake of the staff letter, the town hall “ended up being about preserving people’s feelings and the delicacies of the workplace.”

Over a year after the staff letter was sent, some of its signatories say that Facing History has failed to correct course, instead doubling down on an approach that has damaged the organization. “If you say, ‘we use the lessons of history to challenge racism, bigotry, and hatred wherever it is, except for in Israel/Palestine,’ then the whole sentence falls apart,” said a former Facing History program specialist who left largely over these concerns. “My feeling is that the non-stance of Facing History on Israel and Palestine could be its downfall. It could undermine all of the work that it has done.”

At the core of that work is the organization’s commitment to drawing connections between different atrocities, including the one that it was founded to help teachers address: the Holocaust. Barry Trachtenberg, a historian of Jewish history and Holocaust studies at Wake Forest University, and a member of Facing History’s board of scholars—a group that advises the nonprofit on its educational resources and programs—said that he previously considered Facing History to be at the forefront of progressive education because of the way it put the Holocaust in conversation with other historic wrongs, resisting the exceptionalization of the Nazi genocide that has been used to justify unconditional support for Israel. “A lot of people, including myself, became attracted to Facing History because it hasn’t historically seen the Holocaust in this narrow way and actually takes the charge of ‘never again’ seriously to mean ‘never again to anyone,’” he said. More recently, though, he has pulled back from working with the group in response to its unwillingness to criticize Israel, and its relative silence about the decimation of Gaza—a stance which has mirrored that of many other Holocaust and genocide education institutions. “Holocaust studies writ large is at a crisis point where we have to recognize that the construction of our field limits us from recognizing the fundamental humanity of Palestinians, and we have to contend with that,” Trachtenberg said. “Facing History ranks among the best that we’ve been able to do so far. That tells us about how far we’ve been able to take this work.”


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.”

Facing History staffers have tried to challenge this exclusion. The former program specialist remembers an incident that occurred on a call in Spring 2022, not long after they joined Facing History, in which they suggested creating more resources on Israel/Palestine and connecting them with the organization’s existing materials on Indigenous peoples. The staffer recounted that “there was just this moment of silence before a senior staffer on the call said, ‘There’s a policy of not talking about this. And another more senior staffer interjected, saying, ‘It’s not a policy. We just don’t know how to talk about it yet.’” Others report that the pattern continued more recently. A current staffer said that, in May 2023, they expressed concern to their boss about the lack of Facing History resources on Palestine. “I was told that the history of the Nakba is debated and there’s little agreement on what actually took place, and that we only provide materials on agreed-upon history,” the staffer recounted. “My takeaway from the response was that it’s an unwelcome topic that no one was going to budge on, in no small part due to our reliance on Jewish donors and partnerships.” These donors have included Israel advocates such as Alan Dershowitz, Charles and Lynn Schusterman, the Crown and Goodman family, and Seth Klarman. Klarman, a prominent Zionist philanthropist, served as chair of Facing History’s board for years; his family foundation has given over $15 million to the nonprofit. (Asked about these questions, Facing History dismissed both staffers’ accounts as unsubstantiated, and said the claim of donor influence on their materials was “incorrect.”)

The nonprofit’s reticence on Palestine has become particularly noticeable since October 2023. In a statement to Jewish Currents, Facing History leadership said that they “are supporting educators by offering expert training and resources to help them build safe classroom environments, promote open, respectful and honest discussion and navigate the challenging conversations and questions that have emerged in learning spaces since October 7th.” However, while Facing History did attempt to provide teachers with new resources on Israel/Palestine, it later backtracked. In December 2023, the group published a guide on how teachers could help students “center their community members’ humanity in conversations about the Israel-Hamas war.” In May 2024, it published another teaching resource titled “International Law and the Humanitarian Catastrophe in Gaza,” which was meant to help students understand “the importance of distinguishing between combatants and civilians in times of war.” The last resource “was an attempt at acknowledging that there are two sides to the situation,” said a current employee. But a few weeks later, in mid-May 2024, Facing History decided to take down all three of the resources it had produced since October 7th.

In emails to staffers, Weiss, the senior vice president, said the nonprofit removed the resources after receiving “feedback from members of our community—across a range of perspectives—who have raised concerns about whether Facing History should produce resources about the current conflict”; she said the organization had been accused of being both too “pro-Israel” and too “pro-Palestinian,” writing, “The situation became untenable.” Current and former employees told Jewish Currents that they suspect pro-Israel donors played a role in the decision to take down the third resource, on international law; that lesson plan “got significant backlash for being too pro-Palestine,” said a current employee. In its statement, Facing History said that it decided to “step back” after “recognizing the ever-evolving nature of the news and complexity of the conflict.” Since May 2024, Facing History has not produced any resources on Gaza, though a general resource on genocide published last February mentions that both Hamas and Israel have been accused of committing genocide, while another published the same month is intended to teach students that conflating Jews with the actions of the Israeli government is a form of antisemitism.

Facing History’s continuing hesitancy to speak about Gaza has left teachers who rely on its resources shorthanded. “Many of us noticed and pointed out that our social media was flooded with pleas from the very people we serve, educators begging us for content and calling on us to help them address in classrooms what was unfolding in Gaza,” a current employee said. “Leadership’s position was to not engage and ignore all of the comments of that nature.” Facing History said that its policy of not responding to critical social media comments had been in place for five years and that it was in fact “diligently tracking those comments,” but the current employee emphasized that they had never “heard of a wave of critique like this that was ignored, or at a minimum, not addressed through our resources.” The requests ignored include at least one from an educator who teaches in a Jewish school. During a January meeting initiated by Facing History—which has a Jewish education program—about how they can be helpful to Jewish teachers, the teacher emphasized the need for lessons about Gaza. The educator, who requested anonymity to protect their job, said they were disappointed that the organization had provided nothing to fill the gap they’d identified. “Our Jewish kids have so many questions, and as a Jewish educator I feel a responsibility to provide ethical leadership. Facing History is a place I always turn to for that guidance,” they said. “The silence on Israel and Gaza has certainly been noticeable, and amplifies the feelings of isolation among educators who are trying to teach in a time of moral crisis.”

Despite such concerns, Facing History is now considering formalizing a policy of silence. In an email sent to staff in August 2024, Weiss wrote that the nonprofit would work on a recommendation to its board about whether it should produce content on the history of Israel/Palestine at all going forward, a decision she said was an “important strategic choice for the organization—one that would require an enormous dedication of resources and has significant risks associated with it for us.” Weiss promised a decision on Israel/Palestine in September 2024, though a current employee said staffers have not been told of one. Facing History did, however, announce in August that it would no longer publish “resources that address breaking news stories or discrete events,” but rather would “focus on creating evergreen educator resources on constant themes.”

These decisions come amid a wide-ranging attack on progressive education across the US, especially on teachers who voice support for Palestinians. In Maryland, for instance, a teacher was put on leave for writing “from the river to the sea” in her email signature, while in Florida, a first-grade teacher was also placed on leave after writing to her superintendent and school board about the need to “publicly recognize the Palestinian community” in communications about Israel and Gaza. Some progressive educators and scholars argue that Facing History’s reticence is especially egregious in this context. “When organizations like Facing History & Ourselves are silent on the devastation in Gaza, it leaves teachers more vulnerable to attack when they try to teach honestly about the region,” said Deborah Menkart, co-director of the Zinn Education Project, which also produces social justice educational resources.

For Trachtenberg, Facing History’s difficulty responding to Israel’s destruction of Gaza speaks to a broader bind. “They are part of a trend of American Jewish progressive organizations who have felt like they can’t talk about Israel’s oppression of Palestinians, that it’s a third rail and it’s too toxic,” he said. “It threatens to destroy their organizations because they are dependent upon funders who are pro-Israel. However, now we see that these restraints are giving cover to the genocide of Palestinians, and that’s intolerable.”