Holocaust education has been a mainstay of British education for some time. But the rising tide of anti-Semitism in the UK suggests that it may not be accomplishing its supposed goals. Irene Lancaster and Rowan Williams consider the nature of the problem and its possible solutions:

Schoolchildren, of course, study the Holocaust. But what is disturbing—from our own experience and that of many other teachers—is that they often emerge with only the haziest idea of the specifics. We have heard of students who have studied the diaries of Anne Frank with barely any mention of the fact that she was Jewish. Holocaust education, and even events around Holocaust Memorial Day, can come to be focused on generalities about victimized minorities. We have encountered schoolchildren who have visited Auschwitz and returned with only the vague notion that it is bad to persecute people for their religion.

What would effective Holocaust education look like? It would certainly have to involve an attempt to trace the historical roots, to look at, for instance: the history of the “blood libel”—the myth that Jews routinely kidnapped, tortured, and killed Christian children [to use their blood for religious rituals]—with origins that lie in this country in the Middle Ages. . . . It would need to look at how [Jewish] communities took root and developed, what they had to battle against and still have to combat in the form of lazy prejudices encoded in British literature and popular culture, even when the latter’s Christian rationale has long been forgotten.

Holocaust education must, . . . above all, involve awareness of what Jewish faith and culture have to say about themselves, not just what others say about them, which often recycles, however unwittingly, the stereotypes of the past. It would introduce students to what the state of Israel actually means for Jewish people, [rather than treating it] as an unfortunate but ignorable extra to Jewish identity.

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.