Curriculum & Resources

JFCS Holocaust Center curriculum focuses on expanding students’ understanding of the Holocaust and genocide, so they can develop empathy, critical thinking skills, and moral courage.

Resource Types

Curriculum Consultations
Our staff can work with local teachers to support your teaching of the Holocaust and patterns of genocide. Consultations include sharing resources, teaching pedagogies, and connecting Bay Area schools with programming through the JFCS Holocaust Center. Schedule a consultation >

eBook

The Cost of Free Land

“Sharply insightful . . . A monumental piece of work.”—The Boston GlobeAn award-winning author investigates the entangled history of her Jewish ancestors’ land in South Dakota and the Lakota, who were forced off that land by the United States…

Audience: 9th-12th

eBook

Moshe’s Children

Moshe’s Children presents the inspiring story of Moshe Zeiri, a Jewish carpenter responsible for rescuing hundreds of Jewish refugee children who had survived the Final Solution. During the liberation of Italy, Zeiri, a volunteer in the British Army in…

Audience: 9th-12th

eBook

Bosnian Genocide

In the three years of the Bosnian War, well over 100,000 people lost their lives, amid intense carnage. This led to unprecedented criminal prosecutions for genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity that are still taking place today. Bosnian…

Audience: 9th-12th

eBook

Sarajevo Blues

From one of Bosnia’s most prominent poets and writers: spare and haunting stories and poems that were written under the horrific circumstances of the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Semezdin Mehmedinovic remained a citizen of Sarajevo throughout the Serbian nationalists’ siege…

Audience: 9th-12th

eBook

Rising Out of Hatred

The powerful story of how a prominent white supremacist changed his heart and mind. From the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, this is a book to help us understand the American moment and to help us better understand one another….

Audience: 9th-12th

eBook

First, They Erased Our Name

Through the eyes of a child, we learn about the historic persecution of the Rohingya people and witness the violence Habiburahman endured throughout his life until he escaped the country in 2000. First, They Erased Our Name is an…

Audience: 9th-12th

eBook

The Postcard

Winner of the Choix Goncourt Prize, Anne Berest’s The Postcard is a vivid portrait of twentieth-century Parisian intellectual and artistic life, an enthralling investigation into family secrets, and poignant tale of a Jewish family devastated by the Holocaust and…

Audience: 9th-12th

eBook

How to Fight Anti-Semitism

WINNER OF THE NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARD • The prescient founder of The Free Press delivers an urgent wake-up call to all Americans exposing the alarming rise of anti-Semitism in this country—and explains what we can do to defeat…

Audience: 9th-12th

eBook

Once We Were Slaves

An obsessive genealogist and descendent of one of the most prominent Jewish families since the American Revolution, Blanche Moses firmly believed her maternal ancestors were Sephardic grandees. Yet she found herself at a dead end when it came to…

Audience: 9th-12th

eBook

Neighbors

On July 10, 1941, in Nazi-occupied Poland, half of the town of Jedwabne brutally murdered the other half: 1,600 men, women, and children—all but seven of the town’s Jews. In this shocking and compelling classic of Holocaust history, Jan…

Audience: 9th-12th

eBook

Making Monsters

In Making Monsters David Livingstone Smith offers a poignant meditation on the philosophical and psychological roots of dehumanization. Drawing on harrowing accounts of lynchings, Smith establishes what dehumanization is and what it isn’t. When we dehumanize our enemy, we…

Audience: 9th-12th

Curriculum Consultations.
Our staff can work with local teachers to support the continuation of the study of the Holocaust and patterns of genocide in the virtual space. Consultations include sharing resources, virtual teaching pedagogies, and connecting Bay Area schools with virtual programming through the JFCS Holocaust Center. Schedule a consultation >

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