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

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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

Night without End

Three million Polish Jews were murdered in the Holocaust, wiping out nearly 98 percent of the Jewish population who had lived and thrived there for generations. Night Without End tells the stories of their resistance, suffering, and death in…
Audience: 9th-12th
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  • eBook

Rain of Ash

Jews and Roma died side by side in the Holocaust, yet the world did not recognize their destruction equally. In the years and decades following the war, the Jewish experience of genocide increasingly occupied the attention of legal experts,…
Audience: 9th-12th
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  • 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
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  • 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
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  • 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
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  • 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
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  • 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
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  • 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
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  • 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
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  • 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
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  • eBook

The Last Letter

Born a German Jew in 1915, Rudy Baum was eighty-six years old when he sealed the garage door of his Dallas home, turned on the car ignition, and tried to end his life. After confronting her father’s attempted suicide,…
Audience: 9th-12th
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  • eBook

Why?

Why? explores one of the most tragic events in human history by addressing eight of the most commonly asked questions about the Holocaust: Why the Jews? Why the Germans? Why murder? Why this swift and sweeping? Why didn’t more…
Audience: 9th-12th
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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 >