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

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

eBook

Deciphering the New Antisemitism

Deciphering the New Antisemitism addresses the increasing prevalence of antisemitism on a global scale. Antisemitism takes on various forms in all parts of the world, and the essays in this wide-ranging volume deal with many of them: European antisemitism,…

Audience: 9th-12th

eBook

Rescue Board

Featured historian in the Ken Burns documentary The U.S. and the Holocaust on PBS • WINNER OF THE NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARD • In this remarkable work of historical reclamation, Holocaust historian Rebecca Erbelding pieces together years of research…

Audience: 9th-12th

eBook

Years of Glory

When France fell to Hitler’s armies in June 1940, a flood of refugees fleeing Nazi terror quickly overwhelmed Europe’s borders and spilled across the Mediterranean to North Africa, touching off a humanitarian crisis of dizzying proportions. Nelly Benatar, a…

Audience: 9th-12th

eBook

Hitler’s Furies

Lower, drawing on twenty years of archival research and fieldwork, presents startling evidence that these women were more than “desk murderers” or comforters of murderous German men: they went on “shopping sprees” and romantic outings to the Jewish ghettos;…

Audience: 9th-12th

eBook

I Was Born in an Old Age Home

Susanne (Sanne) Kalter DeWitt, a Jew, was born in Munich, Germany in 1934, during the Nazi era. Her parents were members of the Munich Jewish community. Sanne describes her deportation to Poland, her arrest on Kristallnacht, followed by incarceration…

Audience: 9th-12th

eBook

Hitler’s Army

As the Cold War followed on the heels of the Second World War, as the Nuremburg Trials faded in the shadow of the Iron Curtain, both the Germans and the West were quick to accept the idea that Hitler’s…

Audience: 9th-12th

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

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

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

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

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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