This Time: Teaching the Holocaust Today

This Time: Teaching the Holocaust Today, edited by Carol Rittner and John K. Roth, is a thoughtful and timely intervention. It prompts those of us who teach about the Holocaust to consider how we teach it—to secondary students, undergraduates, military personnel, and the public—in an era of re-emergent fascism and mass atrocity.

Sarah M. Cushman
Director, Holocaust Educational Foundation
Northwestern University

What if the way we have taught the Holocaust is no longer enough?

This Time: Teaching the Holocaust Today examines one of the most pressing questions facing educators and scholars: how to teach the Holocaust in an era marked by rising authoritarianism, political polarization, antisemitism, historical distortion, and ongoing mass violence. Edited by Carol Rittner and John K. Roth, this volume brings together leading voices in Holocaust and genocide studies to reflect on the ethical, political, and pedagogical challenges shaping Holocaust education in the twenty-first century.

Organized around a provocative framework—what educators should keep doing, stop doing, and start doing—the book does not offer a single methodology or consensus position. Instead, it presents a rigorous, often uneasy dialogue among scholars who disagree on core issues, including historical analogy, moral warning, resistance, and the use of Holocaust language in contemporary conflicts, particularly in relation to the Israel–Hamas war. Contributors address the growing pressures educators face, from institutional constraints and public backlash to the moral risks inherent in teaching contested history during periods of democratic instability.

Written for educators, scholars, graduate students, and readers engaged in Holocaust education, genocide studies, history, ethics, religious studies, and political theory, This Time treats teaching as a consequential act—one inseparable from the political realities in which it occurs. The volume challenges readers to reconsider what responsible Holocaust education demands now, and what it means to teach when historical memory itself is under strain.