Maryland DOE Reworks Curriculum to Focus on Antisemitism, Holocaust

Braden Hamelin and Zoe Bell

An estimated four in 10 American teens know that approximately six million Jews died in the Holocaust and only one third of teens know that Adolf Hitler came to power through a democratic process, according to a 2019 survey by the Pew Research Center.

Educators and community members hope that will soon change with recent revisions to Maryland’s middle and high school social studies curriculum.

The Maryland State Department of Education Social Studies Standards and Frameworks Validation Committee approved a new framework for instruction in June that includes a reworked focus on antisemitism and Holocaust education, which are set to go into effect beginning in the 2026–27 academic year.

The revised curriculum framework is the result of over a year of work by the SFVC, a group of teachers, parents, content supervisors and school administrators, including Howard Libit, the executive director of the Baltimore Jewish Council, who co-chaired the panel.

“As we continue to see these national surveys about the number of our young people who don’t know much about the Holocaust, I’m really hopeful that by requiring more instruction of it in middle and high school in Maryland, we’re going to really reverse that trend,” Libit said. “The more we can teach about the Holocaust and the awful impact of extreme hate, I think the better we will be as a society, long term.”

Guila Franklin Siegel, the chief operating officer of the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Washington, said the JCRC worked closely with the nonprofit Institute for Curriculum Services and provided input to the committee after noticing an increasing number of “curriculum-based incidents and challenges” in both public and private schools over the past 12 to 18 months.

Libit said the committee added standards regarding Holocaust education and opportunities to teach about the origins of antisemitism, how multiple historical events influenced antisemitism and the creation of the Anti-Defamation League.

Libit said another change is introducing more information about the founding of Israel, specifically multiple Middle Eastern countries expelling their Jewish populations after Israel was formed and the migration of Northern African Jews to the country.

“It’s not just a question of Palestinians leaving Israel when Israel was founded. Jews were forced to go to Israel because the Arab countries they’d been living in for generations expelled them. And I think that’s a really important lesson for kids to learn and understand,” Libit said.

Some other changes of note include a sixth-grade unit on the bubonic plague adding language to discuss “the plague’s short- and long-term impact on population and antisemitism,” and a high school world history unit on World War I discussing the European mandate system and its contributions to the rise of Zionism.

In the seventh-grade curriculum, the content topic titled “Jerusalem” was renamed to “The Middle East.” The committee agreed to change the timeframe of study from 1900 to the present day to the years 1940 to 1994, removing the requirement to discuss the ongoing developments in the multidecade Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Notably, changes to this framework removed the single mention of Palestinians from the curriculum with the striking of the term “Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” replacing it with language about analyzing how “regional conflicts and diplomacy have influenced efforts towards stability and cooperation in the Middle East.”

That change was subjected to some scrutiny during the public review and comment period that ran from December 2024 until February 2025, as several community members felt it removed an opportunity to discuss the current conflict and its evolution over the past three decades and erased Palestinians.

“By pushing the timeline back, we would lose the opportunity for students to engage with a contemporary issue and to understand a conflict as it unfolds. This would deprive them of a crucial learning experience and the chance to apply historical perspectives to present-day situations,” an anonymous community member wrote to the SFVC in opposition to the revisions.

“The changes strongly reflect the interests of the Jewish community and remove the single instance of the word ‘Palestinian’ from the frameworks, and reframing the topic to stop at the year 1980 instead of present day. Please reconsider these changes,” another anonymous commenter wrote.

Libit said the committee made that change due to the rapidly evolving nature of the conflict and out of a desire to remove the opportunity for individual educators to introduce their own biases and opinions about the modern-day issues into the lessons.

“Your curriculum could change weekly, depending on what’s happening [in the Middle East],” Libit said. “And we felt like it was too much to particularly put on middle school teachers. It just created too much potential for people’s personal opinions and views of what’s happening there.”

He added that there is currently “no country called Palestine, so that’s not a word you would put in there.”

The State of Palestine is recognized as a country by 147 of the United Nations’ 193 member states. The United States does not recognize “Palestine” as a sovereign state.

Peter Ramsey, the committee co-chair and the MSDE’s director of social studies, noted that the U.S. history course mentions the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and also that teachers aren’t limited to the curriculum in their instruction.

“These frameworks are a floor; they’re not a ceiling,” Ramsey said. “This is not a cap on what can be taught. … Each [local education agency] can interpret it and build on it how they see fit.”

Individual school systems will take these revised frameworks and write their own curriculum plans based on that content.

Overall, 67% of public comments were in support of the revisions, while another 16% supported the revisions with amendments, and only 17% were in opposition.

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