California School Scraps ‘Did Holocaust Happen’ Essay

Image by getty images

By JTA May 6, 2014

A California school district said it will rewrite an eighth-grade assignment that asked students to argue whether or not the Holocaust happened.

The writing assignment for students in the Rialto Unified School District asked students to write an argumentative essay about the Holocaust in which they must explain “whether or not you believe this was an actual event in history, or merely a political scheme created to influence public emotion and gain wealth.”

The existence of the assignment, made in April in connection with a unit on “The Diary of Anne Frank,” was first reported Sunday by the San Bernadino Sun.

The students were required to use outside sources to make their argument.

Interim Superintendent Mohammad Z. Islam said he would caution administrators to make sure that “any references to the holocaust ‘not occurring’ will be stricken on any current or future Argumentative Research assignments,” according to a statement released Monday by district spokeswoman Syeda Jafri, who said that an academic team from the school district would meet to change the assignment .

Islam received death threats over the assignment, Rialto Police Captain Randy De Anda told KCAL, the Los Angeles CBS affiliate.

Jafri told the Sun that no parents had complained about the assignment,

In an email to the school district from the Los Angeles office of the Anti-Defamation League, Associate Regional Director Matthew Friedman said: “It is ADL’s general position that an exercise asking students to question whether the Holocaust happened has no academic value; it only gives legitimacy to the hateful and anti-Semitic promoters of Holocaust Denial.”

In a statement posted on its website Monday, the office said: “ADL does not have any evidence that the assignment was given as part of a larger, insidious, agenda. Rather, the district seems to have given the assignment with an intent, although misguided, to meet Common Core standards relating to critical learning skills. ADL has thanked the district for its quick response to this matter.”

The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.

Now more than ever, American Jews need independent news they can trust, with reporting driven by truth, not ideology. We serve you, not any ideological agenda.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.

Readers like you make it all possible. We’re near the end of our Passover Fundraising Drive, and we have a very ambitious goal of $127,000 by April 21.

This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism you rely on. Make a Passover gift today!

— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO