Trump to sign bill granting $10 million for Holocaust education
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Image by Wikimedia Commons
By Aiden Pink May 28, 2020
President Trump is set to sign a bill on Thursday providing millions of dollars in grants for Holocaust education, Jewish Insider reported.
The bill, called the Never Again Education Act, was passed by the House of Representatives in January and by the Senate earlier this month. It will provide $10 million over five years in grants for middle and high schools to incorporate lessons about the Holocaust into their curricula.
Holocaust education is currently mandatory in 12 states, according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Some of the country’s largest states, including California, Illinois and New York, have required public schools to teach about the Holocaust for at least 25 years.
According to Jewish Insider, several Jewish leaders are expected to attend the signing ceremony, which will take place with pandemic-related spacing requirements.
One of the bill’s Senate sponsors, Jacky Rosen of Nevada, said in a webcast sponsored by the Jewish Democratic Council of America that the bill is a “first step in centralizing a good quality and authentic curriculum to teach the Holocaust to future generations.”
Despite this, surveys have repeatedly shown that much of the American public is not knowledgeable about some of the basic historical facts of the Holocaust. A Pew survey in January found that two-thirds of Americans knew that the term “Holocaust” referred to the annihilation of Jews, but less than half knew that the number of Jews killed was approximately six million.
Aiden Pink is the deputy news editor of the Forward. Contact him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter @aidenpink
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
