Maryland’s nearly 900,000 public school students will soon be heading back to school. Over the summer, teachers in every jurisdiction have taken courses to help them face the many challenges in the classroom. Thirty-five signed up for Religion Literacy for Educators, a five-day bus tour through the religion landscape of Montgomery County.

The course grew out of a 2-day summer workshop that Mitchell Joy, a history teacher at Walter Johnson High School, has offered since 2018. Last week the educators spent a morning or an afternoon exploring Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, Christianity, and Sikhism and meeting people of those faiths based on Joy’s many years teaching comparative religion.

“We wanted to have the ability to go and visit houses of worship, and to have a really immersive experience, to get people to listen to what people believe, but also asking speakers to discuss how their practice is impacting the classroom,” Joy said. “The classroom is [also] a place where you can expand emotional and intellectual growth, and that best happens when people are exposed to different ideas and not threatened by that.”

‘All the hates are coming into the classroom’

According to a by the Antidefamation League in 2022, Maryland ranked 10th in terms of the greatest number of antisemitic incidents, with Montgomery County accounting for nearly 60% of those across the state. Rabbi Abbi Sharofsky, the director of intergroup relations for the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Washington, described what many had already seen or heard in their own schools and communities – police cars in front of synagogues, antisemitic slurs, swastikas on buildings, and the hateful ‘Jews not welcome’ message written on the front door of Walt Whitman High School.

“So, they are already coming into the school year feeling this in the pit of their stomach,” Sharofsky said. “And the classroom teacher has to deal with not just one community of faith, but also racism and everything, Islamophobia, and anti-Asian hate. Yes, all the hates are coming into the classroom at the same time, and it’s an impossible juggling act.”

With Sharofsky were three Jewish students, among a corps of Jewish youth who volunteer to speak about their faith as part of JCRC’s Student to Student outreach program. Their audience that day was teachers.

“I know they are trying to listen and make changes based on what they hear,” said Mattie P., a rising junior.

Nathan G., currently filling out college applications, said the effort is worth it. “This kind of education makes teachers better prepared to talk about these subjects, and helps them create a classroom environment that’s more welcoming and more open to all students.”

Dahlia F., who is headed for Kenyon College this fall, said speaking out gives her a greater sense of confidence. “I am able to express myself, to say what needs to be said and that people will listen to me,” she said. “It makes me feel safer, it’s a tool in my back pocket that students like myself can share without fear.”

To think a good thought, to speak a good word, to do a good deed, is the best

Back on the bus in mid-week, the group headed to the Zoroastrian Center, located in a quiet neighborhood in Boyds, near the Montgomery County Agricultural Reserve. More than a dozen association members greet them, to share the traditions of this ancient monotheistic religion, that predates Islam. On this day they are told by its leaders that the religion accounts for 200,000 members worldwide, including the 400 who worship in Boyds and trace their heritage back to Iran or India.

The teachers are invited into a prayer room filled with natural light to listen to chanting from a sacred prayer in Avestan, an extinct language passed down by oral tradition, which Zoroastrians learn by rote.

Afterward the educators move to a great hall for lunch, with members joining them to continue the conversation, including Rubina Patel, who shares the teaching that to think a good thought, to speak a good word, to do a good deed, is best. “I think one of the strengths of Zoroastrianism, is that it’s a reflective religion,” she said. “It is each individual’s responsibility to make this world a better place or leave a place in a better condition than they found it.”

Fourteen-year-old Pourochista Izadyar is there too. She points out the many symbols of the two-winged figure, the Farvahar, she wears around her neck, which, she said makes her religion special. She said in school she’s often the only Zoroastrian, and hasn’t wanted to be singled out. “When I was younger, I would tell them, I was American, born and raised, but now as I grow up, I’ve become prouder of my heritage and feel everyone else should proud of their heritage as well,” she said.

Her message for teachers: “Be accepting. Don’t make [students] feel left out. Learning about [religion] in school makes you feel like, that’s my heritage. That’s my culture right there.”

Cabin John Middle School social studies teacher Vicki Mihailidis gets it. “I’ve been talking with my colleagues, and yes, just to promote that cultural sensitivity,” she said. “I think the main thing we need to do as a teacher is to establish a really safe, comfortable environment in your school, and build relationships with your students, so they do feel seen.”

Beyond prejudice, bigotry, misinformation

At the houses of worship, at lunch and on the bus, teachers said that by learning more about various religions, there is less an opportunity for prejudice, bigotry, misinformation or misunderstandings.

This is also what is the heart of the new social studies curriculum being rolled out for grades pre-K-12 beginning in the fall, through the 2025-6 school year. Lessons will connect historic immigration with current events, tailored to the population of Montgomery County. Social Studies supervisor Tracy Oliver-Gary said the curriculum’s alignment with the state mandated social justice standard is intentional.

“We are using this curriculum to fight hate,” she said. “It is telling their story, but we also have to go beyond the oppression, to humanizing people that continuously face hate crimes or hate acts as well. Those are the goals with the curricula.”

“Just being exposed to all of these ideas really enhances a teacher’s ability to communicate more effectively with students and parents of faith,” Joy said. “Many teachers told me they learned so much and are looking forward to the next level of the course next summer.”

Religion Literacy for Educators was sponsored in part by the non-profit Kaur Foundation.

In the face of centuries of anti-Black violence in America, it has become easy to dismiss the Holocaust as Europeans killing other Europeans, as “white-on-white” violence. This notion completely misses the Black history of the Holocaust, the details of which are lost because educators rarely teach it. 

The Holocaust was the systematic murder of 6 million European Jews, and the centrality of Jewish identity to the perpetration of the Holocaust must not be forgotten. But from a diverse array of communities — including persons with disabilities, LGBTQ people and members of other religious minorities — were also targeted by Nazi ideology. This included Black Germans.

While anti-semitic remarks from celebrities draw headlines and outrage, they are ultimately a symptom of a deeper problem: the failure of educators to teach about the Holocaust in ways that relate it to other marginalized communities’ experiences.

I teach courses on political violence at Virginia Commonwealth University, a minority-serving institution in Richmond — the former capital of the Confederacy. The students in my classroom have the same blind spot about Holocaust history as those celebrities. Yet, I’ve connected with my students in profound ways by studying the Holocaust and allowing them to forge their own personal connections to the victims and survivors of Hitler’s attempt to wipe out Jews and other minorities.

Sadly, the anti-semitism that motivated Nazi ideology has been in American culture and political discourse. Still, when tasked with rooting it out, students are readily able to identify anti-semitism. One student highlighted an circulated by a politician running for county office. One drew a connection between South Park’s and . Another supplied far too many quotes from . Young people from diverse backgrounds are able to recognize anti-semitism when they see it, but they struggle to understand where it comes from and why it affects them. 

That’s why I teach the Holocaust through an intersectional lens that reveals the relevance of religious, racial, gender and sexual identities. While the deep roots of Nazi ideology are found in , the forerunners of Nazi policy can be found in the colonization of Africa. Germany’s colonial genocides that began in 1904 in contemporary Namibia were only in 2021. The annihilation of the Herero and Nama peoples by German forces, through tactics such as forced starvation, deportation to concentration camps and medical experimentation, provided a blueprint for the Holocaust. But that isn’t the only connection. 

Nazi racial policy was built around the concept of eugenics, which held that mental illness, poverty and criminality were biological traits passed down from one generation to another. Popular in the United States as well as Western Europe, eugenicists sought to control who could have children as a way of addressing social problems. Virginia enacted eugenic laws in 1924, the same year it banned interracial marriage, and allowed state institutions to sterilize individuals to prevent the conception of so-called genetically inferior children. Virginia’s law became a model for the country after it was upheld by the in in 1927. Twenty-two percent of the sterilized in Virginia alone were African Americans, and two-thirds were women. 

Similarly, Nazi eugenics focused on the elimination of Afro-Germans — Germans of African descent. Hitler wrote about Afro-Germans in Mein Kampf, arguing that they defiled Aryans’ racial purity. Black and mixed-race people in Nazi Germany were subject to similar to that inflicted on Jews. Ye may like Hitler, but if he and his family had lived in Nazi Germany, they would have been socially and economically marginalized and potentially . The history of Nazi-era discrimination against Afro-Germans continues to affect Black people living in Germany today, with many reporting that .

Teaching Black history alongside Jewish and other histories of the Holocaust helps connect it with students’ own experiences with discrimination, violence and hate. It can also help educators better understand their students. As one of my students wrote while reflecting on an image of Germans mocking their Jewish neighbors as they were to a Nazi concentration camp, “I know the fear of deportation, of being taken away from your home and all you know, and just imagining people I’ve known all my life enjoying me losing everything, I can’t even explain how horrible that feels.” The experiences of the Holocaust still have meaning for marginalized students today.  

By forging connections between Black history and Jewish history, between the exploitation and murder of colonized peoples and the Holocaust, between marginalized communities, educators can help students of all backgrounds make important emotional and intellectual connections between the Holocaust and the bigotry and discrimination experienced by marginalized communities. Teaching the Black history of the Holocaust demonstrates to students how events that seemingly affect only one community ultimately affect us all.