"New Jersey has long been a leader on this issue. Coordinated Holocaust education efforts began in the state as early as 1974, among the first in the country.
In 1982, New Jersey became the first state to establish an Advisory Council on Holocaust Education. In 1994, the Legislature unanimously voted to make New Jersey the second state in the nation to require Holocaust and genocide education in every public school.
In April 2023, legislation was enacted requiring a survey of Holocaust and genocide education in schools. The New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education today supports that mandate through teacher training, curriculum materials and resources for schools across the state.
That mandate was driven in large part by survivor Margit Feldman, who told a room full of education commissioners that without it, the world would be murdering her family twice.
New Jersey is home to the nation’s sixth-largest population of Holocaust survivors, and its schools have benefited for decades from survivors walking into classrooms and speaking in their own voices.
But the mandate does not require authenticity. Technology is filling that gap in ways that should worry us.
Through The Blue Card, I have helped develop a hologram program featuring Sonia Warshawski, a Holocaust survivor whose testimony has been preserved and made interactive for students.
When a student asks her a question and she responds in her own words, the room grows quiet in a particular way. Something real is happening.
What makes it real is precisely what makes it different from so much of what is being built right now: The system does not generate. It retrieves. If Sonia never said something, the system does not say it for her. It pauses. It stops.
That silence is not a limitation. It is the whole point.
Generative AI works on a different principle. It predicts what should come next. It fills gaps. It is extraordinarily good at producing language that feels authentic, even when nothing authentic underlies it. In most domains, that fluency is a feature. In Holocaust testimony, it is a serious risk.
In 2023, antisemitic incidents in New Jersey reached a record high of 830. The state recorded the third-highest total in the nation. Of the 719 incidents tracked in 2024, 166 occurred in non-Jewish public K-12 schools, representing about 23% of the statewide total.
A state that once led the nation in protecting survivor testimony from erasure now faces rising hatred in the very classrooms where that testimony was intended to prevent it. These two facts belong together. The erosion of authentic memory creates the conditions in which hatred grows.
Survivors chose their words deliberately. They decided what to tell, what to withhold and how to describe experiences that resist description. A system that completes their sentences is not preserving memory. It is replacing it with something more convenient and less true.
New Jersey mandated the truth once because survivors demanded it. The question now is whether educators, technologists and policymakers in this state will insist on the same standard for the tools entering their classrooms — tools that must know what they do not know and stop where the record ends."
Photo/ Article Credit NJ.com
https://www.nj.com/opinion/2026/07/hitlers-photo-in-a-nj-yearbook-reveals-what-happens-when-memory-erodes-opinion.html
That is why, to combat antisemitism through education, we launched a petition to incorporate Jewish American Heritage Month (JAHM) into the Fair Lawn Public Schools curriculum every May. Fair Lawn proudly became the first school district in New Jersey to officially recognize Jewish American Heritage Month. Now it's time to turn that commitment into action by implementing it in every school curriculum without delay.
https://www.change.org/p/incorporate-jewish-american-heritage-month-may-into-fair-lawn-schools-curriculum?
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