The Sorry State of Holocaust Studies in North Carolina

In 2021, North Carolina made a decision that deserves real credit. With the passage of the Gizella Abramson Holocaust Education Act, the state mandated Holocaust education in public middle and high schools, ensuring that younger generations would confront one of history’s clearest warnings against hatred, ideological extremism, and the catastrophic consequences of antisemitism.

The law reflected a hard truth: historical memory does not preserve itself. As the generation of survivors passes from living memory, no society can assume the lessons of the twentieth century will simply endure. 

North Carolina’s commitment did not begin in 2021, either. In 1981, the state established the North Carolina Council on the Holocaust, making it one of the earlier states in the country to institutionalize Holocaust remembrance as a matter of public policy. The Abramson Act was not a beginning. It was the continuation of a four-decade recognition that understanding the Holocaust is essential to producing historically literate citizens.

But North Carolina’s legislative seriousness appears to stop precisely where higher education begins.

The state requires Holocaust education for public school students. Its colleges and universities remain under no comparable expectation. There is no state-wide requirement that students at UNC System campuses engage with Holocaust history, the study of antisemitism, or the ideological and political conditions that allowed the twentieth century’s greatest crime to unfold. Sixteen-year-olds in Charlotte and Asheville now receive structured instruction on the Holocaust. Twenty-year-olds down the road at Chapel Hill or Boone can graduate having never opened a book on the subject at all.

This gap deserves scrutiny, and the timing makes it more urgent, not less. Universities nationwide have spent the past several years mired in controversies over antisemitism, with administrators repeatedly struggling to stop the harassment of Jews on campus. Congressional hearings, encampments, and disciplinary investigations have become a familiar rhythm of the academic calendar, and North Carolina’s own campuses have not been immune to that pattern. The institutions with the greatest autonomy over what gets taught—universities—are frequently the places where historical understanding of antisemitism is thinnest, in part due to the fact that no one has ever required them to teach it systematically in the first place.

It is worth pausing on why that autonomy argument, so often invoked to wave away any state interest in curriculum, does not actually settle the question. Universities are rightly protected from state interference in the content of scholarship and the conclusions of research. But the existence of a program, the qualifications required to lead it, and whether an institution is fulfilling the educational mission it advertises to students and donors are administrative and governance questions, not academic freedom ones. A state legislature asking whether a taxpayer-funded Holocaust center is actually staffed by people trained in Holocaust studies is not censoring anyone. It is doing what any board or accreditor would do for a nursing program or a law school: checking whether the credentials match the mission.

North Carolina has told us it takes the problem seriously in another way, too. In 2024, the General Assembly adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism into state law, formally recognizing antisemitism as a contemporary problem requiring institutional attention, not just a historical one.

Here the contradiction becomes hard to miss. The state has decided antisemitism is serious enough to be defined in statute. It has decided Holocaust education is important enough to require it of teenagers. Yet the moment students arrive at institutions built specifically for intellectual inquiry and moral reflection, that expectation simply evaporates. If lawmakers concluded sixteen-year-olds need structured education on the Holocaust, it is fair to ask why that logic disappears the moment those same students turn eighteen and enroll at NC State.

Universities occupy an outsized place in shaping civic culture. They train the teachers, journalists, lawyers, and policymakers who will run the next generation of American institutions. Yet a student can spend four years in North Carolina higher education without ever seriously confronting the mechanics of state-sponsored hatred, ideological fanaticism, and the slow normalization of dehumanization that made the Holocaust possible. That is not a small omission. It is a civic education failing exactly the people who will shape civic life.

None of this is an argument for rigid curriculum mandates or direct state control of what professors teach. Universities need room for independent scholarship, and lawmakers should be wary of dictating syllabi. But oversight is not the same thing as control, and oversight here is entirely appropriate. The state could require public universities to report annually on their Holocaust and antisemitism education efforts—course offerings, enrollment, staffing credentials—the same kind of transparency the UNC System already demands in other areas of academic accountability. 

It could strengthen partnerships between campus centers and established Holocaust museums and research institutions, which have decades of pedagogical expertise that some university programs conspicuously lack. And it could tie a portion of dedicated funding for Judaic and Holocaust studies centers to basic staffing standards, so that a distinguished professorship in Holocaust or antisemitism studies requires, at minimum, a scholarly record in the field. 

None of this requires the legislature to write a syllabus. It only requires the legislature to ask, once a year, whether the money it appropriates is being spent on what it was appropriated for—holding public universities to the same standard of seriousness lawmakers set for high schools.

Yet if anything, what is happening inside some of these programs in North Carolina suggests the opposite of seriousness.

In 2021, roughly two hundred scholars—many of them working in Jewish and Israel Studies, the very field meant to safeguard rigorous engagement with these questions—signed an open letter denouncing Israel’s “ethnonationalist ideologies” and “settler colonial paradigm.” 

Israel is a country where about 20 percent of citizens are Arab Muslims who hold equal rights, and over half of its Jewish population is of Middle Eastern, Indian, and Ethiopian descent. Israel’s former president Moshe Katsav, for instance, was born in Iran and sentenced to prison by an Israeli judge who is Christian Arab. With the same disregard of basic facts, the letter also deployed the term “Jewish supremacy,” language with a lineage in explicitly antisemitic rhetoric. Three signatories came from UNC Chapel Hill and one from NC State. 

A further issue is the leadership of Holocaust and Judaic studies programs themselves. Appalachian State recently named a new director of its Center for Judaic, Holocaust, and Peace Studies, along with the Leon Levine Distinguished Professorship. The new director is a professor of French literature with an affiliate appointment in Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies. 

By her own university’s account, she has no background in Judaic studies, Holocaust studies, or political science, and not a single book publication on any topic (including French literature or Gender studies). That raises the question about what qualifies someone to lead a center built specifically around Holocaust and Judaic education. I put that question to App State. Associate Vice Chancellor Mark D. Lacey replied by defending the search process as “merit-based” but did not explain how the chosen candidate qualified to lead the center.

Another example is a professor of History and Distinguished Scholar in Jewish History at UNC Wilmington. His university-listed CV cites, under “academic publications,” a book titled The Seinfeld Talmud: A Jewish Guide to a Show About Nothing. It seeks to imagine rabbinic sages debating the sitcom. On its book cover one finds invented endorsements from figures like Jesus of Nazareth (“This is as good as anything my Father has written”), Dr. Hannibal Lecter (“Helped me pass the time in prison”), and Mark Twain (“The insane escapes of some delusional Jews in a messy yeshivah that may or may not contain a chicken”). 

One passage reads:

“What is a Guggenheim? asked Shimon ben Pazi. It is a Temple in the Big Apple named for an ‘immigrant’ who went down on the Titanic after it was rammed by Noah’s Ark, killing all the ponies on board, said Rav Kahana. Probably he knew Manya. Maybe even killed her pony, a makher like Guggenheim surely hated anyone who owned a pony. So then coffee is coffee, concluded Bar Kapara. That was easy, I think we are done here.”

Whether that qualifies as humorous is a matter of taste. Whether it qualifies as scholarship is not—and the author was promoted from associate to full professor in the window following its “academic” publication, with no other academic monograph listed on his CV from that period. If the standard for promotion is now who cracks the best jokes, then what are scholarly positions actually for?

Jewish studies used to mean things such as philology, legal analysis, or comparative rabbinics—the unglamorous, exacting work of understanding a textual and historical tradition on its own terms, not defaming Judaism: “the illustrious Talmud, which, depending on whom you ask, is either the most comprehensive body of Jewish law ever produced or thousands of pages about nothing.”

Increasingly, in North Carolina at least, that serious scholarly tradition seems to be handed either to scholars with no grounding in it or to projects that treat it as material for a punch line. Students end up choosing between two distortions: Judaism and the Jewish people recast as “ethnonationalist” and “supremacist,” or mediocre representations of twentieth century Jewish comedy.

North Carolina already showed the country what serious Holocaust education policy looks like. The state decided, correctly, that historical memory requires institutional backing, not good intentions alone. It is time to ask why that same seriousness stops at the university gates—and why, when it comes to who actually teaches this history on campus, the state’s flagship and regional universities have so often gotten it embarrassingly wrong.

Christopher L. Schilling is the author of Antisemitism and the Character of America, Therapy People: How Bad Science Took Over Our Inner Lives, The Japanese Talmud: Antisemitism in East Asia, and The Therapized Antisemite: The Myth of Psychology and the Evasion of Responsibility.