Museum of Jewish Heritage Online Collection

Teaching the concepts of the Holocaust is simply impossible without the invaluable help of the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York. While the Washington DC museum is much better known (and Israel's Yad Vashem better known still), this museum's unique take on the holocaust is what allowed me to offer my students a real perspective about it. The material they offer (which is incredible for both its breadth and depth — and much of it is free, including handouts for your students) doesn't just talk about the Holocaust. It also discusses what Jewish life was like before the Holocaust and what it's like today. This means that it's possible to humanize the Jewish people for my students in a way that a more narrowly focused museum such as the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington cannot do. It allowed me to show my students that the Jews were not just victims of an atrocity but that they were real, ordinary people just like them.

I also attended several of the summer workshop classes at the museum and these are absolutely wonderful, offering you the kind of in depth training that most people pay thousands of dollars for. The classes are free (or at least they were when I took them) and if you are a New York City public school teacher, they offer P credit toward earning a higher paycheck.