German secondary school textbooks offer exceptional instruction on Jewish history and the Holocaust but display significant imbalances when addressing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, according to a comprehensive review of educational materials in North Rhine-Westphalia released on Tuesday.
The study is the final installment of a series by the Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education, known as IMPACT-se, which examined how curricula in seven European countries present Jews, Judaism, Jewish history, the Holocaust, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Researchers reviewed 12 textbooks used in Gymnasien, the highest academic track of Germany's secondary school system, which prepares students for university entrance. The review focused on history, religion, and social science materials covering the final three years before Abitur examinations, with evaluation based on international standards derived from UNESCO declarations.
"With antisemitism at alarmingly high levels in Germany, what children learn about Jews and Israel matters more than ever," IMPACT-se CEO Marcus Sheff said on Tuesday. "German textbooks do an excellent job of confronting the horrors of the Holocaust and the country's antisemitic past. But this commitment to historical accuracy must also extend to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Equating Israeli soldiers with Hamas fighters risks dangerously distorting young people's understanding of the conflict."
On the positive side, the report found that German classrooms present Judaism as a living, contemporary part of national society rather than a historical precursor. One textbook cites former President Christian Wulff's assertion that Judaism undoubtedly belongs to Germany as part of the nation's shared Judeo-Christian foundation. Curricula also include internal Jewish debates on interfaith relations and ideas such as Rabbi Abraham J. Heschel's description of Shabbat as an escape from the constant pressure of daily life. The study did flag one problematic comparison, in which a textbook placed Jewish circumcision and Christian infant baptism alongside an asserted Islamic prerogative for husbands to discipline spouses, creating what the report called an inappropriate equivalence between foundational rites and domestic abuse.
Historical sections address the roots of Christian antisemitism, with upper-level textbooks rejecting collective Jewish guilt for the crucifixion and noting that Roman authorities ordered the execution, while reminding students that Jesus and his early followers were Jewish. Coverage of the medieval period describes how Jews and Christians lived as protected second-class subjects, or dhimmis, under Muslim rule, facing legal limits and special taxes, and recounts Christian persecution of Jews during the First Crusade in cities including Worms, Mainz, and Cologne, though the report noted critics consider those passages brief.
Holocaust chapters trace how Christian prejudice evolved into Nazi racial theory, showing how propaganda and discriminatory laws led to the murder of six million people. Advanced textbooks stress that the genocide wiped out European Jewish culture, observing that nearly a third of German Nobel Prize winners before 1933 were of Jewish origin. Students work with primary sources ranging from Victor Klemperer's diaries and Heinrich Himmler's Posen speech to postwar interrogations of figures such as Otto Moll. Jewish resistance is presented in forms from rescue operations saving Danish Jews to armed revolts in the Warsaw Ghetto, Treblinka, and Sobibor, underscoring that Jews were not passive victims. Postwar trials at Nuremberg and Frankfurt, along with religious studies exploring theodicy through Elie Wiesel and Hans Jonas, complete the curriculum.
On the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, however, the report argues that the curriculum's commitment to multiple perspectives frequently collapses into structural imbalance and false equivalency. Textbooks often use matching headings for opposing narratives, placing the War of Independence beside the Nakba, the Arabic term for the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians during the 1948 war, or the Six-Day War next to the Naksa, the displacement following the 1967 war, blurring the line between acknowledging different memories and treating them as equally valid causes of events.
The study also criticizes how religious attachments are narrowed to ideologically extreme groups, linking Palestinian religious claims almost exclusively to the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas's concept of an Islamic waqf, an inalienable religious endowment, while tying Jewish religious claims primarily to national-religious settlers. One textbook places photographs of Israeli military operations in the West Bank directly beside an armed Hamas fighter under the heading "Mutual threats and violence" without identifying Hamas as a terrorist organization.
Additional findings include uneven treatment of the 1947 UN Partition Plan, where Arab objections over land, demographics, and political rights are detailed thoroughly while the Jewish perspective is reduced to international legitimacy, without comparable attention to security vulnerabilities or territorial fragmentation. Discussions of 1948 and the Intifadas elaborate on Palestinian displacement, portray the First Intifada mainly as a civilian uprising while downplaying violence, omit the expulsion of Jews from Arab and Muslim lands, and frame the Second Intifada around Palestinian frustration rather than terrorist attacks. The report also faults textbooks for presenting Israeli settlements almost exclusively as an illegal obstacle to peace, while ignoring Israel's legal perspectives, the security concerns behind settlement policies, and the context of local violence.
