Resource Library
Find compelling classroom resources, learn new teaching methods, meet standards, and make a difference in the lives of your students.
We are grateful to The Hammer Family Foundation for supporting the development of our on-demand learning and teaching resources.
Introducing Our US History Curriculum Collection
Draw from this flexible curriculum collection as you plan any middle or high school US history course. Featuring units, C3-style inquiries, and case studies, the collection will help you explore themes of democracy and freedom with your students throughout the year.
Sonia Orbuch: Becoming a Partisan
Explore the choices of Jewish partisan Sonia Orban, and gain a deeper understanding of the complexities that young people faced during the German occupation of Poland.
Vitka Kempner: Identity and Resistance
Explore the choices of Vitka Kempner, a Jewish partisan who chose to resist the Nazis.
Introducing Antisemitism and Antisemitic Tropes
Students explore the roots of antisemitism, reflect on its human cost and impact on those who experience it, and start thinking about the process of standing up against antisemitism.
What Is “Normal”?
Through quote and poetry analysis, students will consider the ways in which our desire to fit in can impact our identities and the choices we make.
Frank Blaichman: Ethics in a Time of Genocide
In this lesson, students explore moral and ethical frameworks in relation to teach actions of Frank Blaichman.
Understanding Resistance
Understand the many forms that Jewish resistance to fascism, antisemitism, and Nazism took.
How Do Others See Me?
Students will define key concepts and discuss the impact that labels, assumptions, and stereotypes have on their identity development.
Feeling Seen: A Matter of Perspective
Students will engage in perspective-taking activities to consider what it means to belong and how experiences and interactions with others can shape our identities.
Finding Belonging in the World
Students create “pearls of wisdom” and consider the value of forming relationships that help us feel seen and secure in our sense of belonging.
Making Myself Proud
Students will read and analyze a poem that focuses on what it means to practice celebrating identity, both by loving who you are and by imagining who you can be.
Reexamining History: How Can We Engage with the Stories We’re Told?
This lesson prepares young people to be critical consumers of stories they are told about the UK’s past and encourages them to consider how unpicking historical narratives can be an act of justice and a catalyst for action.
Pre-Viewing: “Take This Giant Leap”: Preparing to Teach Schindler’s List
Students prepare for their study of Schindler's List by creating a contract establishing a thoughtful, respectful, and caring classroom community.
Pre-Viewing: Establishing the Historical Context for Schindler’s List
Students are introduced to the history of ideas, events, and decisions that shaped the world of Schindler’s List.
Viewing: Watching Schindler’s List
Students experience a thoughtful viewing of Schindler's List by completing activities immediately before and after watching it that help them reflect and process reactions.
Viewing: Oskar Schindler and the Making of a Rescuer
Students consider how Schindler's evolution from collaborator to rescuer adds to their thinking about the importance of individual choices.
Viewing: Analyzing the Art of Schindler’s List
Students analyze the film as a work of art and consider how Spielberg’s artistic choices foster emotional engagement with Holocaust history.
Post-Viewing: The Persecution of the Rohingya and the Persistence of Genocide
Students reflect on how the Holocaust can educate us about our responsibilities to confront genocide and injustice today.
Do You Take the Oath?
Students consider the choices and reasoning of individual Germans who stayed quiet or spoke up during the first few years of Nazi rule.
Exploring Antisemitic Tropes in Further Depth
Students explore antisemitic tropes, their troubled history, their evolution and their present manifestation in further depth, and consider the harm that their circulation can cause.
Addressing Antisemitism Online
Students reflect on how they consume and share information they encounter, how antisemitism is spread online and the potential consequences of being exposed to antisemitic content.
Standing Up Against Contemporary Antisemitism
Students to reflect on the consequences of allowing antisemitism to go unchallenged for Jews and for wider society, and explore ways in which they and others can challenge antisemitism.
The Persistence of Hate: What the 2017 Unite the Right Rally Revealed about Contemporary Antisemitism
Students develop an understanding of contemporary antisemitism in the United States through the case of the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville.
Post-Viewing: Responding to Hate in Our Communities Today
Students begin to relate Schindler's List to the contemporary world by examining recent stories of racial hatred in Charlottesville and Germany.
Post-Viewing: Building a Toolbox against Hate
Students create a "toolbox" of the skills, attitudes, and actions that are necessary to respond to and prevent hatred from taking hold in their communities.
Deconstructing Antisemitic Memes: Helping Students Critically View Online Hate
Students consider the intentions, dangers, and impacts of online hate by engaging in a step-by-step close analysis and deconstruction of antisemitic memes.
Confronting Islamophobia
Students explore the roots of Islamophobia, reflect on its human cost and its impact on those who experience it, and start thinking about the importance of standing up against Islamophobia.
Exploring Islamophobic Tropes
Students explore Islamophobic tropes, their troubled history, their evolution and their present manifestation in further depth, and consider the harm that their circulation can cause.
Addressing Islamophobia in the Media
Students reflect on how Islamophobia manifests in the media and in the entertainment industry, and the potential consequences of being exposed to Islamophobic content.
Understanding Gendered Islamophobia
Students learn how Islamophobia intersects with misogyny and the impact that this has on the treatment of Muslim women.
Standing Up Against Contemporary Islamophobia
Students reflect on the impact of Islamophobia on Muslims’ sense of belonging, consider what can be done to foster integration, and explore ways in which they and others can challenge Islamophobia.
Learning to Infer
Educators will Introduce students to the concept of inferencing and then help them develop their inferencing skills.
Pre-War Jewish Life in North Africa
Students deepen their understanding of the diversity and complexity of Jewish life in pre-war North Africa through an analysis of images, film, and readings.
Responses to Rising Antisemitism and Antisemitic Legislation in North Africa
Explore how power structures established through the European colonization of North African countries influenced the fate of North African Jewry during the Holocaust and ways in which individuals and groups responded to rising antisemitism.
The Holocaust and North Africa: Resistance in the Camps
Students learn the importance of teaching the history of the Holocaust’s impacts on North African communities with a focus on ways in which they resisted oppression.
Exploring Identity and Belonging through Poetry
Students prepare a choral reading of a poem about the costs and benefits of fitting in versus standing out in order to introduce the unit’s central topic of belonging.
Identifying and Affirming Core Values
This values-affirmation exercise helps students identify their core values and reflect on how these values impact their sense of belonging.
Fitting In Versus Belonging
Students examine the difference between belonging and fitting in and the ways in which we may sacrifice our values in order to seek acceptance from others.
Group Membership and Belonging
Students examine the human need to belong and how it impacts the behaviors and decisions people make when seeking group membership.
The Dangers of Being an Outsider
Students analyze a clip of poet Ada Limón on The Slowdown podcast and a poem by Hazem Fahmy to consider what’s at stake when someone is perceived as an outsider.
Navigating Social Hierarchies
Students analyze a short story by Misa Sugiura to consider the invisible barriers that divide “in” and “out” groups and how our efforts to seek belonging can conflict with our values.
Negotiating Belonging in Trevor Noah’s Born a Crime
Students analyze a chapter from Trevor Noah’s memoir Born a Crime to consider how cultural, linguistic, and racial borders influence one’s sense of belonging.
Belonging on Your Own Terms
Students explore what it means to seek belonging on their own terms, and in alignment with their values, by reading and discussing personal narrative essays.
Expressing Diversity in Jewish Identity: Blending In and Standing Out
This two-day lesson uses the story of Purim as a frame to examine how Jews have preserved and protected their identities and culture in dominant societies by choosing when to blend in and when to stand out.
A Part and Apart: Inclusion and Exclusion in Our Jewish Communities
Students consider the benefits and challenges of identity labeling and their identity experiences within and outside their Jewish communities.
The Meaning of Home
In this lesson, students reflect on notable quotes about home and watch Pico Iyer’s TED Talk to examine and build on their understanding of home.
Rural, Urban, Suburban: Stories of Place
Students examine the relationship between regional identity and home through photo analysis, journaling, and a 2018 study from the Pew Research Center.
The Poetry of Home
Students react to and analyze poems that illustrate experiences from particular geographic locations.