Earlier this week, in an historic agreement, the Ministers of Education from the states and territories throughout Australia agreed to a significant change to the Australian Curriculum which incorporates the suggestions and resources recommended by the Antisemitism Education Taskforce which was chaired by David Gonski AC.

Among a suite of curricular changes are a range of steps that are intended to improve civics education, counter antisemitism and enhance social cohesion. While some of the details are yet to be released it seems that schools will be required to teach about Jewish life and history in Australia, the Holocaust and also about the shared values and ethics that should be at the core of civic society.

In the current iteration of the Australian Curriculum, Holocaust education is a mandatory subject for inclusion in Year 10 History. This is based on the idea that through teaching humanity’s worst behaviour we educate recipients to reject such hateful attitudes.

However, I am very pleased that the Taskforce has recommended going beyond Holocaust education and focuses on also including a broader understanding of Jewish people and our contributions.

In her provocatively titled book, People Love Dead Jews,  Dara Horn laments that the aspect of Jewry the wider public focuses on most is not Jewish life but Jewish death. She opens with an anecdote from when, at seventeen, she competed in a national quiz bowl tournament in Nashville and shared a hotel room with two girls from Mississippi. When they discovered she was Jewish, they were in disbelief because she had blonde hair. One of them said, “I thought Hitler said you all were dark.”

Horn was baffled that students so smart they had qualified for nationals were so ignorant about Jews that their only reference point was the Nazi view of them.

She wrote: “Those girls were not stupid, and probably not even bigoted. But in their entirely typical and well-intentioned education, they had learned about Jews mainly because people had killed Jews. Like most people in the world, they had only encountered dead Jews: people whose sole attribute was that they had been murdered, and whose murders served a clear purpose, which was to teach us something. Jews were people who, for moral and educational purposes, were supposed to be dead.”

In our school’s submission to the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion, we also argued that in order to reduce antisemitism and enhance cohesion there should be a focus on Jewish life, the contributions of Jews to Australia and a promotion of interfaith and intercultural activity which will help demystify those who are seemingly different from us.

We submitted that “We believe that the Royal Commission should recommend that educational institutions should actively educate students to gain a holistic understanding of Jewish identity.

The Australian Curriculum mandates Holocaust education and this is to be commended, however, for antisemitism to dissipate, we believe that education must go beyond what horrors Jews encountered and should extend to encompassing Jewish life - the tenets, core belief systems, diversity and philosophy as well as the contributions of Jews to the building of contemporary Australia.”

I await the specifics of the recommended changes to the curriculum, but am uplifted that there seems to be unanimity across Australia’s education departments that education is a key to addressing the wicked problems of antisemitism and diminished social cohesion. As Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks famously said: “To defend a country you need an army. But to defend a civilisation you need schools.”