Stern bill shows struggle to find agreement in genocide education

In the eighth grade, Senator Henry Stern (D-Los Angeles) found Nazi political propaganda tucked into his school newspaper. With his help, his social sciences teacher at the time was able to bring some Holocaust survivors to their class and teach his fellow students the meaning and history behind certain symbols.

That formative instance was just one of many he had growing up Jewish in California, he says, one that inspired his genocide education bill, Senate Bill 472, first introduced in February of this year and scheduled for a hearing today in the Assembly Appropriations Committee.

The measure would do two main things if signed into law by the governor.

First, the proposal would require the Superintendent of Public Instruction to establish “the Holocaust and Genocide Education Grant Program” that would provide direct allocations to local educational agencies (LEAs) “for the purposes of providing Holocaust and genocide education and professional development on Holocaust and genocide education.”

Second, it would require the California Department of Education to survey local educational agencies “on the status of Holocaust and genocide instruction at their schools.”

While the measure doesn’t currently allocate a specific grant amount, it calls for funding grants to teach students about specific genocide topic as well as pay for teachers to attend genocide training programs and requires those schools accepting grants to report back to the state how those monies were spent.

California has required teaching about the Holocaust in specific and genocide in general to students in grades 7-12 since 1985. But Stern says that has fallen by the wayside even as Holocaust-denial experiences are becoming more common.

“It’s too much to just expect every teacher to have the courage and wherewithal to do it on their own, or have a student like me figure out how to rally Holocaust survivors to come to your campus,” he says. “The easier thing to do is just don’t talk about it. You know, just discipline the [offending] students, sweep it under the rug and forget it. But I think we’ve got to teach our way through this.”

In that regard his motivation, he says, is “to breathe life back into a mandate that is sort of just sitting on the shelf, but everyone’s ignoring it.”

“It’s too much to just expect every teacher to have the courage and wherewithal to do it on their own, or have a student like me figure out how to rally Holocaust survivors to come to your campus.”

SB 472, which would also address slavery, leaves the genocide portion of the bill up to the interpretation of the local school districts and the United Nations’ definition of genocide.

“We feel like the Holocaust piece is sort of a baseline setter for understanding genocide, just because nothing’s ever been done at that scale within a modern democracy, with sort of that industrial precision and that sort of scale of death in human history,” Stern says.

However, “districts can tailor some of their content to really be relevant to their students,” he says.

For example, in the city of Long Beach, which according to travel website Visit Long Beach has a 4 percent Cambodian population, it would be relevant for the student population to be educated on the genocide that occurred in Cambodia during the late 1970s.

Stern co-chairs Gov. Gavin Newsom’s Council on Holocaust and Genocide Education alongside Attorney General Rob Bonta, Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond and Jewish Family and Children Services Northern California Executive Director Anita Friedman.

In December 2024, the Council released the results of a comprehensive statewide survey which analyzed the landscape of Holocaust and genocide education in California middle/high schools.

The survey was completed by 559 respondents representing 29 percent of the states’ LEAs. Of the 559 respondents, “Only 26% [143] of LEA respondents have Holocaust and genocide education systems in place,” according to the report.

The findings additionally reported that the major barriers in Holocaust and genocide education were insufficient time for curriculum development, lack of appropriate instructional resources and lack of community resources.

The results of this survey propelled Stern into authoring SB 472.

Though the bill has over 30 listed support organizations, there are some Jewish-led opposition organizations that take issue with certain aspects of the bill.

Seth Morrison, whose great-grandmother was killed in the Holocaust, is the co-lead of the legislative team of the Bay Area chapter of the anti-Zionist organization Jewish Voice for Peace California, a listed opposition group to SB472.

“We are Jews who are very proud of our Judaism, but we do not believe that the State of Israel, the concept of Zionism, is really the same as Judaism,” he says. “And because of that, we strongly oppose the efforts to conflate religion with nationality and nationalism.”

That conflation, he says, can lead to a distorted view of history.

“What our worry is, is that the way this grant will be administered by whoever, will be skewed towards the Holocaust, and then the bulk of the money will go to the Holocaust, not to all the other genocides,” Morrison says. “While we fully want the Holocaust to be taught, we want it to be in context with all the other genocides…and fair treatment of all the other genocides.”

Carla Schick, is a member of grassroots opposition group, Queers Undermining Israeli Terrorism (QUIT).

Schick, who is a retired teacher, has a similar stance to JVP and took issue with placing an additional burden on overworked, underpaid teachers with the reporting requirement the bill would institute.

“What our worry is, is that the way this grant will be administered by whoever, will be skewed towards the Holocaust, and then the bulk of the money will go to the Holocaust, not to all the other genocides.”

“And it’s pretty clear that if someone put in a grant to study about the genocide that’s going on in Palestine now, that would not happen,” she says. “They would not get it.”

Both opposition groups say they feel SB 472 is just one in a sequence for the pushing of Zionism and have expressed greater concern for Assembly Bill 715, introduced in February of this year as well. That proposal, authored by Assemblymembers Rick Zbur (D-San Francisco) and Dawn Addis (D-Morro Bay), would create a state-level antisemitism coordinator to oversee compliance with anti-discrimination laws.

“As I said, this is a multi-year strategy to both exceptionalize the Holocaust and use the Holocaust to justify the State of Israel’s ethnic cleansing, and it’s hard to look at one without looking at the others,” Morrison says.

Efforts to find common ground have not been successful.

The relationship between Stern and JVP can be described as “non-existent,” according to Morrison. He says attempts to meet with Stern and the Jewish Legislative Caucus have been met with either no response or outright refusal.

Although Schick, representing QUIT, alongside the California Coalition to Defend Public Education, had a Zoom meeting with Stern’s office earlier in the year, she says no compromise was made.

In response to JVP’s concerns about the bill, Stern says “I mean, we’ve tried to meet with them, but I don’t really think they’re worthy, because of all the antisemitic tropes they’re pushing – and their tactics are so, so deeply just misguided and offensive – that they actually merit a response.”

Stern’s measure follows last year’s passing of AB 1821, a measure signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom that requires California schools to teach students of the genocide the Serrano people and other American Indigenous tribes faced during the Gold Rush and Spanish colonial era.

Editor’s note: This story will be updated after the Appropriations Committee hearing. 

Acsah Lemma is an intern with Capitol Weekly’s Public Policy Journalism Internship program.