The school year is well underway. Students sit at their desks, learning both about history and how to reconcile the suffering of the past with that of the present.
When we ask children to remember past suffering, we also ask them to consider how they treat others today. And that connection deserves more attention — in our classrooms, around our dinner tables, and within ourselves.
It begins with a pause to consider the promises we kept and those we neglected, the people we loved and those we hurt, the apologies we owe and the grievances we may be ready to put down. Beyond What happened? lies a more searching question: Who was I in what happened? And from there, a harder one: Who do I want to become?
Jewish tradition offers a word for this process: teshuvah. Often associated with the Jewish New Year, it is especially relevant to the present moment and to our classrooms. Commonly translated as repentance, teshuvah more literally suggests a return. Maimonides taught that genuine teshuvah is revealed when we encounter an opportunity to repeat a wrong and choose differently. It is not simply regret for yesterday, but a commitment to act differently tomorrow.
And that has implications for the classroom every day.
We are a high school student and two psychologists who have worked in education for over 30 years, from within the Jewish tradition. This year we find ourselves with similar observations about hatred: how easily human beings divide the world into us and them, and how quickly a person can disappear behind a category: Jew, Palestinian, Muslim, Israeli, Black, immigrant, refugee.
Students need serious education about the Holocaust, genocide, slavery, racism, propaganda, antisemitism, and other forms of group-based hatred. In a world where adolescents can encounter conspiracy theories, dehumanizing memes, and distorted history within seconds, historical knowledge and media literacy are forms of protection.
It is not enough to teach what hatred did in the past. Young people must recognize what it is doing now and look beyond the suffering of people with whom we already identify.
It requires widening the circle.
Widening that circle is not a retreat from Jewish memory; it is a responsibility memory creates. Centuries of antisemitism should make dehumanization alarm us wherever it appears, even when recognizing it complicates the loyalties closest to home. For Jewish families, Holocaust remembrance is profoundly personal. Six million Jews were murdered by Nazi Germany and its allies and collaborators. Students need to know that history, including the persecution of Roma and Sinti people, people with disabilities, the LGBTQIA+ community, political opponents, and others.
In Skokie, Illinois, that history has a particular address. In the late 1970s, a neo-Nazi group’s attempt to march through the village, then home to a large community of survivors, became a national free-speech fight, and survivors responded by building an institution of their own: what is now the Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center. On Nov. 11, the museum reopens its newly renovated Skokie campus. Its core Holocaust exhibition now includes more on the roots of antisemitism and on the other groups the Nazis targeted, and a new reflection gallery gives visitors somewhere quiet to sit with what they have just seen. That combination of rigorous history and room to absorb it is what this kind of education requires.
Students should also learn about American slavery and racial terror, the Armenian genocide, the genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, and other histories of targeted violence. These histories are not interchangeable. But together they reveal a recurring human danger: what happens when some people’s lives are treated as less valuable than others.
Our moral circle must also include Palestinians.
We can grieve the Israelis murdered on October 7, 2023, and the terror of families whose loved ones were taken hostage. We can also grieve for Palestinian parents who have buried children, children who have lost parents, families driven from their homes, and civilians whose lives have been devastated in Gaza and the West Bank. Both Israeli civilian suffering on October 7 and the enormous humanitarian toll on Palestinians have been extensively documented by the United Nations and international humanitarian agencies.
We can reject antisemitism, Islamophobia, and anti-Palestinian racism. We can condemn terrorism while insisting upon the humanity of Palestinian civilians. We can mourn Israeli suffering without becoming indifferent to Palestinian suffering, and Palestinian suffering without becoming indifferent to Israeli suffering. If our moral language cannot hold those truths at the same time, it is too small.
The point is not to declare these experiences equivalent. They are not. No group’s suffering requires us to become blind to another group’s humanity.
Hatred rarely introduces itself as atrocity. It enters through language: a joke, a stereotype, a rumor, a conspiracy theory, a group blamed for problems too complicated to understand. It grows when humiliation draws applause, when a social-media post turns another human being into a caricature, when a friend says something cruel and everyone else laughs.
Psychologists have long studied dehumanization because seeing people as categories or threats rather than as complex human beings can make aggression easier to justify. History gives that research terrible clarity, from Nazi propaganda about Jews to propaganda in Rwanda that helped prepare the ground for mass killing.
Young people encounter versions of this pattern every day, often online. Adults cannot control everything they see, but we can teach them to interrupt certainty with questions: Is this true? Whose humanity is missing? What emotion is this trying to provoke? Am I being asked to understand someone, or simply to hate them?
These are questions of history and media literacy. They are also questions of emotional intelligence.
Hatred has an emotional life. Fear, humiliation, anger, and the longing to belong can all be manipulated. Young people need to understand not only what propaganda says, but how it works on emotion.
At the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, we have spent decades studying how emotions shape attention, judgment, and action. Before young people can resist emotional manipulation, they must recognize what they are feeling, understand where it comes from, label it precisely, express it responsibly, and regulate it in ways that serve their values and other people’s dignity. The goal is not to make people less angry, afraid, or passionate. It is greater intentionality about what we do with those feelings.
That makes emotion regulation part of civic education. We can help young people plan for charged moments before they arrive: If a post makes me furious, then I will pause before sharing it. If a joke turns a group into a target, then I will not reward it with silence or laughter. A pause does not guarantee moral courage, but it can create room for it.
Empathy does not require agreement. We can oppose someone’s politics without demeaning them, condemn an action without condemning an entire people, and listen to someone’s pain without surrendering our own. We can say, I believe you are wrong, without saying, You are less human than I am.
Jewish tradition also asks us to think about forgiveness. Forgiveness does not require us to pretend something did not happen, excuse wrongdoing, or reconcile with the person who caused harm, nor should it be demanded of victims.
Still, Jewish tradition insists on repair. For wrongs committed against another person, the Mishnah teaches that we must first seek reconciliation with the person harmed (Mishnah Yoma 8:9). A real apology says, in essence: I hurt you. I am sorry. How can I make it right? What must I change?
That is teshuvah.
Young people learn from the history we teach them. They also learn from us. They notice who gets our empathy.
Perhaps part of our own moral accounting is to ask where we have been too certain, whose suffering we have found easier not to see, and when anger or silence has made another person’s dignity seem negotiable.
We can tell the truth without becoming trapped inside it, take responsibility without surrendering to shame, remember suffering without inheriting hatred, and repair what can be repaired. When we cannot repair the past, we can refuse to reproduce it.
That is what we hope young people inherit from us.
Not a world without disagreement, anger, or conflict. But perhaps a world in which fewer people need an enemy in order to know who they are. A world in which remembering the Holocaust, Rwanda, slavery, Bosnia, Armenia, and other histories deepens our vigilance whenever any people are described as disposable.
At the heart of teshuvah is a remarkable hope: human beings can change. As we ask forgiveness and consider whom we are ready to forgive, we can commit to notice more, listen longer, question what makes hatred easy, and refuse the seduction of dehumanization, especially when it comes from our own side.
We can teach children that recognizing another person’s humanity is not a betrayal of their own people. It is one of the deepest ways of honoring them.
Memory is not only about remembering who suffered. It is about deciding who we will become because we remember.
How to Help
The Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, a Make It Better Foundation 2026 Philanthropy Award winner, is a leader in advancing the science and practice of emotional intelligence, translating decades of research into tools and training that help schools and communities thrive. Support fuels rigorous research, large-scale studies, and the development of accessible, evidence-based curricula, digital resources, and coaching for educators and leaders, with a focus on reaching under-resourced schools. This work strengthens well-being, creates safer and more inclusive learning environments, and builds the emotional, relational, and leadership skills students and adults need to succeed in school, work, and life.
This post was submitted as part of our “You Said It” program. We encourage you to share your ideas and efforts to make the world a better place by submitting a “You Said It,” which can serve as the application for a $1,000 grant award from the Make It Better Foundation for a nonprofit you champion and eligibility for a Philanthropy Award, grant content partnership, and greater engagement with our audience.
Robin Stern, PhD, is the cofounder and senior adviser to the director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, and a psychoanalyst in private practice. She is the author of “The Gaslight Effect” and “The Gaslight Effect Recovery Guide,” and host of “The Gaslight Effect Podcast.”
Marc Brackett, PhD, is the founding director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence and a professor at Yale’s Child Study Center. He is the author of “Dealing with Feeling” and “Permission to Feel.”
Opinions are those of the authors and do not reflect those of Yale School of Medicine.
