Over the years, many moments have stayed with us, but one in particular stands out.
A middle school student stood in front of the interactive testimony of Holocaust survivor Anita Lasker-Wallfisch. He asked her about her life, her family, and her experiences. Then he went quiet and said almost to himself, “She’s like me.”
He didn’t mean their lives were the same. He was recognizing something deeper: connection.
In that moment, the Holocaust was no longer something that happened to “other people, long ago.” Anita was no longer a survivor in a history book. She was a person.
Students today are surrounded by information, yet many still struggle to connect history to real people, human choices, and ultimately themselves. Facts matter deeply. But we began to realize that information alone is often not enough to create lasting understanding.
For more than a decade, we worked alongside educators, researchers, artists, technologists, survivors, psychologists, communities, and, importantly, students, asking a different question:
What if Holocaust education didn’t begin with the Holocaust?
This spring, we launched The Common Circles Experience: New York at the Museum of Jewish Heritage—A Living Memorial to the Holocaust in New York City.
Created through years of research, collaboration, and community engagement, the two-part interactive exhibition weaves together storytelling, art, photography, student participation, and the USC Shoah Foundation’s Dimensions in Testimony technology to help students engage more deeply with themselves, one another, and ultimately the history and lessons of the Holocaust.
Throughout the experience, students also confront the process of dehumanization itself—how Jews arriving at camps like Auschwitz were stripped of their names, possessions, hair, dignity, and humanity.
Beginning with Shared Humanity
Part one of The Common Circles Experience begins not with history, but with perception.
Students stand together looking at optical illusions and often see completely different things. One student sees an old woman; another sees a young woman. One sees a vase; another sees two faces.
Almost immediately, the room changes.
Students become curious about what someone else is seeing instead of trying to prove they are right. And then something important happens: they begin recognizing that two people can look at the exact same thing and genuinely experience it differently.
That moment opens the door to larger conversations. How do our experiences shape what we notice, assume, or overlook? What influences the way we see other people? What happens when curiosity replaces immediate judgment?
From there, students encounter portraits and stories from New Yorkers across backgrounds and communities. They begin reflecting not only on how they see others, but on the ways they themselves are often misunderstood, oversimplified, or only partially seen.
And something shifts.
When students recognize complexity within themselves—the parts others may not immediately see or understand—they often become more open to recognizing it in others. We saw this again and again during the development of the exhibit. Students who initially appeared disengaged often became some of the most thoughtful participants once they recognized themselves somewhere within the experience. Curiosity grew. Defensiveness lowered. Conversations deepened.
The process of building the exhibit is itself part of the learning. In many communities, students help photograph teachers and neighbors, conduct interviews, collect stories, and contribute artwork and reflections that become part of the installation.
What surprised us was how deeply this process affected people across the community. Participants often described feeling genuinely seen. Teachers, custodians, security guards, students, and visitors began sharing stories with one another in ways they had not before. The exhibit stopped feeling like something people simply observed and became something they collectively experienced.
From Connection to History
Only after this foundation of connection and reflection is built do students enter the second part of the experience: Voices Against Hate: Lessons from the Holocaust.
There, students engage in lifelike conversations with Holocaust survivor Anita Lasker-Wallfisch and Jewish American liberator Alan Moskin through USC Shoah Foundation’s Dimensions in Testimony technology.
And because students arrive having already reflected on perspective, belonging, and shared humanity, the encounter often lands differently.
History is no longer abstract. It becomes personal.
In part one of the experience, students spend time exploring the many layers that shape people’s lives and identities within their own communities. By the time they enter Voices Against Hate, many begin approaching Anita in the same way. Yes, she is a Holocaust survivor. But she is also a cellist, a gardener, a mother, a sister, a friend, a neighbor, and so much more.
Students begin to understand her not as a symbol of history, but as a full human being whose life extends far beyond the Holocaust alone.
Seeing Jewish history and identity explored in nuanced and human ways—sometimes through stories connected to their own families—helped many feel more visible and valued.
You can often see the shift happen in the questions students begin asking. Rather than focusing only on dates or historical facts, many become deeply concerned with Anita as a person. They ask whether she had friends in the camps. Whether she misses her parents. What happened to her sisters. How she survived—not only physically, but emotionally.
Sometimes students reach across time trying to connect Anita’s experiences to questions they are already wrestling with in their own lives.
During one visit in White Plains, a student new to the country asked Anita, “What do you think about Venezuela?”
The question was imperfect but deeply human—an attempt to connect history, displacement, and the present.
What emerges in these moments is not sameness, but empathy.
Students are no longer engaging only with “a Holocaust survivor.” They are responding to another human being’s story with care, curiosity, and emotional investment.
Throughout the experience, students also confront the process of dehumanization itself—how Jews arriving at camps like Auschwitz were stripped of their names, possessions, hair, dignity, and humanity. They see the tattooed number on Anita’s arm.
During one visit, a student asked whether she had ever considered having it removed.
“Why should I?” Anita replied. “It’s not my shame. If I removed my number, I’d join the ranks of Holocaust deniers.”
The room went quiet.
That exchange opened conversations about Holocaust denial and distortion that many students had never fully considered. Students listened to Anita’s responses not as abstract historical lessons, but as testimony from someone they had come to see as real and trustworthy.
These moments matter because students are not simply memorizing facts about dehumanization. They are witnessing the enduring human impact of it.
Understanding Jewish Life + Anti-Semitism
As the exhibit evolved, we also realized that many students lacked even basic exposure to Jewish identity, Jewish diversity, and the long history of anti-Semitism beyond the Holocaust itself.
Too often, students encountered Jews primarily through tragedy, without broader understanding of Jewish life, peoplehood, culture, continuity, and resilience.
That realization led us to expand portions of the experience to more directly explore questions such as:
Who are the Jewish people?
How has anti-Semitism evolved across time?
What does it look like today?
How do stereotypes, conspiracy theories, and dehumanization continue to spread?
Throughout Voices Against Hate, students encounter stories not only of persecution and loss, but also of migration, continuity, resilience, hope, and survival. This matters because it helps students understand that the Jewish people cannot be reduced to a single story.
Too often, students encounter Jews only through stereotypes or the lens of victimhood. By including diverse stories of Jewish life and experience, students begin to recognize Jewish communities as layered, living communities with varied histories, traditions, and identities.
What has been especially meaningful is seeing independent evaluation affirm many of the moments we were witnessing firsthand. Students consistently described the experience as engaging, authentic, interactive, and emotionally meaningful. Evaluators observed students leaning in during testimony sessions, asking thoughtful questions, returning to continue conversations, and remembering stories long after their visits ended.
Again and again, we watched students move beyond memorizing history into emotionally engaging with individual human stories.
Recently, after visiting the exhibit, a group of fifth graders repeatedly used one word to describe what they felt:
Empathy.
That response mattered deeply to us.
Because empathy does not mean erasing differences or pretending all experiences are the same. It means recognizing another person’s humanity, emotions, and experiences—even when their life may be very different from your own.
Belonging as a Foundation for Learning
One of the most meaningful outcomes was the impact on belonging.
Students frequently described feeling more connected—not only to the material, but to one another and to their broader school communities. Many reported feeling more seen, heard, and understood.
For many Jewish students in particular, the experience was deeply affirming. Seeing Jewish history and identity explored in nuanced and human ways—sometimes through stories connected to their own families—helped many feel more visible and valued.
Learning does not happen in isolation. It happens in relationship.
When students feel connected, they are often more willing to engage with difficult questions, remain in conversation through discomfort, and listen more openly to perspectives different from their own.
Looking Forward
We are living in a moment shaped by headlines, slogans, social media, and algorithms designed to reward outrage, snap judgments, and oversimplification. Complex issues are often reduced to single narratives, and entire groups of people are flattened into categories.
Young people are constantly navigating online spaces that can reinforce division, misinformation, dehumanization, and isolation—often without opportunities to slow down, reflect, or meaningfully engage with perspectives different from their own.
Holocaust education requires the opposite.
It requires reflection, nuance, curiosity, and the ability to hold complexity. It asks students not only to learn what happened, but to consider how and why it happened—and what happens when societies stop seeing people as fully human.
No single approach will reach every student or community. But through this work, several lessons have become clear to us:
Start with connection.
Honor complexity.
Center individual stories.
Create space for reflection.
Because when students begin to see one another as fully human, history no longer feels distant.
It becomes personal.
And when that middle school student quietly said, “She’s like me,” history was not being simplified.
It was becoming human.
