Terry Strom News Today

Margot Stern Strom, who drew on the pain of her Jewish childhood in the Jim Crow South to create one of the most widely used Holocaust education programs in American schools, died March 28 at her home in Brookline, Massachusetts. She was 81. The Boston Globe reported the cause as pancreatic cancer. Strom was a schoolteacher in 1976 when she co-founded Facing History & Ourselves, which drew on draft lessons piloted in her classroom. For three years in the mid-1980s, the U.S. Education Depar...

(JTA) — Margot Stern Strom, who drew on the pain of her Jewish childhood in the Jim Crow South to create one of the most widely used Holocaust education programs

Margot Stern Strom, a Massachusetts schoolteacher in the 1970s who pioneered Holocaust educator, died at 81 on March 28 in Brookline.

She started an organization whose curriculums challenge teenagers to understand the roots of the Holocaust, racism, apartheid and other human injustices.

Strom was a schoolteacher in 1976 when she co-founded Facing History & Ourselves, which drew on draft lessons piloted in her classroom.

A curriculum launched in 1976 broke a “powerful silence” about racism and antisemitism in American schools.

"We have to allow for discomfort in the classroom," she said of the curriculum the nonprofit she cofounded brings to students.