Margot Stern Strom

Margot Stern Strom was a visionary American educator and non-profit leader.  She co-founded Facing History and Ourselves, an organization she led as President and Executive Director for four decades.

As a Brookline Public School eighth-grade teacher in the 1970s, Margot and fellow teacher Bill Parsons attended a conference at Brandeis University on the Holocaust.  They quickly realized how little they taught and how little their students knew about the collapse of democracy in Nazi Germany and the steps that led to the genocide of Jews during World War II.  They went on to secure interest and funding from local educators and philanthropists to expand their lesson plans into the Facing History and Ourselves: Holocaust and Human Behavior curriculum, which came to be used in classrooms in every state in the U.S. and in more than 100 countries around the world.

As an educator, Margot saw her students as critical thinkers and moral reasoners, who would apply the lessons they learned in class about the fragility of democracy and consider their own responsibility to help strengthen the societies in which they lived.  One of Margot’s pedagogical gifts to her students was mastering the language of holocaust study – of perpetrators, victims, bystanders, and rescuers – and applying it to current day bigotries and hatreds.

All of us are students of history, Strom believed, a belief that pulsed throughout and propelled forward her life.  For more information about Facing History click here.