Schools must teach pupils more about Jewish history in order to avoid 'Holocaust fatigue', Cambridge historian and broadcaster, Simon Schama, has said.  

Sir Simon, who is himself Jewish, said Jewish history currently taught in UK schools consisted mainly of the Holocaust, with little appreciation of their full 'epic, extraordinary' story. 

He said education was 'absolutely essential' to countering growing antisemitism on the left and the right in the country. 

Speaking exclusively to The Telegraph at the FT Weekend Oxford Literary Festival, Sir Simon, 74, who presented BBC Two's Civilisations programme, also called for more money to be ploughed into teaching history as schools were too focused on addressing STEM-based subjects due to recent austerity cuts from the Government. 

Sir Simon, now a professor of history at Columbia University in the USA, said teaching also had to be adapted for the modern age without 'dumbing down' so children could actively learn using digital tools. 

He said: "The challenge is to do it in a way which the kids on the receiving end don't get Holocaust fatigue, somehow to make a real creative effort without dumbing it down at all, to actually do it in the kind of zone of their understanding and the liveliness of their wiring and age, and even for better or worse, with Instagram or Twitter. 

"You think the horror of the Holocaust is so self-evident  but it isn't really self-evident - and it is when one knows everything there is to know about Auschwitz  that it's easy to forget a million Jews were shot before anyone had dreamed up the gas chambers – the so called 'Holocaust of the bullets'. 

"But one also wants education about what happened to the Armenians and what happened in Rwanda."

Sir Simon said 'a really bitter kind of exterminating antisemitism' went back hundreds, if not thousands of years before the Second World War and it was time students knew about this, including the Dreyfus case in France at the turn of the twentieth century, which was mired in anti-Jewish sentiment.  

He said: "This horrible prejudice which goes from words to actual killing goes back so long and is so deep rooted, like slavery and prejudice against blacks and people of different skin colour, that education is very important." 

However, he ruled out supporting a so called 'Jewish history month', similar to Black history month, claiming it risked 'ghettoising' the learning of history. 

He said: "I'm very torn about it. 

"I want people to be engaged in women's history and black history but if you just stick it in a month it does ghettoise it, it says you can then forget it for the rest of the year …so I'm sort of against monthly-fication – I want it to happen all of the time."

Sir Simon famously criticised Michael Gove MP back in 2013, when he was education secretary, over proposed changes to the history curriculum in schools. He initially acted as an adviser to Gove but when he saw the finished product he branded it 'offensive and insulting' and Gove was forced to backtrack amid claims the curriculum had become too narrow.

Sir Simon told The Telegraph Mr Gove had been willing to listen again following his criticism. 

But at the literary festival, he still said resources for teachers were lacking.

He said: "The teachers are heroic, they do what they can. 

"There is just not enough time to teach history but history isn't just a stroll down memory lane, you cannot do it actually without seeing what has happened to lead you to this point.

"I also think you need more classroom time in state schools especially – private/independent schools manage to do this – but state schools are at a terrible pressure and some headteachers complain to me 'well we just don't have the resources and therefore we have to have the gym teacher do history' – they would never say that if the gym teacher was doing maths or something like that. 

"So there has to be more money and more time and more resources set aside for specialist training of history teachers to be thought of something active - it is not an add on part of costume decoration, it is essential to functioning now and in the future."