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.