“If You Don’t Like It, Put the Book Down”

/ January 27, 2022

BY HANK REICHMAN

Today is Holocaust Remembrance Day, commemorating the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.  Perhaps fittingly for our time, it is marked by the revelation that on January 10, by a 10-0 vote, the McMinn County, Tennessee, school board removed from the middle school curriculum Maus, Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel, which tells the story of his parents’ experience of the Holocaust with the Jews portrayed as mice and their Nazi tormenters as cats.  Board members expressed concern that the expletives in Maus were inappropriate for eighth-graders.  “There is some rough, objectionable language in this book,” Lee Parkison, the county’s director of schools, said at the meeting.

Members also said Spiegelman’s illustrations showing nudity — which depict Holocaust victims forced to strip during their internment in Nazi concentration camps — were improper, according to minutes of the meeting.  One board member cited scenes in which a father talks with his son about losing his virginity and a woman cuts herself with a blade.

“We don’t need this stuff to teach kids history,” one board member said.  “We can teach them history and we can teach them graphic history.  We can tell them exactly what happened, but we don’t need all the nakedness and all the other stuff.”  However, the board dismissed questions about potential replacement works as premature.

Maus, which has been called “the greatest graphic novel ever written,” was first published in 1986 and received a special Pulitzer in 1992.  Spiegelman’s parents survived Auschwitz; his mother died by suicide when Spiegelman was 20, which is depicted in the book.  In 2015, bookstores in Russia removed the book, which includes a Swastika on its cover, in an attempt to comply with a law banning Nazi propaganda.  When Maus was being published in German, Spiegelman’s publicist had to find a way around a law that banned Swastikas on books that weren’t serious historical works.  Spiegelman said he felt so strongly that the cover remain unchanged that he included this stipulation in all his publishing contracts.

According to the New York Times, Representative Steve Cohen, Democrat of Tennessee and the state’s first Jewish congress member, said that censoring books about the Holocaust, or about slavery and lynchings or other atrocities, was a way to purge one’s understanding of the horrors of what humanity is capable of.  “It’s depressing to see this happen anywhere in the country, and when it comes to censoring an easy way to reach children and teach them about the Holocaust, it’s particularly disturbing,” he told the paper.  In an official statement, he called the board’s action “typical of a trend we’re seeing around the country of right-wing politicians attempting to shield themselves from the painful truths of history” and said he hopes to see the decision reversed.

In a statement on Twitter the US Holocaust Museum said that using books like Maus to teach students about the Holocaust can inspire them to “think critically about the past and their own roles and responsibilities today.”

The decision came as the Anti-Defamation League and others have warned of a recent rise in antisemitic incidents — just this week, CNN reported, hundreds of antisemitic flyers, falsely claiming the public health response to Covid-19 is being orchestrated by Jews, were distributed to homes in six states — and amid a broader movement to ban books that address certain ideas about race, as well as sex and LGBTQ issues.  In Virginia, where newly installed governor Glenn Youngkin won election in part on a fear campaign against “critical race theory” and other supposed harmful materials — including Toni Morrison’s classic novel Beloved — in schools, the Spotsylvania County School Board voted unanimously last year to have books with “sexually explicit” material removed from school library shelves.

In Mississippi, Ridgeland Mayor Gene McGee is withholding $110,000 of funding from the Madison County Library System allegedly on the basis of his personal religious beliefs, with library officials stating that he has demanded that the system initiate a purge of LGBTQ+ books before his office releases the money.  Library director Tonja Johnson said the targets of McGee’s demands are mostly books that touch on homosexual identities, themes and stories.  The list includes books about incidentally queer family members such as children’s stories intended to provide representation to gay, lesbian and transgender individuals.

Johnson added that, among all other “homosexual materials,” McGee specifically demanded the removal of “The Queer Bible,” a series of essays by LGBTQ+ figures including Elton John, Munroe Bergdorf, and Tan France on other queer luminaries such as David Bowie, George Michael and Susan Sontag.

The mayor’s order, the director said, only culminated a spate of homophobic activism intended to censor other queer literature, especially children’s books.  One of the books that previous complaints specifically targeted is Grandad’s Camper, a children’s book by author Harry Woodgate, who is nonbinary.  It tells the story of a young girl learning about her late grandfather by taking a road trip with her surviving grandparent.

“This is taxpayer money that was already approved by the board of aldermen,” Johnson explained.  “It was included in the city budget for 2021-2022.  It’s the general-fund appropriation that the City of Ridgeland sends every year for daily operation of the library.  That money goes to everything from purchasing materials to supporting programs and staff salaries.”

While the city’s aldermen may have approved the funds, Johnson said it was the mayor alone who is withholding it.  “I asked the mayor specifically on the phone call if this had been decided by the board of aldermen.  And he told me no, but (that) he could have them make that decision,” she said.

In November, I wrote on this blog about Texas governor Greg Abbott’s order to purge school classrooms and libraries of alleged “pornography,” which is largely a cover for removing materials that the governor and his political allies don’t like.  Abbott’s call, I noted, followed a review launched by state Rep. Michael Krause (R), who is running for Texas attorney general.  Krause wrote to school superintendents targeting books that “contain material that might make students feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress because of their race or sex or convey that a student, by virtue of their race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously.”  He accompanied his request with a list of some 850 titles, most likely simply copy-and-pasted from key word searches in public library catalogs.

Krause’s call was taken up by the school board in Granbury, a city of a bit more than 10,000 35 miles southwest of Fort Worth.  In an email to the Hood County News, district Communications Director Jeff Meador stated: “School library books have been under heavy scrutiny over the past several months as investigations are ongoing by the Texas House General Investigating Committee chaired by State Rep. Matt Krause as well as the Texas Education Agency as directed by Governor Greg Abbott.”  Meador said that “like every school district in the state,” the GISD is currently reviewing all books in the district’s schools to determine their educational value and age appropriateness.

“While we acknowledge some parents and community members will not agree with the potential removal of any book, we understand the conservative climate of our community and that a large majority recognizes that several social and cultural topics are best left to parents and families to discuss with their children,” Meador added.

But now comes the good news.  At a meeting of the Granbury board on Monday students at the district’s high school took aim at this censorious “review.”  “No government — and public school is an extension of government — has ever banned books and banned information from its public and been remembered in history as the good guys,” one student said.

“It’s plain and simple: If you don’t like it, put the book down,” a senior who initiated a petition to retain the books, said.  “No one is forcing you to read it.”

There was a similar heartening development in Kutztown, Pennsylvania, where junior high school students created a banned book club to discuss and celebrate challenging stories, discussing both classic novels and current hot topics. The club’s first meeting on January 12 was attended by nine young people, primarily from grades 7 to 11. Fourteen-year-old eighth grader Joslyn Diffenbaugh founded the club after reading about a public protest to ban books in national and regional schools based on the topics of race, gender identity and sexuality.

“I wanted to give teens access to books that could be personally relevant or interesting, and prevent groups in the community from pointing out what we could and couldn’t read,“ Joslyn said.  “I was worried about censorship in our community after seeing the banned book in Texas and my experience in the Central York School District,” added her mother, Lisa, who helped set up the club.  “Unfortunately, we see a group of our community starting to propose a ban during a school board meeting.”

In November, there was intense debate between parents and school board members over LGBTQ + -themed books that would be available in high school libraries.  Some parents said the books contained adult content with inappropriate graphics and demanded they be removed.  Director Christian Temchatin confirmed that the books in question were purchased by the district, but were not placed on the shelves of the school library or made available to students.

As MSNBC journalist Ja’han Jones put it, “Often, the fight over school lesson plans is framed as a political one — conservatives versus progressives.  In truth, the fight is between conservatives and the history they wish to ignore.  And the students, in many cases, are on history’s side.”

And what does Art Spiegelman think about efforts to ban his Maus and other works?   “This is not about left versus right,” he told the Nashville Tennesseean.  “This is about a culture war that’s gotten totally out of control.”  Earlier he tweeted this:

Contributing editor Hank Reichman is professor emeritus of history at California State University, East Bay; former AAUP vice-president and president of the AAUP Foundation; and from 2012-2021 Chair of AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure. His book, The Future of Academic Freedom, based in part on posts to this blog, was published in 2019.  His Understanding Academic Freedom has recently been published. 

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One thought on ““If You Don’t Like It, Put the Book Down””

  1. Soon after posting this, I encountered Corey Robin’s perceptive Twitter thread on the Maus removal (see https://twitter.com/CoreyRobin/status/1486726473947828228). He makes three interesting points with which I agree. First he notes — and for this he has apparently gotten some, in my opinion unmerited, pushback — that this not about antisemitism or Holocaust denial, but that the board members “really just hate the curse words and sexual suggestiveness of anything nude, which is obviously a problem—that people are freaked out about that and don’t want middle schoolers to read or see that in class.” He continues, “I mean, we’re talking about 13-year-olds. What do they think these kids have not seen or read on social media? But again, it had little to do with the Holocaust or anti-Semitism and a lot to do with classic American prudishness. And hypocrisy.”

    His other two points reflect his careful reading of the complete minutes of the board meeting (see https://core-docs.s3.amazonaws.com/documents/asset/uploaded_file/1818370/Called_Meeting_Minutes_1-10-22.pdf) to which i linked above, but must confess only skimmed. He notes “How much thought and care went into the teachers’ design of the curriculum. They keep reminding the board that you can’t just pull one book w/o the whole thread of the curriculum unraveling. I so identified with their frustration that all the work they had done to create this innovative curriculum would just be tossed aside in an evening’s bout of thoughtlessness.”

    But then Corey notes an important aspect of the incident that I had missed: “Sadly, the teachers and administrators had already agreed to redact a bunch of the book, before this meeting, which feels like an equally awful crime. The role of the school’s lawyers, who advised them on the rules of redaction and copyright, is troubling and interesting.” He then adds: “I kind of weeped for the teachers trying to navigate these sexual anxieties of grownups who ought to know better, and how much the teachers had to concede to them just to get heard.” Yes, weep indeed.

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