On the eve of Holocaust Remembrance Day, Tennessee School Board bans ‘Maus’

If there’s one thing you can count on history doing, it’s repeating itself. Book bans are hardly new. Yet no matter how many times we learn that banning books is never the right thing to do, it happens again. And again. And again.

In this latest iteration, a Tennessee School Board decided to ban “Maus” — an evocative, thought-provoking graphic novel about the Holocaust, that remains to this day the only graphic novel to receive a Pulitzer Prize. Teachers had intended to include “Maus” as part of an eighth grade English Language Arts curriculum on the Holocaust.

Yet despite vociferous defenses of the book by the educators who chose “Maus” for inclusion in the curriculum, the School Board voted unanimously against it, on the basis that the novel contained “cuss words” including “bitch” and “god damn,” and nudity (of the cartoon mouse variety).

No right thinking person can deny that the Nazis tortured and dehumanized Jews and others by rounding them up, confining them to concentration camps, stripping them naked, shaving their heads, branding them with tattoos, starving them, beating them, raping them, and killing them. No doubt vulgar language was used. Yet somehow teaching eighth graders about this, showing them even just a small fraction of it in pictures, is “normalizing” sexuality, nudity, and vulgar language. Is “offensive.” Is “indoctrination.”

These are some of the same excuses being peddled against Critical Race Theory — a higher-level academic conceptual framework that has the audacity to examine critically the basis of historical and continuing racial inequities in this country.

As a Jew, it pains me to see such systemic refusals to learn history, and to learn from history. To see those who view knowledge as indoctrination. Because without knowledge of the truths of our past, history will continue to repeat itself, again and again.

Photo by Karsten Winegeart on Unsplash