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By ANDREW LAPIN<\/p>\n
(JTA) \u2013 Nazi book burnings, antisemitic attacks on high school students and Shylock were all invoked during a Senate hearing on school book bans Tuesday morning. <\/p>\n
The hearing brought to Capitol Hill the debate over how much control parents should have over what kinds of books their children can access in their school and public libraries \u2014 and whether it constitutes a \u201cban\u201d when a book is removed because of their activism.<\/p>\n
The hearing comes as a national movement of \u201cparents\u2019 rights\u201d groups, stoked in some cases by Republican lawmakers, have brought challenges against thousands of books in school libraries, saying that they are not appropriate for children. The vast majority of the challenged books deal with topics of race, gender and sexuality; Jewish books have also been ensnared, with the Holocaust-themed \u201cMaus\u201d and an illustrated adaptation of Anne Frank\u2019s diary among the highest-profile book removals.<\/p>\n
\u201cExtremists continue to fight popular graphic novels like \u2018Maus\u2019 and other books,\u201d Illinois Democratic Dick Durbin, the judiciary committee chair, said during his opening remarks. Art Spiegelman\u2019s comic-book memoir about his parents\u2019 survival of the Holocaust was the first book named at the hearing, closely followed by texts including Margaret Atwood\u2019s \u201cThe Handmaid\u2019s Tale\u201d and Maya Angelou\u2019s \u201cI Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cLimiting access to a book about antisemitism or racism does not protect students from the actual history or the reality that hate still exists,\u201d Durbin said, before introducing Illinois\u2019 Democratic secretary of state as a witness. Illinois recently passed a law aimed at curbing book bans. It would revoke state funding to libraries that remove books for partisan or ideological reasons.<\/p>\n
An opening video at the hearing produced by Senate Democrats also emphasized the widely publicized case of a Tennessee district that removed \u201cMaus\u201d from its middle school curriculum, and featured a quote from Spiegelman. \u201cMaus\u201d has also been removed or nearly removed from additional districts in Missouri, Iowa and elsewhere. <\/p>\n
One of the Democratic majority\u2019s witnesses on the panel was a Jewish college student and book-access activist named Cameron Samuels. Samuels, who is nonbinary and uses they\/their pronouns, described how a challenge to \u201cMaus\u201d at their Katy, Texas, high school felt like an attack on their Jewish identity.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen Katy targeted Art Spiegelman\u2019s \u2018Maus,\u2019 I could not fathom how cartoon mice walking shamefully naked towards the gas chambers were considered sexual by the book\u2019s challengers,\u201d Samuels, a Brandeis University undergraduate who has received a Teen Tikkun Olam award from the Helen Diller Family Foundation, told the panel. <\/p>\n
\u201cMy ancestors fled religious persecution in Eurasia. I faced too many antisemitic remarks in school to remember,\u201d Samuels continued. \u201cClassmates told me the Holocaust did not exist. Many could not name a Jewish person so they learned about Judaism through media representation, often dominated by stereotypes. Books like \u2018Maus\u2019 teach accurate reflections of Jewish identity. <\/p>\n
\u201cIf a friend knew the real extent of the Holocaust,\u201d Samuels continued, \u201cmaybe they would have thought twice before spraying cologne in my face, saying he was \u2018gassing the Jew.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Durbin and Samuels further invoked the book-burning activities of Nazi Germany in their objections to parental challenges. But conservatives at the hearing, in addition to disputing the definition of \u201cbook ban,\u201d also fought the Nazi comparison.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy public school did not carry \u2018Mein Kampf.\u2019 Was it banned? I don\u2019t know,\u201d Max Eden, a research fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute who was a witness at the hearing, testified, referring to Hitler\u2019s manifesto. \u201cI\u2019ve read a few books about this era since, and I\u2019ve so far missed the part where the Nazi Party forced schools to relocate books to guidance counselors\u2019 offices.\u201d<\/p>\n
Nicole Neily, president of the conservative parents\u2019 rights activist group Parents Defending Education, also disputed the comparison, claiming, \u201cHeadlines and research papers by activist organizations have intentionally muddled the waters between World War II book burning and what is happening in America\u2019s K-12 schools.\u201d <\/p>\n
Later, referencing Muslim parents in Maryland and Michigan who have organized to protest books about sexuality in their school districts, Neily added, \u201cTo conflate that issue, that I don\u2019t want my child to be forced to read something with a book that is being burned in Nazi Germany, is disingenuous and false.\u201d<\/p>\n
During her testimony, Neily also claimed that librarians and freedom-to-read activists were on a mission to \u201cextract a pound of flesh\u201d from book-challenging parents by having them \u201cpilloried in the public square.\u201d The phrase \u201cpound of flesh\u201d comes from William Shakespeare\u2019s \u201cThe Merchant of Venice,\u201d which features Shylock, an antisemitic depiction of a Jewish money-lender who demands a pound of flesh from a client unable to pay his debts.<\/p>\n
Present at the hearing were Republican Senators from Tennessee, Iowa, Missouri and South Carolina, all states where Jewish books including \u201cMaus\u201d and Bernard Malamud\u2019s \u201cThe Fixer\u201d have been challenged or removed from public schools. None addressed those books. Instead, many of them used their time to accuse publishers, tech companies and the Biden administration of silencing conservative voices, or pivoted the hearing to a debate over immigration reform. John Kennedy, a Republican senator from Louisiana, turned heads when he used his allotted time to read sexually explicit passages from frequently challenged LGBTQ-themed books \u201cGender Queer\u201d and \u201cLawn Boy\u201d into the Congressional Record.<\/p>\n
The hearing wasn\u2019t the first time \u201cMaus\u201d bans had been invoked on Capitol Hill. Earlier this year, Democratic House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries declared, \u201cExtreme MAGA Republicans want to ban books on the Holocaust,\u201d while holding up a copy of \u201cMaus\u201d during a press conference. Jeffries was opposing a House bill passed by Republicans that would grant parents greater influence over their children\u2019s educational materials.<\/p>\n