COMMENTARY: Book banning movement spells trouble across U.S. in years to come

"Banning books gives us silence when we need speech. It closes our ears when we need to listen. It makes us blind when we need sight."
–Stephen Chbosky, author and film director

By Alan Gershel

Recently, we have seen grassroots campaigns to remove books from schools and libraries because subjects such as Critical Race Theory, alleged pornography, and gender ideology were deemed objectionable to young readers.

Being swept up in this version of book burning have been such important Holocaust themed books as "The Storyteller" by Judi Picoult and "Maus" by Art Spiegelman.

Picoult's novel follows a Jewish granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor who learns her neighbor is a former concentration camp guard. He asks her to help him die by suicide. An organization called "Moms for Liberty" told the local school board in Florida that the book contains sexually graphic material.

Spiegelman's book, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize in 1992, depicts the author interviewing his father, a Holocaust survivor, in an illustrated format in which he portrays the horrors of the Holocaust. All the people in the story appear as anthropomorphic animals. The Wall Street Journal called it "the most affecting and successful narrative ever done about the Holocaust."

The Board of Education in McMinn County, Tenn. took a different view, however, removing "Maus" from the curriculum because "of its unnecessary use of profanity and nudity and its depiction of violence and suicide."

Similarly, a graphic adaptation of Anne Frank's diary was removed from a school district in Texas, while several young reader histories about the Holocaust were briefly removed from a Missouri school district.

Unfortunately, these occurrences are not episodic but rather portend a disturbing nationwide trend involving not just books related to the Holocaust, but other subject areas as well.

In Florida, for example, the "Stop W.O.K.E. Act" encourages parents and educators to purge from schools and libraries books deemed inappropriate. According to PEN America, the nonprofit organization that was founded more than a century ago to protect the rights of free expression, in the 2021 and 2022 school years, book bans have occurred in 138 school districts in 32 states, impacting more than 5,000 schools with a combined enrollment of nearly 4 million students.

Book bans, by nature, are undemocratic. It is often a small group of zealots pushing their agenda resulting in censorship for all. This is an assault on the First Amendment. Student have First Amendment rights to access information and ideas in schools. Teaching the history of the Holocaust and other subject areas should not be exclusively predicated upon a school or library board's subjective determination. It's important to recognize that the books being systematically removed from school libraries and the classrooms have been carefully selected by professional librarians and teachers, and often involve peer review.

I recently spoke to Kelley Siegrist, director of the Farmington Community Library, about these issues. She noted that the mission of a library is to uphold intellectual freedom. The library will not even cordon off books, she said. Doing so limits the right of every individual to receive information. Ms. Siegrist pointed to a robust content development policy concerning the purchasing of books and a thorough process for challenging the acquisition of library materials.

Let me close with a quote from historian Harold Zinn, a World War II veteran who was a prolific author and playwright: "Sometimes it's a short step from banning to burning."
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Alan Gershel, a former federal prosecutor who retired in 2019 after heading the Attorney Grievance Commission for 5 years, is a docent at the Zekelman Holocaust Center in Farmington Hills.