Conservative activists, led by a local pastor and outspoken Israel advocate, pushed the district, Mission CISD, to excise books mostly about gender, sexuality and race. Their demands represented an extreme version of a nationwide culture war over books that has played out in recent years — and ensnared a number of books with Jewish themes.
In Mission, the long list of books on the chopping block includes a recent illustrated adaptation of Anne Frank’s diary; both volumes of Art Spiegelman’s Holocaust graphic memoir “Maus”; “The Fixer,” Bernard Malamud’s novel about a historical instance of antisemitic blood libel; and “Kasher in the Rye,” a ribald memoir by Jewish comedian Moshe Kasher.
Their justification is that they would have banned them anyway if they’d thought of it on their own, but now that somebody’s brought it up they realize it exists and provided the smallest justification to ban it.
It makes me glad that my state passed a law against banking books (in public libraries at least). Hopefully it’ll spread to public schools. Religious schools are probably a lost cause though.