:format(jpg):watermark(cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/ipmgroup/5IDEBLR7ERC5TMAPLOHS63MVNM.png,0,30,0)/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/ipmgroup/EMQGH6EBPRF5ZC4TAKMMODAMSE.jpg?fit=%2C&ssl=1 "The graphic novel, new victim of the school war in the United States: “Maus” withdrawn from a teaching program")
In this book, the cartoonist Art Spiegelman recounts the moving memories of his Holocaust survivor father, in which the Jews are represented by mice, the Nazis by cats.
Awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1992, a first for a comic book, mouse has been translated into more than twenty languages.
But its content is “vulgar and inappropriate” for 13-year-old middle schoolers, said the McMinn County School Board in Tennessee, which voted Jan. 10 to drop it from the curriculum, pending another Holocaust book. According to the minutes of the meeting, eight vulgar words and a picture of a naked woman were involved.
Interviewed by CNN on Thursday, Art Spiegelman said he was immersed in a “total confusion”, before'”try to be tolerant with those people who might not be Nazis” most “who focused on a few rude words”.
Faced with the controversy, the school council justified the withdrawal by judging the book “not suitable for study by [ses] students” because of his “unnecessary use of rude language and nudity”, and “his description of violence and suicides”.
The council assured not to minimize the educational value of mouse, nor dispute the importance of teaching “the historical and moral lessons as well as the realities of the Holocaust”.
“We have a duty to ensure that younger generations learn from these horrors to ensure that an event of this nature is never repeated”, added its members in a press release.
The Holocaust museum in the capital Washington, however, pointed out on Twitter that mouse was playing “a vital role” for the teaching of the Holocaust, “by sharing detailed and personal experiences of victims and survivors”.
Questioning teaching
“Given the pronounced lack of knowledge of the Holocaust in the United States, particularly among young Americans, the decision (from McMinn School Board, Editor’s note) beyond comprehension”, reacted in a press release to AFP David Harris, the director general of the American Jewish Committee (AJC), one of the oldest American organizations for the defense of the Jewish cause.
The book “explains what happened to millions of European Jews at the hands of Nazi Germany’s genocidal regime”, he added, while Thursday was the 77th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp, where the parents of Art Spiegelman were interned. This date has since become Holocaust Remembrance Day.
The withdrawal of mouse comes amid challenges to education in conservative US states, which attack books dealing with topics ranging from racism to gender identity. According to their detractors, these works in particular encourage white children to see themselves as oppressors of minorities. These conservative activists denounce the “critical race theory”, a current of thought that analyzes racism as a system, with its laws and logics of power, rather than at the level of individual prejudices.
Some states, such as Florida or Wisconsin, have thus introduced laws prohibiting schools from teaching that an individual, regardless of “his skin color, his sex or his origin”, that is “by nature racist, sexist or oppressive, consciously or unconsciously”.
Another literary classic, the novel Beloved by African-American Toni Morrison, has also been the subject of controversy recently. A Virginia student mother says her high school son had nightmares after reading the book, which tells the story of a former slave girl choosing to kill her child to save her from the atrocities of the slavery.
But these assaults on cultural works are not the prerogative of the Conservatives. Took no mockingbird by Harper Lee or The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, landmarks of American letters, have been removed from required reading lists by several school boards in recent years because they are considered insulting to African Americans.
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