I spent much of the day rereading Art Spiegelman’s brilliant graphic novel Maus. It felt like the right thing to do after the Mcminn County, TN schoolboard voted unanimously to remove it from the eighth-grade curriculum. “There is some rough, objectionable language in this book,” Director of Schools Lee Parkison said in his opening remarks at the 10 January schoolboard meeting. Board member, and Mcminn High School science teacher Tony Allman called Maus “vulgar and inappropriate” and insisted that “we don’t need to enable or somewhat promote this stuff.”
So, I cracked-open my worn copy and began to read about Vladek and Anja Spiegelman, their son Richieu and those dark years that we Jews simply call the Shoah, (שואה) the Catastrophe. Sometimes one needs to call such enormity by the simplest possible name.
It was an act of resistance; in some ways what Holocaust historian Yehuda Bauer called an Amidah. In Rethinking the Holocaust, he used the word, “which is almost impossible to translate,” the name of a sequence of prayers central to Jewish observance, as a metaphor. “In this context it means literally ‘standing up against,’ but that does not capture the deeper sense of the word.” What he meant was a resistance that “sanctified life” in the face of the brutality and horror of the Shoah.
I am well aware that there is nothing heroic in reading a book in the comfort of your living room, and that my small act of resistance is nowhere near as sanctified as “smuggling food into ghettos; mutual sacrifice within the family to avoid starvation or worse; cultural, educational, religious, and political activities taken to strengthen morale; the work of doctors, nurses, and educators” in the face of Nazi brutality. I merely opened an old and beloved book and began to read; and, in reading, I remembered the Catastrophe, its victims and its survivors. I fulfilled the obligation, the mitzvah of nizkor (נזכור), “we will remember,” and that is a sanctified act.
It is a standing-up against an ignorant belief that narrating and calling attention to a historical obscenity – one of the worst in all human history – is itself somehow obscene. “I am not denying it was horrible, brutal, and cruel,” Allman said of the Shoah. But, he added, Maus “shows people hanging, it shows them killing kids, why does the educational system promote this kind of stuff? It is not wise or healthy.” For the elders of the Mcminn County school board, ignorance is evidently both wiser and healthier.
It is difficult to know where to begin with this kind of thinking, but it has become utterly pervasive in America. It has a close relationship with the kind of toxic positivity articulated in motivational social media memes, and peddled by “life coaches” and self-help gurus that promises salvation if only you block-out “negative energy.” Just don’t look at the dark stuff, or even acknowledge that it exists, and everything will be okay.
We can detect this kind of thinking, to the extent that it is thinking at all, both in the Prosperity Gospel Christianity that pervades the white South, and in the controversy over “critical race theory” cooked up by Magaist demagogues. After all, merely acknowledging the existence of racism in American history, they say, denies the perfection of America – and that cannot be gainsaid.
And Mcminn County is in the heart of the Magaist white South. About 90 percent of its 50,000 residents are white, and almost 80 percent voted for Donald Trump in the 2020 election. The high school team is the Cherokees. Not a single Jew lives in the county – which isn’t surprising in a state where we make up less than 0.3 percent of the population – and although there is a “synagogue” in the town of Etowah, it is a Messianic Christian congregation.
So, when the overwhelmingly Republican, exclusively white, Christian guardians of public education in Mcminn county say that the content of a graphic novel about the Shoah is “vulgar and inappropriate,” what they really mean is that it harshed their buzz. It shook them from their complacency and forced them to think about other people who suffered at the hands of white Christians like themselves. Like “critical race theory,” it denied them the racial privilege of feeling good about being white, and that was “vulgar and inappropriate.”
It would be so laughable if the decision hadn’t hit the headlines the day before International Holocaust Remembrance Day, at a time when neo-Nazi and white nationalist battalions are on the march and Jews are routinely attacked and murdered by antisemitic terrorists in numbers never before seen in American history. To make matters worse, as the last members of the generation who suffered, witnessed, and survived the Shoah die – like Vladek, who died in 1982, and Anja Spiegelman, who took her own life in 1968 – what happened in the ghettos, camps, and killing fields is fading from our collective memory.
What the Mcminn County school board wants to do, however, is far more sinister: It wants to actively forget, to hide the “horrible, brutal, and cruel” truth from their students, and act like the Shoah never happened. To remember at all, after all “is not wise or healthy.”
We can, however, stand up in resistance to this act of willful ignorance, to make an Amidah sanctified by the mitzvah of nizkor – by remembering and demanding that neither the Shoah, nor any obscenity in our history, ever be forgotten.
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The Mcminn County School Board
Front row from left; Mike Cochran, Donna Casteel, Chairperson Sharon Brown, Denise Cunningham and Vice Chairperson Quinten Howard. Back row from left; Bill Irvin, Mike Lowry, Jonathan Pierce, Rob Shamblin, Tony Allman and Director of Schools Lee Parkinson.
Lee Parkison
Director of Schools
423-745-1612
Sharon Brown
School Board Chairman – District 5
423-745-1612
Quinten Howard
School Board Vice Chairman – District 1
423-745-1612
Jonathan Pierce
School Board Member – District 1
423-745-1612
piercefarms@outlook.com
Denise Cunningham
School Board Member – District 2
423-745-1612
Mike Lowry
School Board Member – District 2
423-745-1612
Donna Casteel
School Board Member – District 3
423-745-1612
Mike Cochran
School Board Member – District 3
423-745-1612
Tony Allman
School Board Member – District 4
423-745-1612
Bill Irvin
School Board Member – District 4
423-745-1612
Rob Shamblin
School Board Member – District 5
423-568-2112
info@dycho.com