The banning of Maus
- Jane Lee
- Feb 25, 2022
- 2 min read
Earlier this year, a middle school in Tennessee recently voted to ban the Holocaust novel Manus in their eighth-grade curriculum. The McMinn County School Board, Tennessee, board of supervisors unanimously voted to ban the book, citing concerns over "rough" language and graphic depictions of nude women. The book also uses images to convey the message of suicide and other outbreaks of violence. The book was first published in 1968 by Art Spiegelman. Maus depicts the narrator, who is Spiegelman, symbolized as a mouse, chronicling his difficult relationship with his father, Vladek. The book also explores complex topics like reckoning with the loss by suicide, like Spiegelman's experience with his Anja, who died by suicide in 1968.
Regarding the recent ban of the book, The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and the NAACP, and other groups have criticized the ban. The group acknowledges that books like Maus keep the critical conversation about the Holocaust alive. In response to the school ban in Tennessee, the complete book set of Maus had been the No. 1 bestseller on Amazon's online bookstore. The top three bestsellers in the "Literary Graphic Novels" section in the United States.
While the depictions in Maus may seem jarring, it is the truth about the Holocaust, and with an increasing amount of younger students not aware of the Holocaust, Maus can be a great teaching mechanism. In a recent survey conducted, researchers discovered that 31% of Americans believe that only 2 million Jewish people were killed during the Holocaust, and 41% of Americans do not know what Auschwitz was. Another survey found that 11% of respondents believe Jews caused the Holocaust. These numbers are highly frightening when we realize that more and more Holocaust survivors are passing or aging in their 80s and 90s.
With fewer survivors being able to tell their stories and more conspiracy and less knowledge about the Holocaust and the historical context, it is a disservice to young adults to shut off a source of education about the Holocaust.
While others may say that social media can provide historical knowledge without Maus's graphic images, the reality is that many distortions and conspiracy theories lie within the internet. Half of millennial and Gen-Z social media users have observed Holocaust denial or conspiracy posts on their social media pages in the same survey. These sites can be especially damaging without any supervision or prior knowledge of the truth about the Holocaust. Although Maus might be a graphic novel for many teenagers, it is the truth that needs to be shared. Adolescents are exposed to much more false information and extremely graphic content with social media.
Teaching Maus in a safe environment with professional or educated experts is a safer and more efficient environment for students to learn and discuss complex topics.By censoring the work of Spiegelman, it will be shutting out one of the few sources left that depicts in great detail the violence and horrific actions that were taken against millions of people.
I think the widely approved and vetted Maus books are an appropriate way of teaching children about a very terrible thing that happened. There is no nice way to teach the horrors of the Holocaust. Something so wrong should be taught at a young-enough age that the impact is set deep in someone. Delaying the shock of truth is detrimental to someone who will need to deeply understand the world they live in to thrive in it. These books are a great way to appropriately introduce the concept and realities of the Holocaust to school children and I don't understand how a school could be so naive and miss the point completely.
I remember reading Maus at quite a young age myself. While the subject matter is obviously horrific, it serves its purpose extremely well in making you never want to witness that sort of thing yourself. Its value as a warning tale can be very valuable to kids of the right age so its saddening to see such a reactionary attempt to ban it from that audience.
The remaining survivors are few and aging, meaning society is losing Holocaust resourceful sources. Internet sites are controversial and have misleading conspiracy theories; students cannot depend on them. I agree that banning the book worsens the situation.
Great post! With social media as the main environment for conversation and public discourse, there are often fewer and less reliable resources made available in the world. Therefore books like Maus and the details that they provide about the atrocities that occurred are necessary to spread informed ad accurate information about the topic. I really hope that this middle school changes its mind and sees the value that these texts have in educating us on world history.
As you have discussed, another side to this issue would be the fact that Maus Details a very personal and individual story. Such that with the removal of Maus, and only relying on textbooks to inform students of the Holocaust may in turn reduce a lot of the individual and personal hardships that many Jewish people endured during WW2. In this manner, Maus is not only a historical text, it is more importantly a humanist text. Great post!