Art Spiegelman blames ‘political headwinds’ for removal of ‘Maus’ from curriculum

Art Spiegelman, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the iconic Holocaust book “Maus,” on Monday blamed authoritarian political trends and petty parental grievances for the book’s removal from a Tennessee school’s curriculum last month.

The decision by the McMinn County school board set off a firestorm of criticism and sparked a national discussion about antisemitism and Jewish identity in the US.

Spiegelman spoke during a remote call Monday night with representatives of Jewish and Christian groups in Tennessee. Organizers said over 10,000 viewers tuned into the discussion.

He said he had pored over the minutes of the school board members’ meeting minutes to discern their motive for removing the book from the school’s curriculum. He said he believes they did so due to politics, an authoritarian bent and a desire to whitewash history, as well as petty grievances.

He pointed out that the school district had no problems with “Maus” until very recently.

“I’m distressed to find that’s changed in the midst of strong political headwinds that are burning books, literally,” he said. “They are trying to readjust our curricula to terrify librarians, book readers and teachers.”

He said some of the parents on the board wanted to teach the Holocaust in a way that made the US look good, and said that was tied to other recent trends in US education.

He said one board member commented: “What we need is a book that shows the patriotism we can proudly feel for having liberated the Jews from the camps.” Spiegelman pointed out that the US was reluctant to join the war and put a stop to the persecution of Jews, and that it was the Russians who liberated Auschwitz, where his father had been held.

He said there had been moves recently to monitor teachers and curricula, and that teachers “have to watch your words so you don’t offend somebody who might be unhappy about their grandfather being a Klansman, who might be unhappy and embarrassed about some of the things America has done in its history.”

“Even if they say they’re willing to teach the Holocaust, they want a fuzzier, warmer, gentler Holocaust that shows how great the Americans were,” he said.

“This is a dangerous world. It’s getting more dangerous. Are you going to try to confront it in a way that’s useful, or hide your head in myths and stories that are heartwarming?” he said.

He also said many of the parents on the school board appeared to be attempting to control their children by controlling the curriculum and had issues with personal elements in Spiegelman’s story.

School board members in McMinn County, Tennessee, objected to Art Spiegelman’s ‘Maus because of its language and images. (Philissa Cramer/JTA)

“Maus” is highly personal and describes Spiegelman’s fraught relationship with his father. The two were divided by culture, history and trauma, and the relationship was painful for them both. Its depiction in the book was no more lurid than it needed to be, he said.

The McMinn County school board focused on elements of “Maus” including Spiegelman’s disrespect toward his parents in the book. He calls his mother a “bitch” in one scene, and discusses his father’s premarital affair in another. He said personal details like those were necessary to tell the story truthfully and believably, calling his childhood household a “suburb of Auschwitz.”

“The taboo of not honoring my father and mother, that’s where the school board was totally focused,” he said.

“It would have been impossible for me to have done this book as only a historical text and extracting myself from it,” he said. “My contract is not with my father, my contract is with the reader, making a story that’s lucid, and that means my trust has to be earned.”

“I believe this is all about parents wanting to control their kids in the guise of protecting them,” he said. “It’s certainly about Jews but it’s not just about Jews. It’s about ‘othering,’ and what’s going on now is about controlling. Controlling what kids can look at, what kids can read, what kids can see in a way that makes them less able to think, not more, and it takes the form of the criticisms from this board where they say ‘He shouldn’t be talking to his parents like that.'”

He did not intend “Maus” to be a teaching tool, but the personal element made it useful and a compelling story, including for children, he said.

“If you speak to them honestly, they know it. They can tell the difference. If I was trying to make a tool to teach the Holocaust, it would start feeling medicinal,” he said.

He warned the trends reflected “perilous times.”

“The danger is that if you don’t know what happened and don’t pick up from it, it’s not that history repeats itself exactly, it’s just you have to be instructed by what happens in the past to protect yourself,” he said. “After there’s been a genocide on the scale of the Holocaust, it’s now out of the bag. This can be done, this could even be inspiring for some horrible, monstrous politician.”

Tuesday’s live event was hosted by the Jewish Federation of Greater Chattanooga, the B’nai Zion Congregation, the Mizpah Congregation, the Evangelical Lutheran Church of the Ascension and the Tennessee Holler, the news outlet that first broke the school board story.

Cartoonist Art Spiegelman attends the French Institute Alliance Francaise’s “After Charlie: What’s Next for Art, Satire and Censorship at Florence Gould Hall on February 19, 2015 in New York City. (Mark Sagliocco/Getty Images via JTA)

Spiegelman’s graphic novel series “Maus” relates his father’s experience during the Holocaust, and the genocide’s reverberations within their family. Spiegelman completed the series in 1991.

It depicts Jews as mice and Germans as predatory cats, and is considered an iconic piece of Holocaust literature. It is the only graphic novel to have won a Pulitzer Prize.

Last month, Tennessee’s McMinn County school board voted unanimously to remove “Maus” from its curriculum. Board members raised concerns about curse words, nude drawings of animals and “not wise” or healthy content in the series.

The school board’s decision set off a firestorm of controversy and garnered national media attention.

Then, Whoopi Goldberg came into the firing line last week during a discussion about “Maus” on ABC’s “The View.” She said the Holocaust “isn’t about race,” but about “two white groups of people.”

The comments provoked outrage and prolonged the controversy. She apologized for the comments, but ABC suspended her from the show for two weeks.

In his writings and speeches that would ultimately come to articulate his mass-extermination plans, Adolf Hitler repeatedly referred to Jews as a race rather than a religious group. Secular Jews, and Christians with Jewish grandparents, were considered Jewish by the Nazis.

Goldberg’s comments come amid a larger nationwide reckoning on Holocaust and race education, as many conservative activists have fought to restrict the teaching of race-related topics in schools, while some American Jews have expressed discomfort around identifying themselves as simply “white.”

In another related incident, this week in Tennessee, the mother of a middle-schooler said a class on the Bible included Christian proselytizing and comments offensive to Jews, including a lesson on “how to torture a Jew.”