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‘Persecution of Jews is educationally significant’: How a school district put a contested Bernard Malamud classic back on the shelves

(JTA) — Even before Joanna Sargent had read “The Fixer,” she knew about it.
A middle-school librarian in South Carolina, Sargent first heard of Bernard Malamud’s novel about antisemitism during her professional training. Budding librarians often study Island Trees School District v. Pico, the only U.S. Supreme Court case to address the holdings of school libraries. The 1982 case pitted a high school student against his school board, which had removed several books from the school library — among them “The Fixer.”
Last year, Sargent felt she was seeing history repeating itself when the book showed up on her own district’s list of challenged materials and was temporarily removed from library shelves. “The Fixer” was one of 96 books challenged by a local parent affiliated with the conservative activist group Moms For Liberty and a local business owner who doesn’t have a child in the district.
When the Beaufort County School District convened a committee to review the challenged books and appointed Sargent to join it, she finally got a chance to read “The Fixer” herself.
“I was blown away,” Sargent recalled to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. The novel, based on the real-life case of Mendel Beilis, a Jewish day laborer in Kyiv accused of murdering Christian children to make matzah in 1913, reminded her of the Biblical story of Job. “I was just like, ‘Oh, this poor man! Is anything going to go right for him?’”
Sargent and the six other members of the review committee got together to discuss the book and several others that had been challenged as inappropriate for students. The experience, she said, didn’t feel like a politically charged debate on censorship. Instead, it felt like a book club.
“We were all fascinated and captivated by the book,” Sargent said of the committee’s reaction. “It was about a man who had so many things going on for him, and the antisemitism was just so heartbreaking to me. I think I was in tears reading that book. I was just like, ‘How can we not let this voice be heard?’”
Sargent’s experience, along with the notes recorded by her fellow committee members and obtained by JTA, sheds light on an oft-unseen battlefield of the culture war over books currently playing out in states and school districts around the country. Parents’ challenges against books tend to make headlines, and so do districts’ decisions to ban books in response — but there’s frequently a review process behind closed doors that does not. That process, which in many districts requires staff and others to read books their own challengers may not have read, can be key to whether children continue to have access to contested literature.
In Beaufort County, the school district convened a rotating committee of seven people to review the challenged books, making their way through about seven a month starting with titles used in classroom instruction. For each book, committee members had to complete a checklist with their assessment of the book’s quality and content, its value in an educational setting, how thoroughly it avoids “pervasive vulgarity” and, in an echo of language frequently used by book challengers, its “appropriateness.”
The district signaled from early on that it was not very sympathetic to the charges leveled by a handful of parents that it was making explicit and inappropriate books available to children. A district spokeswoman said the books were removed from public access, despite not being contested according to the district’s regular process, only because of concerns about the safety of educators and officials in a heated environment. Over the course of the school year, the committee had returned all but four of the titles it reviewed to school library shelves.
When it came time to review “The Fixer,” Sargent was tapped alongside three other district employees, including a middle-school language arts teacher; a parent; a member of a school improvement council and a “community member.” The committee is meant to represent different constituencies in the district community, according to the district’s own guidelines for dealing with book challenges.
None of the members, to Sargent’s knowledge, were Jewish; the district, which has relatively few Jewish students, said it does not always achieve representation from the groups whose stories are being contested.
“The district could have done a better job with that,” Sargent said. “As librarians, we want to try to make our libraries inclusive and diverse.”
A review of the committee’s notes on the novel, obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request, shows that every member endorsed keeping the book available in schools, with one participant specifying it should only be accessible at the high school level. (The book had previously only been stocked in high schools, according to Sargent, who estimated it had been a part of the school library’s collection for more than 25 years without any controversy.)
In their notes, the committee members said they thought “The Fixer” had the power to offer students a valuable perspective on bigotry — and on Judaism.
“History of the time period and persecution of Jews is educationally significant,” one reviewer wrote.
“Something I really like about ‘The Fixer’ is that it introduces an education of Judaism to the reader,” another reviewer noted. Despite saying that they personally “don’t think it holds up as a timeless novel of literary quality,” the reviewer said the book “helps to expand the world of many Lowcountry students,” referring to the coastal region of the state where the district is located.
Another reviewer included a list of vocabulary in the book that could be of educational value, including terms like “Torah,” “pogrom,” “shtetl” and “goyim.”
A few panelists took things a step further, declaring that the story, about the persecution of Yakov Bok by antisemitic Russians, had echoes in the book’s very placement on the banned list.
“The same individuals banning these books follow the views of the Tsarist persecutors in this novel,” one wrote.
Another alluded to the review of “The Fixer” on BookLooks, a ratings site started by a former Moms For Liberty member cited by the local parent who challenged the books. BookLooks gave the novel a “minor restricted” rating in part because of the use of an antisemitic slur directed at the Jewish protagonist.
The site’s administrator told JTA the rating was not meant to encourage schools to remove the book altogether.
“Banning any book because of the term ‘Jew noses’ is doing exactly what the antagonists in the novel are doing,” the reviewer wrote.
The committee’s final decision was unanimous: The book should be returned to shelves.
Mike Covert, a Republican former Beaufort County council member in South Carolina, challenged Bernard Malamud’s “The Fixer” in his district and appealed a committee’s decision to return the book to schools on Aug. 9, 2023. (Screenshot via YouTube)
The ruling drew at least one formal appeal: from Mike Covert, a former Republican county council member who frequently attacks the school board on a conservative internet stream. Covert, a local business owner whose children no longer attend school in the district, worked with Ivie Szalai, the parent affiliated with Moms For Liberty, to file nearly identical challenges within minutes of each other last year. Covert added one more book, bringing the total of challenges to 97. He has appealed the review committee’s rulings regularly, without success.
In the appeal form, obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request, Covert referenced “The Fixer” by name and wrote that it and the other six books the committee returned to shelves during its most recent session are “lewd and vulgar. Period.” On recent video streams, Covert has taken his rhetoric a step further, telling his followers that “these books have no education value to anyone under the age of 18,” and declaring, “For those that think it is perfectly OK for your kid to read that s–t — and that’s all it is — there is something seriously wrong with you.”
Reached by phone, Covert told JTA he had read “The Fixer” — unlike Szalai, who said she had not read the books she challenged. He said the book had landed on his and Szalai’s radar because it was featured on conservative-run websites listing objectionable texts. He said he had appealed the board’s decision to restore it to shelves because he believed “it would be challenging my credibility if I didn’t.”
Covert also said he didn’t know the book was based on a true story or that it described a real episode of antisemitism in Russian history. His objections, he said, had largely been based on the incorrect idea that it was “completely fictional.”
“I like to think of myself as a pretty learned individual, and if somebody had said, ‘Would you bet that this was real?’ I would have taken that bet and said, ‘No, of course not,’” Covert said. “I would have had a different opinion right off the bat knowing that it’s true.”
Covert allowed that older grades could get some use out of “The Fixer” but also echoed the thinking of the Island Trees school board in 1982 in suggesting that reading the book could encourage antisemitism, rather than educate about it.
“The last thing we need is more kids going out there thinking, ‘Well, you know, maybe I should go shoot up a synagogue,’” he said. “Let them be kids. Let them mature physically as well as mentally, and then understand why were the Jews persecuted so disgustingly by the Russians. I mean, what was the reason? This book doesn’t go into the reason.”
At the same time, Covert said he could understand why Jews would be concerned with the specter of Jewish books being removed from schools. In addition to “The Fixer,” other books with Jewish content that have been challenged multiple times in various places include Art Spiegelman’s “Maus” and a new graphic adaptation of Anne Frank’s diary.
“If I was you all, I would be on guard as well,” Covert said. “Anne Frank and the whole litany of material with that is absolutely, completely educational, in my opinion.”
Other than Covert’s appeal, the review committee’s restoration of “The Fixer” to the Beaufort County School District hasn’t yet elicited any particular response, Sargent said. The committee still has dozens of titles to wade through, under different configurations. Having rotated off, Sargent has her own thoughts about the sort of people who bothered to challenge the novel nearly 60 years after its publication.
“I don’t think they’re seeing the significance of them,” she said of the parents who challenged “The Fixer” and others in the first place. “It just seems like, ‘Jump on the bandwagon, and here’s a list of books. Let’s just try to get all of these out of as many places as we can.’”
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The post ‘Persecution of Jews is educationally significant’: How a school district put a contested Bernard Malamud classic back on the shelves appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Switzerland Moves to Close Gaza Humanitarian Foundation’s Geneva Office Over Legal Irregularities

Palestinians carry aid supplies received from the US-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation in the central Gaza Strip, May 29, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Ramadan Abed/File Photo
Switzerland has moved to shut down the Geneva office of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), a US- and Israeli-backed aid group, citing legal irregularities in its establishment.
The GHF began distributing food packages in Gaza in late May, implementing a new aid delivery model aimed at preventing the diversion of supplies by Hamas, as Israel continues its defensive military campaign against the Palestinian terrorist group.
The initiative has drawn criticism from the UN and international organizations, some of which have claimed that Jerusalem is causing starvation in the war-torn enclave.
Israel has vehemently denied such accusations, noting that, until its recently imposed blockade, it had provided significant humanitarian aid in the enclave throughout the war.
Israeli officials have also said much of the aid that flows into Gaza is stolen by Hamas, which uses it for terrorist operations and sells the rest at high prices to Gazan civilians.
With a subsidiary registered in Geneva, the GHF — headquartered in Delaware — reports having delivered over 56 million meals to Palestinians in just one month.
According to a regulatory announcement published Wednesday in the Swiss Official Gazette of Commerce, the Federal Supervisory Authority for Foundations (ESA) may order the dissolution of the GHF if no creditors come forward within the legal 30-day period.
The Trump administration did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the Swiss decision to shut down its Geneva office.
“The GHF confirmed to the ESA that it had never carried out activities in Switzerland … and that it intends to dissolve the Geneva-registered branch,” the ESA said in a statement.
Last week, Geneva authorities gave the GHF a 30-day deadline to address legal shortcomings or risk facing enforcement measures.
Under local laws and regulations, the foundation failed to meet several requirements: it did not appoint a board member authorized to sign documents domiciled in Switzerland, did not have the minimum three board members, lacked a Swiss bank account and valid address, and operated without an auditing body.
The GHF operates independently from UN-backed mechanisms, which Hamas has sought to reinstate, arguing that these vehicles are more neutral.
Israeli and American officials have rejected those calls, saying Hamas previously exploited UN-run systems to siphon aid for its war effort.
The UN has denied those allegations while expressing concerns that the GHF’s approach forces civilians to risk their safety by traveling long distances across active conflict zones to reach food distribution points.
The post Switzerland Moves to Close Gaza Humanitarian Foundation’s Geneva Office Over Legal Irregularities first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Key US Lawmaker Warns Ireland of Potential Economic Consequences for ‘Antisemitic Path’ Against Israel

US Sen. James Risch (R-ID) speaks during a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing, Washington, DC, May 21, 2024. Photo: Graeme Sloan/Sipa USA via Reuters Connect
Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman James Risch (R-ID) issued a sharp warning Tuesday, accusing Ireland of embracing antisemitism and threatening potential economic consequences if the Irish government proceeds with new legislation targeting Israeli trade.
“Ireland, while often a valuable U.S. partner, is on a hateful, antisemitic path that will only lead to self-inflicted economic suffering,” Risch wrote in a post on X. “If this legislation is implemented, America will have to seriously reconsider its deep and ongoing economic ties. We will always stand up to blatant antisemitism.”
Marking a striking escalation in rhetoric from a senior US lawmaker, Risch’s comments came amid growing tensions between Ireland and Israel, which have intensified dramatically since the Hamas-led attacks on southern Israel on October 7, 2023. Those attacks, in which roughly 1,200 Israelis were killed and more than 200 taken hostage, prompted a months-long Israeli military campaign in Gaza that has drawn widespread international scrutiny. Ireland has positioned itself as one of the most vocal critics of Israel’s response, accusing the Israeli government of disproportionate use of force and calling for immediate humanitarian relief and accountability for the elevated number of Palestinian civilian casualties.
Dublin’s stance has included tangible policy shifts. In May 2024, Ireland formally recognized a Palestinian state, becoming one of the first European Union members to do so following the outbreak of the war in Gaza. The move was condemned by Israeli officials, who recalled their ambassador to Ireland and accused the Irish government of legitimizing terrorism. Since then, Irish lawmakers have proposed further measures, including legislation aimed at restricting imports from Israeli settlements in the West Bank, policies viewed in Israel and among many American lawmakers as aligning with the controversial Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement.
While Irish leaders have defended their approach as grounded in international law and human rights, critics in Washington, including Risch, have portrayed it as part of a broader pattern of hostility toward Israel. Some US lawmakers have begun raising the possibility of reevaluating trade and diplomatic ties with Ireland in response.
Risch’s warning is one of the clearest indications yet that Ireland’s policies toward Israel could carry economic consequences. The United States is one of Ireland’s largest trading partners, and American companies such as Apple, Google, Meta and Pfizer maintain substantial operations in the country, drawn by Ireland’s favorable tax regime and access to the EU market.
Though the Trump administration has not echoed Risch’s warning, the remarks reflect growing unease in Washington about the trajectory of Ireland’s foreign policy. The State Department has maintained a careful balancing act, expressing strong support for Israel’s security while calling for increased humanitarian access in Gaza. Officials have stopped short of condemning Ireland’s actions directly but have expressed concern about efforts they see as isolating Israel on the international stage.
Ireland’s stance is emblematic of a growing international divide over the war. While the US continues to provide military and diplomatic backing to Israel, many European countries have called for an immediate ceasefire and investigations into alleged war crimes.
Irish public opinion has long leaned pro-Palestinian, and Irish lawmakers have repeatedly voiced concern over the scale of destruction in Gaza and the dire humanitarian situation.
Irish officials have not yet responded to The Algemeiner’s request for comment.
The post Key US Lawmaker Warns Ireland of Potential Economic Consequences for ‘Antisemitic Path’ Against Israel first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Israel Condemns Iran’s Suspension of IAEA Cooperation, Urges Europe to Reinstate UN Sanctions

Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar at a press conference in Berlin, Germany, June 5, 2025. REUTERS/Christian Mang/File Photo
Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar on Wednesday condemned Iran’s decision to halt cooperation with the UN’s nuclear watchdog and called on the international community to reinstate sanctions to curb Tehran’s nuclear ambitions.
“Iran has just issued a scandalous announcement about suspending its cooperation with the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency),” Saar wrote in a post on X. “This is a complete renunciation of all its international nuclear obligations and commitments.”
Last week, the Iranian parliament voted to suspend cooperation with the IAEA “until the safety and security of [the country’s] nuclear activities can be guaranteed.”
“The IAEA and its Director-General are fully responsible for this sordid state of affairs,” Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi wrote in a post on X.
The top Iranian diplomat said this latest decision was “a direct result of [IAEA Director-General Rafael Grossi’s] regrettable role in obfuscating the fact that the Agency — a full decade ago — already closed all past issues.
“Through this malign action,” Araghchi continued, “he directly facilitated the adoption of a politically-motivated resolution against Iran by the IAEA [Board of Governors] as well as the unlawful Israeli and US bombings of Iranian nuclear sites.”
The Parliament of Iran has voted for a halt to collaboration with the IAEA until the safety and security of our nuclear activities can be guaranteed.
This is a direct result of @rafaelmgrossi‘s regrettable role in obfuscating the fact that the Agency—a full decade ago—already…
— Seyed Abbas Araghchi (@araghchi) June 27, 2025
On Wednesday, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian approved a bill banning UN nuclear inspectors from entering the country until the Supreme National Security Council decides that there is no longer a threat to the safety of its nuclear sites.
In response, Saar urged European countries that were part of the now-defunct 2015 nuclear deal to activate its “snapback” clause and reinstate all UN sanctions lifted under the agreement.
Officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), this accord between Iran and several world powers imposed temporary restrictions on Tehran’s nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief.
During his first term, US President Donald Trump withdrew from the deal and reinstated unilateral sanctions on Iran.
“The time to activate the Snapback mechanism is now! I call upon the E3 countries — Germany, France and the UK to reinstate all sanctions against Iran!” Saar wrote in a post on X.
“The international community must act decisively now and utilize all means at its disposal to stop Iranian nuclear ambitions,” he continued.
The time to activate the Snapback mechanism is now!
I call upon the E3 countries- Germany, France and the UK to reinstate all sanctions against Iran!
Iran has just issued a scandalous announcement about suspending its cooperation with the IAEA (International Atomic Energy…— Gideon Sa’ar | גדעון סער (@gidonsaar) July 2, 2025
Saar’s latest remarks come after Araghchi met last week in Geneva with his counterparts from Britain, France, Germany and the European Union’s Foreign Policy Chief Kaja Kallas — their first meeting since the Iran-Israel war began.
Europe is actively urging Iran to reengage in talks with the White House to prevent further escalation of tensions, but has yet to address the issue of reinstating sanctions.
Speaking during an official visit to Latvia on Tuesday, Saar said that “Operation Rising Lion” — Israel’s sweeping military campaign aimed at dismantling Iran’s nuclear capabilities — has “revealed the full extent of the Iranian regime’s threat to Israel, Europe, and the global order.”
“Iran deliberately targeted civilian population centers with its ballistic missiles,” Saar said at a press conference. “The same missile threat can reach Europe, including Latvia and the Baltic states.”
“Israel’s actions against the head of the snake in Iran contributed directly to the safety of Europe,” the Israeli top diplomat continued, adding that Israeli strikes have set back the Iranian nuclear program by many years.
The post Israel Condemns Iran’s Suspension of IAEA Cooperation, Urges Europe to Reinstate UN Sanctions first appeared on Algemeiner.com.