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A South Carolina school district removed ‘The Fixer,’ a classic novel about antisemitism with its own history of school controversies
(JTA) — Late last year, a mom in South Carolina requested that her local school district remove nearly 100 books from its shelves — including a classic novel about antisemitism.
The challenge to “The Fixer,” an award-winning 1966 work by Bernard Malamud, came amid an ongoing flurry of attempts by conservative activists to take books out of schools. And this instance of an attempted ban followed what has become an established playbook.
The parent in question, Ivie Szalai, is affiliated with the conservative “parents’ rights” group Moms for Liberty. She alleged that “The Fixer” and dozens of other books were too lewd for children’s eyes, raising her concerns at Beaufort County school board meetings and with district officials.
“I know that many of the books in question may have extremely helpful material for many students,” she reportedly said at one meeting of the coastal district that includes the popular vacation destinations Hilton Head and St. Helena Island. “But that does not negate the fact that many of them contain explicit sexuality, even some pornographic, X-rated scenes.”
In seeking to ban “The Fixer,” however, Szalai isn’t just joining a recent national trend. She’s also targeting a book that was at the center of a previous generation’s attempt to restrict children’s access to literature — and that led to a rare Supreme Court decision on library book bans, in 1982.
The situation in Beaufort County, more than 40 years later, bears striking parallels to that case and demonstrates the deep roots of conservative efforts to ban books. It offers yet another example of how stories about Judaism and antisemitism, even on topics that predate the Holocaust, can get caught in the book-banning dragnet. And it shows how the movement’s advocates are scoring victories even in places without new laws working in their favor.
Szalai did not respond to repeated requests for comment. But Josh Malkin, an attorney and senior advocacy strategist at the American Civil Liberties Union of South Carolina, believes that challenging “The Fixer” may be part of a broad attempt to stress-test the court’s ruling from 1982, which was inconclusive.
“What the right is doing really well right now is finding language in the law that they believe there to be wiggle room around,” said Malkin, who has been monitoring book challenges across the state. “With all of this insanity around book bans in 2023, it’ll be interesting to see how far up in the judicial system this gets.”
“The Fixer” fictionalizes a notorious 1911 case in which a Jewish laborer in Kyiv, Mendel Beilis, was charged with murdering a Christian boy and using his blood to make matzah. The case is one of the most famous modern examples of the blood libel — the canard that Jews murder non-Jewish children and use their blood for ritual purposes. Beilis’ family has bristled that the character based on him is a crass, irreligious laborer, and has alleged that Malamud plagiarized from Beilis’ own autobiography. Still, the story is widely recognized as an indictment of antisemitism and a powerful portrayal of human suffering. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Szalai challenged “The Fixer” in October 2022 along with popular titles including “The Kite Runner” and “The Handmaid’s Tale.” She did not follow the district’s normal process for challenging books, instead submitting a list of the objectionable material to officials via email and threatening “to escalate this to authorities” if the district did not take immediate action.
Unlike some other Republican-led states, Malkin said, South Carolina has no law that requires schools to acquiesce to book bans, though the state superintendent was elected last year on a promise to prevent “political indoctrination” in schools. The state’s Republican governor Henry McMaster has also made book bans into a political issue, instructing his education department to investigate “obscene material” in schools. Local districts can decide how to handle challenges that parents raise about books.
Candace Bruder, a spokesperson for the Beaufort County School District, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency the books were removed following threats against the district and efforts by activists to identify its librarians.
“In order to protect our employees from this harassment, the decision was made to temporarily pull the 97 books for review through an organized process,” she wrote.
In the months since, many of the books that Szalai challenged have returned to schools’ shelves, including “The Freedom Writers Diary,” which details an inner-city public school teacher’s efforts to educate her students about the Holocaust. But “The Fixer” is still in limbo: The school board in Beaufort County will decide the book’s local fate next month.
It isn’t the first school board to weigh that question. In 1975, board members in the Island Trees School District on Long Island removed “The Fixer” and six other books from school libraries — citing similar complaints as those aired by Szalai now.
In a statement, the Island Trees district’s board members said the books were “anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-Semitic and just plain filthy.” The critique of “The Fixer” included instances in the book of profanity directed toward the Jewish protagonist by his prison guards. A board member told the Washington Post that he thought some passages might be objectionable to Jews.
A group of students challenged the board’s book bans and took their case to the Supreme Court. In the Island Trees Union Free School District No. 26 v. Pico case, a majority of justices ruled in the students’ favor, but they also said school boards have a role to play in managing the titles available in school libraries. Only a few agreed that the students had a First Amendment right to access particular books. “Because it’s a plurality of opinion, it doesn’t have the same force of law that majority opinions do,” Malkin said.
Now, conservative activists are making the same arguments as their forebears about books they’re seeking to ban. The questions at the core of the Supreme Court ruling are animating the book-ban movement, and its opponents, today.
“As a Jewish person who knows the history of our culture, I know we have an active role to play in ensuring that ‘never again’ happens. This for me is part of that moment,” Emily Mayer, a former public school teacher in Beaufort County who now works as a political strategist, told JTA about why she has been organizing her neighbors to oppose book bans.
“I didn’t think that I would ever be kind of on the precipice of something like this, to make sure that we don’t see history repeat itself,” said Mayer, whose father is a rabbi in Maryland. “But now that we are at that moment, if I sat by quietly — and other Jewish advocates I know feel the same — we would be doing an injustice, not just to the Jewish religion, but to all people who have been othered in some kind of way.”
Art Spiegelman, author of “Maus,” poses in Paris, March 20, 2012. (Bertrand Langlois/AFP via Getty Images)
While today’s book ban movement focuses largely on titles about race, gender and sexuality, Malkin believes it is not an accident that books about Jews keep facing challenges. Multiple school districts have fielded challenges to “Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graphic Adaptation,” with at least one in Florida permanently removing it because of a determination that it is “not age-appropriate.” The Holocaust graphic memoir “Maus,” a picture book about Purim featuring a family with two dads and a book about Shabbat included in a diversity collection have all faced challenges over the last year.
“This movement of white Christian nationalism is coinciding with the rise in antisemitism. So while that likely doesn’t make the text of the challenge, it’s scary,” said Malkin, who is Jewish. “This whole thing is: you scratch back one layer and it’s about putting God back into schools. But whose God? I think that’s a pretty quick step to ‘Let’s make sure we are marginalizing and othering folks with other religious beliefs.’”
In 1975, the Island Trees board members got their lists of “objectionable” books at a conservative political conference at a time of skyrocketing complaints about obscene material in schools. Similarly, conservative parent activists today are turning to BookLooks, a website created by Emily Maikisch, a former Moms for Liberty activist, to identify books to challenge.
Szalai has said that she sourced her complaints from BookLooks, which annotates and rates books based on their content. She did not read most of the books she sought to have removed, according to local reports,
“I felt led to do what I did, and I’d do it all again,” Szalai said at a school board meeting last month when she informed the board that she would be pursuing criminal charges over a decision to keep a book she said was “obscene” in schools.
BookLooks assigns “The Fixer” a rating of 3 out of 5, what it calls “minor restricted.” A content warning reads: “This book contains controversial religious and racial commentary; hate involving racism; violence including self harm; and profanity,” citing more than 30 instances of objectionable content. Those include descriptions of violence and invocations of antisemitic stereotypes. It ends with a chart showing how many times profane words can be counted in the book.
Absent from the BookLooks brief on “The Fixer” is one of its most famous lines, spoken early on by its ill-fated narrator: “There are no wrong books. What’s wrong is the fear of them.”
Maikisch told JTA the site’s rating for “The Fixer” should be viewed as the equivalent of an R rating for a movie, meant to reflect “very valid concerns” parents could have about the book’s content. She thinks it’s a good thing parents are challenging books like this one in their school districts and prompting formal review processes.
“The alternative would be for parents to be hands-off and let the ‘experts’ handle it,” she told JTA. “But that ship has sailed and parents are not wanting to remain passive and uninformed about their children’s education anymore.”
Still, Maikisch said she’d be “very surprised” to see books like “The Fixer” completely removed from high schools, which she said “wouldn’t likely be a popular position.”
BookLooks has fueled challenges to “The Fixer” in other places where Moms for Liberty is active. The book was on a list of challenged books drawn up by the group’s chapter in Horry County, South Carolina and, following a member’s complaint, it was also removed from shelves in Martin County, Florida — a state where a law allows parents to challenge instructional materials and books in public school libraries and where Gov. Ron DeSantis has been an outspoken ally of Moms for Liberty, which was founded in the state in 2021.
Julie Marshall, a Martin County parent and Moms for Liberty activist, asserted in a form challenging “The Fixer” that the book had no serious literary value and said it should be removed entirely from schools, while noting that she had not personally read it. Asked to provide a description of the book’s inappropriate content, she provided a link to its BookLooks page.
The principal of a Martin County high school that had the book in its library wrote back weeks later to let Marshall know that “The Fixer” and several other titles had been removed from the shelves, according to emails that Marshall shared with JTA.
But Marshall, who successfully fought for the removal of a Jodi Picoult novel about the Holocaust in her district earlier this year, told JTA that she came to believe — after consulting with “some Jewish friends” whom she did not name — that “The Fixer” should in fact be available in schools, but only for older students.
“The Fixer is an Adult novel and has graphic violence in it and that is how it came up for possible removal, but after discussions, we did not feel this book should be removed,” she told JTA via email.
The review committee in Beaufort County could agree with that assessment when it reveals its latest batch of book reviews on Aug. 2. The committee, which meets around once a month to tackle about 10 books at a time, prioritized “titles being used in classroom instruction,” Bruder said to explain last spring why “The Fixer” hadn’t yet been reviewed. But it is now on the agenda alongside six other more recently published novels.
The committee has so far sided with the parent challenges only three times, for a novel about a school shooting by Jodi Picoult, a novel about abuse by Colleen Hoover, and a raunchy novel about teens on a road trip by Jesse Andrews.
Before they meet, Beaufort County committee members are reading “The Fixer.” It’s something that Malamud himself said he wished would happen more often when his book faced challenges.
“I wish those school board members and others who want to ban books would make an effort to understand them before shoveling them off library shelves,” the author said in 1976, a decade before his death, in response to the Island Trees ban. “If they read ‘The Fixer,’ they might be clamoring to have more students read it.”
Mayer said she thought one outcome could indeed be more widespread readership for a significant Jewish novel that is read far less often than it was at its heyday.
“It’s the same thing that we say about children, that the best way to get a kid to do something is to tell them not to do it,” she said. “Saying you can’t read that book only makes it more appealing. … It’s very possible that ‘The Fixer’ could come back around.”
For Jay Beilis, Mendel Beilis’s grandson, that wouldn’t be an ideal outcome. He’s been waging a one-man battle against “The Fixer” because of Malamud’s alleged plagiarism and in defense of his grandfather’s character, even publishing a book enumerating his concerns. Yet he says he doesn’t want to see the book pulled off of school district shelves because of the concerns raised by Moms for Liberty members.
“I’m not going to celebrate the book being banned,” Beilis told JTA. “A book like that to me shouldn’t be read — but not for the reason the people who are banning it are doing it for.”
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The post A South Carolina school district removed ‘The Fixer,’ a classic novel about antisemitism with its own history of school controversies appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Northwestern University Touts Progress on Addressing Campus Antisemitism Amid Federal Scrutiny
Signs cover the fence at a pro-Palestinian encampment at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill. on April 28, 2024. Photo: Max Herman via Reuters Connect.
Northwestern University on Monday touted its progress in addressing the campus antisemitism crisis, issuing a statement containing a checklist of policies it has enacted since being censured by federal lawmakers over its handling of pro-Hamas demonstrations which convulsed its campus during the 2023-2024 academic year.
“The university administration took this criticism to heart and spent much of last summer revising our rules and policies to make our university safe for all of our students, regardless of their religion, race, national origin, sexual orientation, or political viewpoint,” the statement said. “Among the updated policies is our Demonstration Policy, which includes new requirements and guidance on how, when, and where members of the community may protest or otherwise engage in expressive activity.”
The university added that it has adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, a reference tool which aids officials in determining what constitutes antisemitism, and begun holding “mandatory antisemitism training” sessions which “all students, faculty, and staff” must attend.
“This included a live training for all new students in September and a 17-minute training module for all enrolled students, produced in collaboration with the Jewish United Fund,” it continued. “Antisemitism trainings will continue as a permanent part of our broader training in civil rights and Title IX.”
Other initiatives rolled out by the university include an Advisory Council to the President on Jewish Life, dinners for Jewish students hosted by administrative officials, and educational events which raise awareness of rising antisemitism in the US and across the world. Additionally, Northwestern said that it imposed disciplinary sanctions against several students and one staff member whose conduct violated the new “Demonstration and/or Display Policies” which regulate peaceful assembly on the campus.
“In closing, although Northwestern has made significant progress in the fight against antisemitism on campus, the university remains vigilant and will continue to do what is necessary to make our campus safe,” the statement concluded. “Importantly, the fight against antisemitism is NOT [sic] a zero-sum game. All members of our communities on campus — all religions, races, national origins, genders, sexual orientations, and political viewpoints — deserve to feel safe and know that our rules will be enforced to protect them against hate, discrimination, harassment, and intimidation. Northwestern is committed to this principle.”
As previously reported by The Algemeiner, Northwestern University struggled for months to correct an impression that it coddled pro-Hamas protesters and acceded to their demands for a boycott of Israel in exchange for an end to their May 2024 encampment.
University president Schill denied during a US congressional hearing held that year that he had capitulated to any demand that fostered a hostile environment, but his critics noted that part of the deal to end the encampment stipulated his establishing a scholarship for Palestinian undergraduates, contacting potential employers of students who caused recent campus disruptions to insist on their being hired, creating a segregated dormitory hall that will be occupied exclusively by students of Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) and Muslim descent, and forming a new advisory committee in which anti-Zionists students and faculty may wield an outsized voice.
The status of those concessions, which a law firm representing the civil rights advocacy group StandWithUs described as “outrageous” in July 2024, were not disclosed in Monday’s statement.
Northwestern University is not the only school creating distance between itself and the anti-Zionist movement, a step many colleges have taken in response to US President Donald Trump’s vowing to cut the flow of taxpayer funds supplementing their budgets should they refuse to crackdown down on illegal protests and antisemitism. Following the Trump administration’s cancelling of over $400 million in federals contracts and grants awarded to Columbia University, former interim president Katrina Armstrong proposed a list of reforms the school would agree to undertake — in areas ranging from undergraduate admissions to campus security — to restore the funds.
Armstrong later resigned from her position, saying in a statement which explained the decision that she wishes to return to her role as executive director of the university’s Irving Medical Center, as well as several other positions she holds.
Meanwhile, Harvard University recently fired a librarian whom someone filmed ripping posters of the Bibas children, two babies murdered in captivity by Hamas, off a kiosk in Harvard Yard and denounced him as “hateful.” Additionally, it paused a partnership with a higher education institution located in the West Bank, a move for which prominent members of the Harvard community and federal lawmakers had clamored in a series of public statements. The Trump administration initiated a review of $9 billion in taxpayer funds it receives anyway, prompting interim president Alan Garber to defend Harvard’s handling of the issue.
“For the past fifteen months, we have devoted considerable effort to addressing antisemitism,” Garber said. “We have strengthened our rules and our approach to disciplining those who violate them. We have enhanced training and education on antisemitism across our campus and introduced measures to support our Jewish community and ensure student safety and security.”
Northwestern University is in the Trump administration’s crosshairs too. It is one of 60 universities being investigated by the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights over its handling of campus antisemitism, a project that will serve as an early test of the administration’s ability to perform the essential functions of the agency after downsizing its workforce to increase its efficiency.
“The department is deeply disappointed that Jewish students studying on elite US campuses continue to fear for their safety amid the relentless antisemitic eruptions that have severely disrupted campus life for more than a year,” Education Secretary Linda McMahon said in March. “US colleges and universities benefit from enormous public investments funded by US taxpayers. That support is a privilege, and it is contingent on scrupulous adherence to federal antidiscrimination laws.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
The post Northwestern University Touts Progress on Addressing Campus Antisemitism Amid Federal Scrutiny first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Pressure Mounts on UN Members to Block Reappointment of Controversial Anti-Israel Official
Francesca Albanese, UN special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories, attends a side event during the Human Rights Council at the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland, March 26, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Denis Balibouse
The United Nations is facing growing pressure to block the reappointment of Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese, who has an extensive history of using her role to denigrate Israel and seemingly rationalize the terrorist group Hamas’s attacks against the Jewish state.
The UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) is set to reappoint Albanese for another three-year term on Friday, despite calls from several countries and NGOs urging UN members to oppose her reappointment due to her controversial remarks and alleged pro-Hamas stance.
Since taking on the role of UN special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories in 2022, Albanese has been at the center of controversy due to what critics, including US and European lawmakers, have described as antisemitic and anti-Israel public remarks.
In the months following the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, atrocities, across southern Israel, Albanese accused Israel of perpetrating a “genocide” against the Palestinian people in revenge for the attacks and circulated a widely derided and heavily disputed report alleging that 186,000 people have been killed in Gaza as a result of Israeli actions.
She has also previously made comments about a “Jewish lobby” controlling America and Europe, compared Israel to Nazi Germany, and stated that Hamas’s violence against Israelis — including rape, murder, and kidnapping — needs to be “put in context.”
Last year, the United Nations launched a probe into Albanese for allegedly accepting a trip to Australia funded by pro-Hamas organizations.
In the past, she has also celebrated the anti-Israel protesters rampaging across US college campuses, saying they represent a “revolution” and that they give her “hope.”
On Monday, US Rep. Brian Mast, chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, sent a letter to the president of the UNHRC, Ambassador Jürg Lauber, to express his strong opposition to Albanese’s reappointment.
In the letter, Mast claimed that Albanese has failed to act “in an independent capacity with a professional, impartial assessment, and maintain the highest standards of efficiency, competence, and integrity.”
“Ms. Albanese unapologetically uses her position as a UN special rapporteur to purvey and attempt to legitimize antisemitic tropes, while serving as a Hamas apologist,” the letter read.
“In her malicious fixation, she has even called for Israel to be removed from the United Nations while likening Israel to apartheid South Africa,” Mast wrote in a letter signed by six fellow lawmakers. “Regrettably, Ms. Albanese’s rhetoric has perverted the very institution and its foundational principles in which she was appointed to serve.”
Governments worldwide, including France, the UK, Germany, Canada, and the Netherlands, have condemned her statements as antisemitic and urged that she not be given another term in her role.
Last month, 42 members of the French Parliament publicly urged the government to oppose Albanese’s reappointment, arguing that it “would send a regrettable signal to victims, human rights defenders, and states committed to credible multilateralism.”
This week, British Labour Member of Parliament David Taylor also objected to Albanese’s reappointment, saying “there is no place for such alleged antisemitism on the international stage.”
“Albanese’s response to the largest antisemitic massacre of the 21st century was to describe it as ‘a response to Israel’s oppression,’” Taylor told the Jewish Chronicle. “She described Israel as being a ‘settler colonial conquest.’”
“Making statements of this nature in a UN capacity is abhorrent and does so much damage to communities already torn apart by horrific violence, going against everything the United Nations stands for,” Taylor said.
Human rights groups and NGOs have also campaigned to prevent the anti-Israel rapporteur from receiving a second term.
UN Watch, a Geneva-based NGO, has organized a petition against her reappointment, which has garnered over 83,000 signatures.
Last month, Maram Stern, executive vice president of the World Jewish Congress, sent a letter to the president of the UNHRC urging him to reject the renewal of Albanese’s mandate, citing what she described as the UN official’s history of anti-Israel animus and antisemitic statements.
“Ms. Albanese has repeatedly made public remarks that propagate harmful antisemitic tropes, question the legitimacy of the State of Israel, and employ rhetoric that undermines the credibility of the Human Rights Council itself,” the letter read. “Her persistent lack of objectivity and failure to uphold a balanced and impartial approach required of her as special rapporteur compromises her credibility as an independent expert.”
The American Jewish Committee (AJC) also urged UN Members to reject Albanese’s second term, saying she “has systematically demonstrated a troubling pattern of conduct and expression that is incompatible with the responsibilities, neutrality, and integrity expected of a UN special rapporteur.”
“Her actions not only betray the victims of terrorism and antisemitism but also are a stain on the credibility of the Human Rights Council itself,” the AJC wrote in a letter.
The post Pressure Mounts on UN Members to Block Reappointment of Controversial Anti-Israel Official first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Three Jewish Coaches Lead Teams in NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament Final Four
Florida Gators head coach Todd Golden and Auburn Tigers head coach Bruce Pearl talk before the game as Auburn Tigers take on Florida Gators at Neville Arena in Auburn, Ala., on Saturday, Feb. 8, 2025. Photo: USA TODAY NETWORK via Reuters Connect
The men’s 2025 NCAA Tournament Final Four bracket includes four No. 1 seed teams, three of which have Jewish coaches who will lead the way in the two national semifinals taking place on Saturday.
Auburn University Tigers head coach Bruce Pearl has contributed Auburn’s success in the NCAA in part to God and his Jewish faith. He described Israel as the “ancestral homeland for the Jewish people” and called for the release of American-Israeli Edan Alexander from Hamas captivity at a post-game conference last month. He also took the Auburn team on a trip to Israel, where they made stops at the Western Wall and Yad Vashem – The World Holocaust Remembrance Center.
The Tigers will compete on Saturday in the NCAA Tournament Final Four against the Florida Gators whose Jewish coach, Todd Golden, is an Israeli citizen who previously played two years professionally for Maccabi Haifa in Israel.
In 2009, Golden was co-captain of the USA Open Team, coached by Pearl, that won gold at the Maccabiah Games, which is an international multi-sport event for Jewish and Israeli athletes. Golden has been the coach of the Tigers for two seasons, but prior to that he was the assistant coach at Columbia, the head coach at San Francisco, and even worked under Pearl. Golden was director of basketball operations for the Auburn staff for the 2014-15 season and was promoted to assistant coach for the 2015-16 campaign.
Duke and Houston also play each other on Saturday in the Final Four. The head coach of the Duke Blue Devils, Jon Scheyer, also formerly played in Israel and holds Israeli citizenship. He played professionally for Maccabi Tel Aviv from 2011-12. In October 2023, not long after the start of the Israel-Hamas war, Scheyer commented on the conflict and said in part: “My heart breaks for the people in Israel — that have hostages, American lives that are taken, mourning loved ones.” Scheyer is leading Duke to the Final Four in only his third year as head coach.
The Houston Cougars – the fourth men’s team competing in the Final Four – do not have a Jewish coach, but they have a player who was born in Israel and played for Israel’s national youth squad. Guard Emanuel Sharp, who is the son of Derrick Sharp, was part of Israel’s under-16 national basketball team and also played for Maccabi Tel Aviv for over a decade.
This year’s Final Four have a combined record of 135-16. Since seeding began in 1979, this is only the second time in history that all four No. 1 seeds advanced to the Final Four. It previously happened in 2008. Larry Brown was the last Jewish coach to win the NCAA Tournament when he led Kansas to the victory in 1988.
The 2025 NCAA Tournament Final Four begins on Saturday, with two national semifinals taking place at the Alamodome in San Antonio, and ends on Monday with the national championship.
The post Three Jewish Coaches Lead Teams in NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament Final Four first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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