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Anne Frank and ‘Night’ may soon be required reading in Texas public schools. Is that good for the Jews?
(JTA) — In the years since school libraries became a culture-war flashpoint, Texas has been one of the most active states to pull books from shelves in response to parental complaints — sometimes including versions of Anne Frank’s diary and other Jewish books.
Now, Texas is pursuing a new approach: requiring that Frank’s diary, and several other Jewish texts, be taught throughout the state.
The Texas state education board recently discussed draft legislation that would create the nation’s first-ever statewide K-12 required reading list for public schools. Among the roughly 300 texts on the list: Elie Wiesel’s Holocaust memoir “Night”; Lois Lowry’s young-reader Holocaust novel “Number the Stars”; George Washington’s letter to a Rhode Island synagogue in 1790, and Frank’s diary — the “original edition.”
Each of the works could become mandatory reading for Texas’s 5.5 million schoolchildren as soon as the 2030-31 school year, as the state’s conservative education leaders seek to reverse a nationwide decline in the number of books read or assigned in class while also constraining the texts that activist parents tend to object to. Instead of letting individual teachers put together reading lists that might include “divisive” or progressive content, Republicans in Texas are trying to nudge the curriculum toward a “classical education” said to draw on the Western canon.
Supporters said the list would help ensure every student is on the same page.
“We want to create an opportunity for a shared body of knowledge for all the students across the state of Texas,” Shannon Trejo, deputy commissioner of programs for the Texas Education Agency, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency about why the group undertook the list project.
While state lawmakers passed a law mandating at least one required book per grade, the board has decided to implement a full reading list. Trejo said the options had been whittled down from thousands of titles suggested in a statewide teachers survey. They were also cross-referenced with a variety of other sources, including books from “high-performing educational systems” in other states and reading lists from the high-IQ society Mensa.
“We’re trying to help students love reading again,” LJ Francis, a Republican member of the state school board who supports the list, said during the Jan. 28 meeting. “I personally think schools should be teaching more than what we have on this list.”
The proposal underscores a complicated moment for Jewish literature in Texas schools, where books about the Holocaust and Jewish history have recently been pulled from shelves amid parental complaints but are now poised to become required reading statewide. Jewish educators and free-speech advocates say the shift reflects both recognition of Holocaust education’s importance — and continuing tensions over who controls what students read and how those stories are taught.
The overall list largely centers the Western canon and deemphasizes modern works as well as most books about race and identity, although selections from Booker T. Washington, Frederick Douglass and other Black American authors made the cut. The Bible is also heavily represented, with selections from both the Old and New Testaments on the reading list.
The state’s Holocaust Remembrance Week education mandate means that Jews are one of the few ethnic groups whose stories are fairly well represented on the state’s required reading list. That doesn’t mean that Holocaust educators are unreservedly enthusiastic about the new approach.
“Obviously I’m pleased that they’re including quality Holocaust materials,” Deborah Lauter, executive director of TOLI, the Olga Lenkyel Institute for Holocaust Studies, told JTA. Lauter noted that many teachers trained by TOLI on how to teach the Holocaust in their classrooms — including in Texas — already rely on books that made the list.
But, Lauter said, teachers generally like to develop their own curricula to tailor to their classrooms. “Mandating certain books, I don’t know how teachers would feel about that,” she said.
Lauter also expressed concern about whether the state would be providing materials to help teachers decode the Holocaust texts for their students. Trejo told JTA that fell beyond the scope of the list and the statute.
“It is just the title that is going into the standards for the state of Texas,” Trejo said. “Beyond that, it would be up to publishers to look to, how can I support districts and teachers in teaching this title?”
To literacy activists in the state, the approach was concerning.
“This is censorship as well,” Laney Hawes, co-director of the Texas Freedom to Read Project, told JTA. The overall list, she said, reflects “a very narrow worldview,” and the large number of books on the list would make it difficult for educators to find time for additional texts of their own choosing in class.
At the same time, Hawes said, “there are some really worthwhile books on this list. ‘The Diary of Anne Frank’ is an incredible book.”
The Jewish titles, Trejo said, were selected with additional input from Holocaust museum experts, local rabbis and Jewish day schools in the state. They also sought input from the Texas Holocaust, Genocide, and Antisemitism Advisory Commission.
“We were invited to provide input regarding a few specific parts of these proposals,” Joy Nathan, the commission’s director, told JTA in an email.
She named “Blessed Is the Match,” a poem by the Hungarian-born poet and resistance fighter Hannah Senesh, as a reading that her commission recommended for the draft list. “We will continue these direct conversations throughout the process.”
At the state education board meeting, a last-minute amendment proposed by the board’s GOP treasurer sought to remove dozens of works from the list, including Senesh’s poem and Washington’s letter.
The amendment would replace those texts with a new crop of selections, including “Refugee,” a young-adult novel by Alan Gratz that partially follows a German Jewish World War II refugee; Biblical passages on Moses; Maurice Sendak’s “Where the Wild Things Are”; George Orwell’s “1984”; and a book about former Polish president Lech Walesa. The amendment also listed “Night” as required in two different grades.
The story of Moses, the board member said, made the amendment’s cut because “there are a lot of parallels between Moses leading the people out of Egypt and the American Revolution.” Debate on the topic dragged into the night, with board members arguing whether requiring Bible passages would violate the Establishment clause and which Biblical translation had superior literary merit.
Following the amendment, the board agreed to postpone a vote on the required books until April to give members time to review both lists. Another board member, pushing for greater racial diversity in the list, submitted his own titles for review as well.
Once voted on, the legislation would enter a public comment period prior to being formally adopted at a later meeting.
A long list of public commenters at the meeting opposed the law on various grounds, including that it was overly prescriptive, lacked proper balance between classical and modern literature, included more books than could realistically be taught, overly emphasized Christian texts over other religious works, and lacked racial and gender diversity. One teacher said that “Night” is traditionally taught at a different grade level than the law mandates.
Among those who testified against the policy was Rebecca Bendheim, a middle-school teacher at an Austin private school and author of young-adult novels about Jewish and LGBTQ identity. “I believe the list underestimates what Texas students can do,” Bendheim said.
A handful of commenters voiced support for the measure. Matthew McCormick, education director at the conservative Texas Public Policy Foundation, which backed the law, said that it covers “important historical eras such as the Great Depression and the Holocaust.”
He added, “By approving this reading list, the board has the opportunity to enact a generational change by ensuring that every public school student has a strong foundation in literacy and literature.”
At Wednesday’s meeting, the board also voted on new required civics training for teachers and new required vocabulary lists, which would be extracted from the required books.
The state’s embrace of Jewish curricula comes after one Texas school district recently pulled “The Devil’s Arithmetic,” another young-reader Holocaust novel, following a “DEI content” weeding process aided by artificial intelligence. A state law currently on the books in Texas places classroom restrictions on “instruction, diversity, equity and inclusion duties, and social transitioning.”
While Jewish texts are generously represented on Texas’s list, works by and about authors of other identities are not; the high school list, for example, features no Hispanic authors. An estimated 245,000 Jews live in Texas, or less than 1% of the population, according to Brandeis University demographics; Hispanics, by contrast, form 40% of the state population, more than the white share.
The state offered lists of approved Holocaust materials teachers may select from when marking Holocaust Remembrance Week last month. Those approved materials, provided by the Texas Holocaust, Genocide, and Antisemitism Advisory Commission, include many of the texts now required in the legislation.
The proposed legislation concerns activists in the state who oppose book bans and restrictions on students’ “right to read.” Hawes, a Fort Worth mother of four children in the state education system, first became an activist after her district removed the “Graphic Adaptation” of Frank’s diary from its shelves in 2022.
That district returned the book after public outcry. But other districts both in and outside of Texas followed suit by pulling the same edition, along with other Jewish books including “Maus” and “The Fixer,” over the last few years.
Seeing Frank’s diary on the state’s required reading list now, Hawes said, “feels weird to me.”
She noted that the draft legislation specifies that the “original edition” must be taught. The 2018 illustrated adaptation, which includes a passage of Frank discussing a same-sex attraction that had been excised from the original published edition, has been opposed by conservative parents across the country.
In a slideshow by the Texas Educational Agency that outlines the proposed requirements, Frank’s diary is portrayed as an “anchor” text for the 7th grade. “Blessed Is the Match,” an ode to self-sacrifice for a higher cause, and Washington’s letter, a landmark statement of religious tolerance, are listed as supplemental texts for the diary.
The goals of the unit, the agency states, are “factual accounts of Jewish resistance during the Holocaust” and “foundational American ideals of religious liberty and tolerance.”
The Biblical passages, the agency notes, are intended to fulfill a statewide requirement that school districts have “an enrichment curriculum that includes: religious literature, including the Hebrew Scriptures (Old Testament) and New Testament, and its impact on history and literature.” Christian activist groups within Texas, and several elected officials, have pushed for years to promote Evangelical Christian texts in public schools.
The inclusion of Washington’s letter, which assures the Newport congregation that Jews will find safe haven in the United States, also struck Hawes as suspicious. The list contains numerous texts promoting patriotism but does not include any material addressing ongoing antisemitism in America.
“This is making us think that George Washington solved antisemitism. And he didn’t,” she said.
Lauter said that if Texas’s policy of statewide Holocaust book requirements becomes a broader trend, she would welcome it — despite her concerns.
“I think it’s a positive. We support more Holocaust education in schools,” she said. “It’s certainly better than the opposite, which is banning books.”
The post Anne Frank and ‘Night’ may soon be required reading in Texas public schools. Is that good for the Jews? appeared first on The Forward.
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During WWII, a heroic Jewish lawyer warned against the dangers of a dual state — is it coming true in Trump’s America?
For five years after Adolf Hitler came to power, attorney Ernst Fraenkel did something almost unimaginable: He stood in German courtrooms defending anti-Nazi dissidents and trade unionists — and sometimes even won. Even more remarkable, Fraenkel was Jewish. The Nazis tolerated him only because he had served in the German army during World War I, a temporary shield he knew would not last. In 1938, after learning from a sympathetic official that he was on a Gestapo arrest list, he fled to the United States.
Three years later, Fraenkel published a book: The Dual State: A Contribution to the Theory of Dictatorship. Many assume that Nazi rule instantly swept aside all “normal” legal standards. Fraenkel showed otherwise. In the early years of the Third Reich, he wrote, Germany lived under two systems at once — a functioning legal order and a parallel, lawless realm of political power.
Lately, a number of legal scholars have been warning that the American legal system under Trump shows troubling similarities to the “dual state” Fraenkel described. They point to federal agents using lethal force against protesters, arrests and detentions of immigrants based on appearance or perceived foreignness, the exclusion of state and local law enforcement from federal investigations, and the use of the Justice Department to pursue Trump’s perceived enemies.
Trump’s massive air assault on Iran has brought more accusations that he has put himself above the law. Rep. Thomas Massie, a Kentucky Republican, called the strikes “acts of war unauthorized by Congress.”
America in 2026 is not Nazi Germany. But Fraenkel’s observations confront us with a question for our times: Can a democracy like ours drift toward a dual system of its own — one legal, one ruled by authoritarian prerogative — without fully realizing it?
A young German Jew, wounded in World War I, returns from fighting for the Kaiser, earns his law degree, becomes a rising figure in the anti-Nazi Social Democratic Party, defends trade unionists as counsel for a metalworkers union, continues representing dissidents after Hitler’s rise, and escapes with his life as the Nazis purge Jewish lawyers and Germany marches toward the Holocaust. It sounds like the outline of an epic film. But it was Ernst Fraenkel’s life.
It is striking that Fraenkel has not been recognized more widely for the hero he was. And it has taken his 1941 book on the legal structures of Nazi Germany — combined with Trump’s assaults on American democracy — for Fraenkel to receive the broader attention he deserves.
“When I first read about him, I thought it was astounding: Here was a Jewish Social Democratic lawyer representing political defendants effectively,” while at the same time anonymously writing anti-Hitler pamphlets, said Douglas G. Morris, a retired criminal defense lawyer for indigent clients and author of Legal Sabotage: Ernst Fraenkel in Hitler’s Germany.
After Hitler came to power, he quickly moved to purge the civil service of employees deemed disloyal or who were Jewish, including attorneys. But the Nazis granted exemptions for Jewish civil servants who had served in World War I — the Frontkämpferprivileg. Fraenkel hadn’t just served; he had been severely injured.
Even as the Nazis rounded up political opponents and sent them to early concentration camps like Dachau, pockets of resistance remained. As a Social Democrat and attorney, Fraenkel had contacts with dissidents and took many on as clients.
He understood something essential about the new regime: To protect his clients — and himself — he had to avoid provoking the Nazis or drawing the attention of the Gestapo. So he presented cases as if the normal legal system still existed — and in some ways it did. This required discipline, given his opposition to the regime. But the strategy worked. If he couldn’t win an acquittal, he could sometimes secure a light prison sentence.
At the same time, Fraenkel was secretly writing pamphlets for the anti-Nazi resistance. He wrote five in total, Morris told me in an interview, including “The Point of Illegal Work,” which argued that Germans should resist the regime through various means. He was also quietly drafting the manuscript that became The Dual State.
Fraenkel knew about the torture and punishments used in the camps. But as brutal as the Nazis were toward their enemies, the regime initially did not view attorneys — Jewish or otherwise — as a significant threat, according to Morris. That blind spot allowed Fraenkel not only to write anti-Nazi pamphlets but also to serve as a conduit for dissidents to exchange information.
From his courtroom experience, Fraenkel observed how the Nazis handled the pre-1933 legal system. They did not abolish it outright. Instead, they created a parallel system to dish out especially harsh punishments to those deemed in violation of the regime’s political edicts. Fraenkel called the pre-Nazi system the “normative state,” and the Nazi-controlled system the “prerogative state.” Thus, a dual state. The two systems were never equal, Morris notes: “The prerogative state — exercising its arbitrary power through intimidation and violence — always maintained control.”
On Sept. 20, 1938, Fraenkel received a warning that he was about to be arrested. He fled Germany, traveling to London, then New York, and finally Chicago. A French diplomat had smuggled his manuscript out of Germany. After arriving in the U.S., Fraenkel earned a law degree from the University of Chicago and published The Dual State. He returned to Germany in 1951, became a professor at the Freie Universität Berlin, and died in 1975.
A growing number of legal analysts argue that the United States is developing its own version of a dual state — one that persecutes, demonizes or sidelines those who oppose MAGA ideology or threaten the fantasies of white-superiority advocates.
On his first day in office, Trump issued a mass pardon to some 1,500 insurrectionists who had stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 to try to keep Trump in power despite his election loss. During the following months Trump granted clemency to 100 more convicted criminals, who included prominent business figures, high-profile MAGA supporters, and allies connected to Trump’s political and fundraising networks.
Masked and dressed for combat, ICE and CBP now act like the muscle for a parallel legal state — imprisoning foreigners whose only offense is entering the country illegally, dragging people from their homes in front of their children, and assaulting citizens who try to shield immigrants from unjustified arrest, killing two so far. The administration’s arbitrary decree that immigration agents no longer need judge-signed warrants to force their way into homes is another expression of what Fraenkel called the prerogative state.
Trump’s perceived and real political foes are being swept into a legal system built for his benefit, targeted by a Justice Department that now functions as an instrument of presidential power. In Trump’s America, Democrats, non-MAGA members of the press, and anyone who disagrees with him are denounced as mortal threats to the nation. Administration officials deemed insufficiently loyal are purged from their jobs.
This parallel system is colliding with legal traditions dating to the country’s founding, and courts have so far slowed the slide into full autocracy with rulings blocking Trump’s most aggressive edicts. Trump responds by attacking the judges who rule against him.
The Supreme Court dealt a significant blow to Trump’s parallel legal system when it struck down his tariffs. But this is the same court that nearly two years ago granted presidents broad immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts.
Fraenkel showed how a democracy can lose its bearings long before it loses its laws. As the United States nears its 250th year, the question is no longer whether a dual state can take root here. It is whether we will recognize it in time.
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Behind Ronnie Eldridge’s sweet, motherly face, one of the toughest political minds in NYC
When news arrived that Ronnie Eldridge had passed away at the age of 95, I thought back to the mid-1980’s when I made a number of visits to the apartment on Central Park West that she shared with the legendary newspaper columnist Jimmy Breslin and their blended family of six kids. At the time I was doing stories for NPR about Breslin and his passionated denunciation of municipal authorities for their neglect of city’s homeless. Sometimes I’d record Breslin at home.
I couldn’t help noticing that almost every time I was in that apartment, Eldridge was on the phone with an autistic Jewish man named Ralph. I tend to notice things like that because my brother Michael, olav ha sholom, was autistic.
According to Daniel Eldridge, the eldest of the three Eldridge “kids,” his mother met Ralph at a Robert F. Kennedy presidential campaign event in 1968. Apparently, a campaign volunteer who was manning the door was giving Ralph a hard time.
Ronnie Eldridge intervened and declared that Ralph, who she had never met before, was her friend and he was to be allowed in. Daniel Eldridge told me his mother spoke with Ralph nearly every day after that.
Because my conversation with Daniel Eldridge was conducted on speakerphone, Eldridge’s granddaughter, Sophie Silberman, piped up.
“She looked after everybody with kindness and devotion,” Silberman said. “She knew that she was significant to Ralph and it didn’t take much to keep that part of his life alive and it meant the world to Ralph.”
Big shoes to fill
That kindness and devotion echoed in several recollections of Eldridge’s public life today.
Ruth Messinger, a former city council member who went on to lead the American Jewish World Service, told me that Eldridge “was very savvy.”
“She was a no-nonsense person,” Messinger said. “If there was an issue, if there was a problem, she would take it on. She was a seriously progressive presence for many, many years. She pursued the issues and stood up for justice.”
“She was just an institution all by herself,” said her successor in the New York City Council, Gale Brewer.
Eldridge represented an Upper West Side district in the Council for 12 years before being term-limited out of office. “Her shoes were very big shoes to fill,” Brewer said.
Eldridge was one of the sponsors of a 1992 law that required cameras be placed in facilities that house automated teller machines. She was motivated to win passage, having been held up using an ATM in her neighborhood.
Brewer is one of many public officials and activists who are remembering Eldridge’s advocacy on behalf of the most vulnerable members of society, including the LGBTQ community and women who have been abused by their spouses or boyfriends. She remembers Eldridge visiting incarcerated women who were doing time for crimes linked to their experience as battered women.
“She put that issue on the map,” Brewer told me.
The conscience of the Lindsay administration
Eldridge was one of the anti-war activists in the 1960’s who made mountains move on the national level. During the war in Vietnam she helped found the “Dump Johnson” movement, which in turn sparked President Lyndon Johnson’s decision to forego re-election in 1968. That prompted Robert F. Kennedy to enter the race. Eldridge was keen on RFK. She was a young mother in 1964 when she volunteered his campaign for the U.S. Senate.
During the ’68 presidential campaign, RFK said of Eldridge, “Behind that sweet, motherly face, Ronnie Eldridge has one of the toughest political minds in the city, if not the country.” She used the quote on a campaign poster for her unsuccessful bid to become Manhattan Borough President in 1977.
Eldridge’s activism also paid dividends on the local level. She served as the coordinator of Democrats for Lindsay and helped the Republican mayor win re-election in 1969 on the Liberal Party line. She was a political strategist for Lindsay and was known as the conscience of the Lindsay administration.
Around that time, she was part of a group that included the singer Harry Belafonte challenging the license of television station WPIX. The challenge dragged on for nine years but in 1978 an out of court settlement put about $10 million into the entity that challenged the license. I learned about all this when I asked Eldridge how she came to possess that very valuable Central Park West apartment.
A tabloid life
A number of Eldridge’s close friends have remarked that being married to Jimmy Breslin may’ve come with some perks, it must’ve been a challenge as well. For those of us who read Breslin religiously in the New York Daily News and New York Newsday, some of the gruff newspaper columnist’s more entertaining columns chronicled the foibles of the interfaith family’s Upper West Side life together.
This shtick inspired a pilot for a 1989 CBS sitcom about a NYC newspaper columnist and a mayoral aide. American Nuclear was co-written by Breslin but the network ultimately decided not to pick up the series.
In a 2004 for a radio documentary interview about her husband, I asked Ronnie Eldridge about having her domestic life portrayed in a tabloid
“The first time it happened everybody was hysterical,” she said. “I had a daughter in Paris. She called from Paris and was in tears. A daughter at college, she was also in tears. And my son in California said, ‘What’s going on?’ And then Jimmy’s family said, ‘Oh, just don’t pay any attention to it.’”
“When I was in the city council, I would just pretend that I didn’t read the paper. He would write articles. condemning and attacking colleagues of mine. I’d have to go into the city council and, see somebody that he’d just called unmentionable names. So, I just learned to leave it alone.”
A memorial service will be held for Ronnie Eldridge on Wednesday, March 11 at 4:30 p.m. at the New York Society for Ethical Culture, 2 West 64th Street in Manhattan.
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New Analysis Questions Legality of Campus BDS Efforts Against Israel
Cornell’s divestment protests continued during the university’s commencement ceremony, May 25, 2024, during which students interrupted a speech by President Martha Pollack with chanting and canvas signs. Photo: Reuters Connect
A newly released research paper is raising fresh legal questions about the wave of campus and institutional campaigns calling for divestment from Israel, arguing that such efforts may violate anti-discrimination laws in the United States.
The report, published by Northwestern Law School professor Max M. Schanzenbach and Harvard Law School professor Robert H. Sitkoff, examines the growing push by activists affiliated with the global boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement (BDS), which urges governments, universities, and companies to cut economic ties with Israel in the first step to the Jewish state’s eradication.
According to the paper, divestment campaigns that single out Israeli institutions or businesses could potentially run afoul of state and federal laws that prohibit discrimination based on national origin.
BDS advocates argue that their campaign is a form of political protest designed to pressure Israel to change its policies. The movement, formally launched by anti-Israel activists in the mid-2000s, has called for boycotts of Israeli goods, divestment from companies linked to Israel, and government sanctions.
But the new analysis contends that when governments or public institutions adopt such policies, the underlying legality could be questionable. The authors argue that targeting Israel specifically for economic exclusion could conflict with existing anti-discrimination statutes or state laws aimed at preventing boycotts of Israel.
More than half of US states have enacted legislation limiting participation in BDS-related boycotts or requiring government contractors to certify that they are not boycotting Israel. In some states, including California, laws restrict the awarding of public contracts or funding to organizations that participate in boycotts targeting the country.
The paper also challenges the argument frequently made by BDS supporters that such boycotts are protected under the First Amendment to the US Constitution. While individuals may advocate for boycotts as political speech, the authors argue that institutional policies, particularly those adopted by government bodies or public universities, could still violate anti-discrimination or procurement laws depending on how they are implemented.
The paper raises potential anti-discrimination concerns surrounding divestment campaigns that target Israeli companies. The authors argue that some boycott or divestment proposals could expose universities or public institutions to legal vulnerability if investment decisions are based primarily on a company’s Israeli national origin rather than specific conduct. Under certain US civil rights laws and state policies governing public institutions, actions that single out individuals or entities because of national origin may trigger discrimination claims. The paper suggests that if divestment policies are framed broadly against Israeli businesses as a category, rather than tied to particular corporate activities, institutions implementing them could face legal challenges alleging unequal treatment.
The analysis argues that modern divestment campaigns targeting Israel differ significantly from the anti-apartheid divestment movement against South Africa. The paper contends that while many universities in the 1980s adopted selective restrictions on companies directly tied to South Africa’s apartheid system, often aligned with international sanctions and corporate conduct codes, the current iteration of the BDS campaign against Israel frequently calls for broader exclusions based on a company’s ties to Israel itself, potentially creating legal risks such as national-origin discrimination issues.
Divestment campaigns have become especially prominent in recent years on US college campuses, where student groups have pushed universities to withdraw endowment investments from companies tied to Israel or its military. Critics, however, argue the campaigns unfairly single out the world’s only Jewish state and risk creating discriminatory policies against Israeli businesses or academics.
In the two years following the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, massacre of 1,200 people and kidnapping of 251 hostages throughout southern Israel, campus activists have intensified efforts to implement divestment policies on university campuses. While universities have mostly resisted these efforts, federal lawmakers have advanced legislation to truncate divestment initiatives before they gain traction. For instance, in 2024, Congress introduced “The Protect Economic Freedom Act,” which would render universities that participate in the BDS movement against Israel ineligible for federal funding under Title IV of the Higher Education Act, prohibiting them from receiving federal student aid. The bill would also mandate that colleges and universities submit evidence that they are not participating in commercial boycotts against the Jewish state.