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How Jewish comedy found religion, from Philip Roth to ‘Broad City’
(JTA) — In the 2020 comedy “Shiva Baby,” a 20-something young woman shows up at a house of Jewish mourners and gently offers her condolences. When she finds her mother in the kitchen, they chat about the funeral and the rugelach before the daughter asks, “Mom, who died?”
While “Shiva Baby” explores themes of sexuality and gender, the comedy almost never comes at the expense of Jewish tradition, which is treated seriously by its millennial writer and director Emma Seligman (born in 1995) even as the shiva-goers collide. It’s far cry from the acerbic way an author raised during the Depression like Philip Roth lampooned a Jewish wedding or a baby boomer like Jerry Seinfeld mocked a bris.
These generational differences are explored in Jenny Caplan’s new book, “Funny, You Don’t Look Funny: Judaism and Humor from the Silent Generation to Millennials.” A religion scholar, Caplan writes about the way North American Jewish comedy has evolved since World War II, with a focus on how humorists treat Judaism as a religion. Her subjects range from writers and filmmakers who came of age shortly after the war (who viewed Judaism as “a joke at best and an actual danger at worst”) to Generation X and millennials, whose Jewish comedy often recognizes “the power of community, the value of family tradition, and the way that religion can serve as a port in an emotional storm.”
“I see great value in zeroing in on the ways in which Jewish humorists have engaged Jewish practices and their own Jewishness,” Caplan writes. “It tells us something (or perhaps it tells us many somethings) about the relationship between Jews and humor that goes deeper than the mere coincidence that a certain humorist was born into a certain family.”
Caplan is the chair in Judaic Studies at the University of Cincinnati. She has a master’s of theological studies degree from Harvard Divinity School and earned a Ph.D. in religion from Syracuse University.
In a conversation last week, we spoke about the Jewishness of Jerry Seinfeld, efforts by young women comics to reclaim the “Jewish American Princess” label, and why she no longer shows Woody Allen movies in her classrooms.
Our conversation was edited for length and clarity
[Note: For the purpose of her book and our conversation, this is how Caplan isolates the generations: the Silent Generation (b. 1925-45), the baby boom (1946-65), Generation X (1966-79) and millennials (1980–95).]
Jewish Telegraphic Agency: Let me ask how you got into this topic.
Jenny Caplan: I grew up in a family where I was just sort of surrounded by this kind of material. My dad is a comedic actor and director who went to [Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey’s] Clown College. My degrees were more broadly in American religion, not Jewish studies, but I was really interested in the combination of American religion and popular culture. When I got to Syracuse and it came time to start thinking about my larger project and what I wanted to do, I proposed a dissertation on Jewish humor.
The key to your book is how Jewish humor reflects the Jewish identity and compulsions of four sequential generations. Let’s start with the Silent Generation, which is sandwiched between the generation whose men were old enough to fight in World War II and the baby boomers who were born just after the war.
The hallmark of the Silent Generation is that they were old enough to be aware of the war, but they were mostly too young to serve. Every time I told people what I was writing about, they would say Woody Allen or Philip Roth, two people of roughly the same generation.
In “Funny, You Don’t Look Funny: Judaism and Humor from the Silent Generation to Millennials,” Jenny Caplan explores how comics treated religion from the end of World War II to the 21st century. (Courtesy)
The Roth story you focus on is “Eli, the Fanatic” from 1959, about an assimilated Jewish suburb that is embarrassed and sort of freaks out when an Orthodox yeshiva, led by a Holocaust survivor, sets up in town.
Roth spent the first 20 to 30 years of his career dodging the claim of being a self-loathing Jew and bad for the Jews. But the actual social critique of “Eli, the Fanatic” is so sharp. It is about how American Jewish comfort comes at the expense of displaced persons from World War II and at the expense of those for whom Judaism is a real thriving, living religious practice.
That’s an example you offer when you write that the Silent Generation “may have found organized religion to be a dangerous force, but they nevertheless wanted to protect and preserve the Jewish people.” I think that would surprise people in regards to Roth, and maybe to some degree Woody Allen.
Yeah, it surprised me. They really did, I think, share that postwar Jewish sense of insecurity about ongoing Jewish continuity, and that there’s still an existential threat to the ongoing existence of Jews.
I hear that and I think of Woody Allen’s characters, atheists who are often on the lookout for antisemitism. But you don’t focus on Allen as the intellectual nebbish of the movies. You look at his satire of Jewish texts, like his very funny “Hassidic Tales, With a Guide to Their Interpretation by the Noted Scholar” from 1970, which appeared in The New Yorker. It’s a parody of Martin Buber’s “Tales of the Hasidim” and sentimental depictions of the shtetl, perhaps like “Fiddler on the Roof.” A reader might think he’s just mocking the tradition, but you think there’s something else going on.
He’s not mocking the tradition as much as he’s mocking a sort of consumerist approach to the tradition. There was this sort of very superficial attachment to Buber’s “Tales of the Hasidim.” Allen’s satire is not a critique of the traditions of Judaism, it’s a critique of the way that people latch onto things like the Kabbalah and these new English translations of Hasidic stories without any real depth of thought or intellect. Intellectual hypocrisy seems to be a common theme in his movies and in his writing. It’s really a critique of organized religion, and it’s a critique of institutions, and it’s a critique of the power of institutions. But it’s not a critique of the concept of religion.
The idea of making fun of the wise men and their gullible followers reminds me of the folk tales of Chelm, which feature rabbis and other Jewish leaders who use Jewish logic to come to illogical conclusions.
Yes.
You write that the baby boomers are sort of a transition between the Silent Generation and a later generation: They were the teenagers of the counterculture, and warned about the dangers of empty religion, but also came to consider religion and tradition as valuable. But before you get there, you have a 1977 “Saturday Night Live” skit in which a bris is performed in the back seat of a luxury car, and the rabbi who performs it is portrayed as what you call an absolute sellout.
Exactly. You know: Institutional religion is empty and it’s hollow, it’s dangerous and it’s seductive.
Jerry Seinfeld, born in 1954, is seen as an icon of Jewish humor, but to me is an example of someone who never depicts religion as a positive thing. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.)
“Seinfeld” is more a show about New York than it is necessarily a show about anything Jewish. The New York of Seinfeld is very similar to the New York of Woody Allen, peopled almost entirely by white, middle-class, attractive folks. It’s a sort of Upper West Side myopia.
But there’s the bris episode, aired in 1993, and written by Larry Charles. Unless you are really interested in the medium, you may not know much about Larry Charles, because he stays behind the camera. But he also goes on to do things like direct Bill Maher’s anti-religion documentary “Religulous,” and there’s a real strong case for him as having very negative feelings about organized religion which feels like a holdover from the Silent Generation. And so in that episode you have Kramer as the Larry Charles stand-in, just opining about the barbaric nature of the circumcision and trying to save this poor baby from being mutilated.
The few references to actual Judaism in “Seinfeld” are squirmy. I am thinking of the 1995 episode in which a buffoon of a rabbi blurts out Elaine’s secrets on a TV show. That was written by Larry David, another boomer, whose follow-up series, “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” is similarly known for its irreverence toward Judaism. But you say David can also surprise you with a kind of empathy for religion.
For the most part, he’s classic, old school, anti-organized religion. There’s the Palestinian Chicken episode where the Jews are rabidly protesting the existence of a Palestinian-run chicken restaurant near a Jewish deli, and where his friend Funkhouser won’t play golf on Shabbos until Larry gets permission by bribing the rabbi with the Palestinian chicken. There, rabbis are ridiculous and can be bought and religion is hollow and this is all terrible.
But then there’s this bat mitzvah montage where for one moment in the entire run of this show, Larry seems happy and in a healthy relationship and fulfilled and enjoying life.
That’s where he falls in love with Loretta Black during a bat mitzvah and imagines a happy future with her.
It’s so startling: It is the most human we ever see Larry over the run of the show, and I believe that was the season finale for the 2007 season. It was much more in line with what we’ve been seeing from a lot of younger comedians at that point, which was religion as an anchor in a good way — not to pull you down but to keep you grounded.
So for Generation X, as you write, Judaism serves “real, emotional, or psychological purpose for the practitioners.”
I wouldn’t actually call it respect but religion is an idea that’s not just something to be mocked and relegated to the dustbin. I’m not saying that Generation X is necessarily more religious, but they see real power and value in tradition and in certain kinds of family experiences. So, a huge amount of the humor can still come at the expense of your Jewish mother or your Jewish grandmother, but the family can also be the thing that is keeping you grounded, and frequently through some sort of religious ritual.
Who exemplifies that?
My favorite example is the 2009 Jonathan Tropper novel, “This Is Where I Leave You.” I’m so disappointed that the film adaptation of that sucked a lot of the Jewish identity out of the story, so let’s stick with the novel. In that book, where a family gathers for their father’s shiva, the characters are horrible people in a dysfunctional family writ large. They lie to each other. They backstab each other. But in scene where the protagonist Judd describes standing up on the bimah [in synagogue] to say Kaddish [the Mourner’s Prayer] after the death of his father, and the way he talks about this emotional catharsis that comes from saying the words and hearing the congregation say the words — it’s a startling moment of clarity in a book where these characters are otherwise just truly reprehensible.
Adam Sandler was born in 1966, the first year of Generation X, and his “Chanukah Song” seems like such a touchstone for his generation and the ones that follow. It’s not about religious Judaism, but in listing Jewish celebrities, it’s a statement of ethnic pride that Roth or Woody Allen couldn’t imagine.
It’s the reclamation of Jewish identity as something great and cool and fun and hip and wonderful and absolutely not to be ashamed of.
From left, Ilana Glazer, Abbi Jacobson and Seth Green in an episode of “Broad City” parodying Birthright Israel. (Screenshot from Comedy Central)
Which brings us to “Broad City,” which aired between 2014 and 2019. It’s about two 20-something Jewish women in New York who, in the case of Ilana Glazer’s character, anyway, are almost giddy about being Jewish and embrace it just as they embrace their sexuality: as just liberating. Ilana even upends the Jewish mother cliche by loving her mother to death.
That’s the episode with Ilana at her grandmother’s shiva, which also has the B plot where Ilana and her mother are shopping for underground illegal handbags. They spend most of the episode snarking at each other and fighting with each other and her mother’s a nag and Ilana is a bumbling idiot. But at the moment that the cops show up, and try to nab them for having all of these illegal knockoff handbags, the two of them are a team. They are an absolute unit of destructive force against these hapless police officers.
I think all of your examples of younger comics are women, who have always had fraught relationships with Jewish humor, both as practitioners and as the target of jokes. You write about “The JAP Battle” rap from “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,” which both leans into the stereotype of the Jewish-American Princess — spoiled, acquisitive, “hard as nails” — and tries to reclaim it without the misogyny.
Rachel Bloom’s character Rebecca in “Girlfriend” self-identifies as a JAP, but she doesn’t actually fit the category. It’s her mother, Naomi, who truly is the Philip Roth, “Marjorie Morningstar,” Herman Wouk model of a JAP. So Bloom is kind of using the term, but you can’t repurpose the term when the original is still there.
So as an alternative, I offer up a new term: the Modern Ashkenazi American Woman. It’s very New York, it’s very East Coast, it’s very particular to a type of upbringing and community that in the 1950s and ’60s would have been almost exclusively Conservative Jews, and then may have become a bit more Reform as we’ve gotten into the ’90s and 2000s. They went to the JCC. They probably went to Jewish summer camp.
But even that doesn’t even really speak to the American sense of what Jewish is anymore, because American Jews have become increasingly racially and culturally diverse.
There is also something that’s happening historically with Generation X, and that’s the distance from the two major Jewish events of the 20th century, which is the Holocaust and the creation of Israel.
The Silent Generation and baby boomers still had a lingering sense of existential dread — the sense that we’re not so far removed from an attempted total annihilation of Jews. Gen X and millennials are so far removed from the Holocaust that they don’t feel that same fear.
But the real battleground we’re seeing in contemporary American Judaism is about the relationship to Israel. For baby boomers and even for some older members of Gen X, there’s still a sense that you can criticize Israel, but at the end of the day, it’s your duty to ultimately support Israel’s right to exist. And I think millennials and Zoomers [Gen Z] are much more comfortable with the idea of Israel being illegitimate.
Have you seen that in comedy?
I certainly think you can see the leading edge of that in some millennial stuff. The “Jews on a Plane” episode of “Broad City” is an absolute excoriation of Birthright Israel, and does not seem particularly interested in softening its punches about the whole idea of Jews going to Israel. I think we can see a trend in that direction, where younger American Jewish comedians do not see that as punching down.
You’re teaching a class on Jewish humor. What do your undergraduates find funny? Now that Woody Allen is better known for having married his adoptive daughter and for the molestation allegations brought by another adoptive daughter, do they look at his classic films and ask, “Why are you teaching us this guy?”
For the first time I’m not including Woody Allen. I had shown “Crimes and Misdemeanors” for years because I think it’s his most theological film. I think it’s a great film. And then a couple years ago, I backed off, because some students were responding that it was hard to look at him with all the baggage. He’s still coming up in conversation because you can’t really talk about the people who came after him without talking about him, but for the first time I’m not having them actually watch or read any of his stuff.
They have found things funny that I didn’t expect them to, and they have not found things funny that I would have thought they would. They laughed their way through “Yidl mitn fidl,” the 1936 Yiddish musical starring Molly Picon. I also thought they’d enjoy the Marx Brothers’ “Duck Soup” and they did not laugh once. Some of that is the fact that Groucho’s delivery is just so fast.
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AIPAC defends $2.3M spend against ‘pro-Israel’ politician in NJ-11, where anti-Israel candidate is prevailing
(JTA) — If AIPAC has any regrets about pouring more than $2 million into opposing a candidate who calls himself pro-Israel — and is set to lose to an anti-Israel opponent — it isn’t saying so. In fact, the pro-Israel group’s affiliated super PAC suggests it would do it again.
“We are going to have a focus on stopping candidates who are detractors of Israel or who want to put conditions on aid,” Patrick Dorton, a spokesperson for the United Democracy Project, said in an interview.
The target of the UDP’s recent spending was Tom Malinowski, a former congressman running in a special election in New Jersey’s 11th Congressional District. Malinowski, who calls himself pro-Israel and has been endorsed by the liberal Zionist organization J Street, has said he’d be open to placing conditions on some U.S. aid to Israel.
AIPAC pummeled Malinowski with $2.3 million in negative ads — but not about Israel. Instead, the ads tarred him from a progressive angle — one emphasized his vote on a 2019 bill that included increased funding for ICE, the immigration enforcement agency.
By one measure, AIPAC’s spend could be seen as a success: The candidate it opposed, seen as a favorite, did not score an easy win on Election Day. But in another crucial way, the effort appears to have backfired by throwing open the door for Analilia Mejia, a progressive grassroots organization leader who is far more critical of Israel.
The race is too close to call, but Mejia, who was the national political director for Bernie Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign, is ahead by nearly 900 votes with 4,800 left to count. Tahesha Way, the former lieutenant governor of New Jersey who is thought to have been AIPAC’s preferred candidate, finished in a distant third.
Critics, including AIPAC supporters, have slammed AIPAC’s strategy in the race.
“They could not have gotten a worse result than what they got,” said Alan Steinberg, a journalist in New Jersey who was an EPA administrator under George Bush. “I’m a very pro-AIPAC person, very supportive of AIPAC, but this is one of the worst strategic errors that they could’ve ever made.”
The UDP got into the race because of Malinowski’s comments on U.S. aid to Israel at a time when a large number of Democrats, and some Republicans, were expressing new openness to attaching conditions to the aid as they sought to press Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to end the war in Gaza and adopt different policies in Israel and the West Bank.
Asked last fall about the possibility of conditioning or suspending aid to Israel, Malinowski told Jewish Insider that he “would make case-by-case judgments given what’s happening on the ground.” He said he would similarly make case-by-case judgments for any U.S. ally receiving aid.
“We had very serious concerns about Tom Malinowski, who clearly was open to conditioning aid to Israel,” Dorton said. “He knew that he had moved to what is not a pro-Israel position.”
Dorton indicated that the UDP would likely go after other candidates who have expressed openness or interest in conditioning aid. “Adding conditions to aid to Israel, and undermining the U.S. relationship, is a top priority for us in assessing candidates,” he said.
In New Jersey, the result could be elevating a politician whose stance on Israel is much harsher. Mejia has accused Israel of committing a genocide in Gaza and pledged not to take any AIPAC-funded trips to the country. She also began calling for a ceasefire in Gaza within weeks of Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel after tweeting on Oct. 10, “Every fiber of my being is horrified beyond words at what is furthering in Gaza. Yet again we see how oppression & dehumanization leads to despair & unthinkable destruction.”
Mejia’s campaign focused on affordability and she drew endorsements from progressives including Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ro Khanna. If she holds her lead, she will become the Democratic nominee for April’s special election to fill the House seat vacated by now-governor of New Jersey, Mikie Sherrill.
Steinberg said he thought that AIPAC “never took seriously the possibility of her winning in this primary,” and that Malinowski would be far more aligned with AIPAC on Israel.
“I don’t think Malinowski is anti-Israel,” said Steinberg. “I know Tom, I disagree with him on Israel, but he is much preferable to Analilia Mejia. Much preferable.”
Jeremy Ben-Ami, the president of J Street, which endorsed Malinowski, wrote in a Substack column that AIPAC was responding to criticism of the Israeli government’s policies as if it were hostility toward the country itself.
“AIPAC now treats even good-faith criticism from friends as a threat to be crushed,” he wrote.
Dorton downplayed the impact of a Mejia primary victory because the upcoming special election decides only which candidate fills the seat until the end of 2026. A second primary, held in June 2026, will decide the Democratic nominee for the regular November election.
But others are viewing her potential win as a larger victory for progressives, and specifically the pro-Palestinian movement.
“Analilia Mejia for New Jersey just set a new precedent in NJ and beyond,” wrote pro-Palestinian activist Linda Sarsour in a Facebook post on Monday featuring a photo of Mejia raising her hand as the lone candidate indicating that she believed Israel committed genocide, at a forum hosted by the Council on American-Islamic Relations. “She’s teaching us that it’s okay to stand alone so as [sic] long as you are on the right side of history.”
The UDP has spent millions on congressional races to mixed results since AIPAC began directly funding candidates in 2021; it had previously worked only to cultivate support for Israel among politicians. In 2024, it spent at least $14.5 million against the incumbent “Squad” member Jamaal Bowman in New York, and more than $8 million to take down Cori Bush in Missouri; both incumbents lost their primaries. But the $4.5 million it spent was not enough to beat Dave Min for Katie Porter’s House seat in California.
Now, the upcoming midterms will likely serve as a test of AIPAC’s strength as lawmakers and voters on both sides of the aisle distance themselves from Israel and its advocates. They will also answer the question of what dividends AIPAC — whose PAC opened the year with a nearly $100 million war chest — will draw if it focuses on punishing candidates who show insufficient support for Israel.
Dorton said he is not concerned. The UDP is looking ahead to the June midterm primaries and will “continue to run ads that move the needle” in primary races about issues that mostly don’t involve Israel, he said. He added that the group is assessing polling data and “candidate viability” for dozens of races around the country — including in NJ-11.
“There is a strong bipartisan pro-Israel majority in Congress,” Dorton said. “And we intend to keep it that way.”
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Oklahoma board denies proposal for Jewish charter school — and lawyers up ahead of expected legal battle
(JTA) — A Jewish group is preparing to sue to overturn a ban on publicly funded religious charter schools in Oklahoma, after a state board unanimously rejected its proposal on Monday.
The Oklahoma Statewide Charter School Board’s decision blocked an application from the National Ben Gamla Jewish Charter School Foundation to open a statewide virtual Jewish school serving grades K-12 beginning next school year.
Ben Gamla’s legal team, led by Becket, a prominent nonprofit religious liberty law firm, said the rejection violates the Constitution’s Free Exercise clause and announced plans to file suit in federal court. In a statement, Becket attorney Eric Baxter criticized Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond, who has argued that publicly funded religious charter schools are unconstitutional.
“Attorney General Drummond’s attack on religious schools contradicts the Constitution,” Baxter said. “His actions have hung a no-religious-need-apply sign on the state’s charter school program. We’ll soon ask a federal court to protect Ben Gamla’s freedom to serve Sooner families, a right that every other qualified charter school enjoys.”
A victory for Ben Gamla could redraw the line separating church and state, establishing the first school of its kind nationwide and opening the possibility for taxpayer-funded religious schools across the country.
Spearheaded by former Florida Democratic Rep. Peter Deutsch, the Ben Gamla proposal called for a blend of daily Jewish religious studies alongside secular coursework. Deutsch, who nearly two decades ago established a network of nonreligious “English-Hebrew” charter schools in Florida, has said he chose Oklahoma as a testing ground for what he views as a viable model of publicly funded religious education.
In a statement, Deutsch criticized the board’s decision.
“Parents across the Sooner State deserve more high-quality options for their children’s education, not fewer,” Deutsch said in a statement. “Yet Attorney General Drummond is robbing them of more choices by cutting schools like Ben Gamla out. We’re confident this exclusionary rule won’t stand for long.”
The rejection, delivered during the board’s monthly meeting, did not come as a surprise. The board’s 2023 approval of a similar application by a Christian group to establish St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School was ultimately overturned by the Oklahoma Supreme Court on constitutional grounds.
An attempt to challenge the state court decision at the federal level failed when the U.S. Supreme Court deadlocked on the case last year due to a recusal by Amy Coney Barrett, who has ties to the Catholic group.
Several board members cited the legal outcome in explaining their votes against Ben Gamla.
“I am troubled by the fact that our hands are tied by the state Supreme Court decision, but I think we have to honor it, and it’s a very clear directive,” board member Damon Gardenhire said at the meeting.
Board member David Rutkauskas said it was “very unfortunate” that the board was “bound” by the Oklahoma Supreme Court, adding that the decision was not because Ben Gamla is “not a good candidate or qualified.”
“If I could have voted for this school today without being bound, I would have voted yes,” Rutkauskas said. “I think it would be great for the Jewish community and the Jewish kids to have this option of a high quality school.”
Ahead of the board’s vote, during public comment, Jewish Oklahoma resident Dan Epstein argued that the “public should not be funding sectarian education.”
“My religious education was entirely private,” Epstein said. “My parents didn’t ask for anybody else to pay for it. They paid for it as part of dues to our congregation, and so I’m here today to express my opposition to the application of the Ben Gamla school.”
Epstein was not the only Jewish voice in Oklahoma to object to Ben Gamla.
Last month, the Tulsa Jewish Federation and several local Jewish leaders issued a joint statement in which they criticized Ben Gamla for failing to consult local Jewish leaders ahead of their application to open the school.
“We are deeply concerned that an external Jewish organization would pursue such an initiative in Oklahoma without first engaging in meaningful consultation with the established Oklahoma Jewish community,” the leaders wrote. “Had such a consultation occurred, the applicant would have been made aware that Oklahoma is already home to many Jewish educational opportunities.”
Oklahoma is home to fewer than 9,000 Jews, many of whom live in Tulsa.
During Monday’s deliberation, board member William Pearson cited opposition to the Ben Gamla proposal from Oklahoma Jewish congregations.
“My real concern is that I don’t see a grassroots effort from the Jewish community in the state of Oklahoma,” Pearson said. “Now maybe I’m wrong, but I haven’t seen it. What I have seen is the synagogues, both from Oklahoma City and Tulsa, come out in opposition to this, and I find that very interesting, that the Jewish community, the people that are involved daily in Jewish lifestyle, that they’re opposed to this.”
Immediately after voting to turn down Ben Gamla, the board approved hiring outside legal counsel in anticipation of a lawsuit.
“I can’t predict the future, but I would say, by all indicators, I would be shocked if there’s not a lawsuit filed by Friday,” board chair Brian Shellem said.
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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.”
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