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Several Holocaust books, including ‘Maus,’ have been yanked from some Missouri schools amid state law
(JTA) – Art Spiegelman’s “Maus,” along with six books about the Holocaust geared toward young readers, are among the hundreds of books that a handful of school districts in Missouri have reportedly removed from their shelves since the start of this school year.
The list of books pulled from shelves was published Wednesday by the literary free-expression advocacy group PEN America, along with a letter of protest signed by Spiegelman and other authors.
“This is what happens when we are operating in a climate of fear,” Jonathan Friedman, PEN America’s director of free expression and education programs, told reporters in a virtual press conference Wednesday sharing the findings.
The books were pulled owing to an amendment to a new Missouri state law, largely dealing with child trafficking and sexual abuse, that also establishes a criminal penalty for providing “explicit sexual material” to students. The law orders possible jail time for any educators found to be in violation.
Politically motivated school book bans are on the rise nationally, often prompted by right-wing parent groups and school board members, with the majority of such bans targeting books with racial and LGBTQ themes. They have attracted increased attention from Jewish groups as books about Judaism and the Holocaust have been caught up in the purges. A Tennessee school district’s removal of “Maus” from its Holocaust curriculum and a Texas school district’s brief removal of a graphic novel adaptation of Anne Frank’s diary were both heavily opposed by Jewish groups earlier this year.
This time, Spiegelman’s “Maus” was banned from two different school districts: Wentzville School District and Ritenour School District, both in the St. Louis area. The Wentzville ban is categorized by PEN America as “banned pending investigation,” while Ritenour’s is categorized as “banned from libraries.”
The vast majority of the affected books originated from one school district: Wentzville, a St. Louis exurb that the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported had ordered its librarians to pull more than 200 books off its shelves at the start of the semester and place them under review.
Included in the Wentzville purge was “Maus” and several Holocaust history books published for young readers by ReferencePoint Press: “Holocaust Camps and Killing Centers,” “Holocaust Rescue and Liberation” and “Holocaust Resistance” by Craig Blohm; “Hitler’s Final Solution” by John Allen; and “LIfe in a Nazi Concentration Camp” by Don Nardo. A Time-Life history book on the Holocaust, “Apparatus of Death — The Third Reich” by Thomas Flaherty, was also banned.
Further books banned by Wentzville included “Good Talk: A Memoir in Conversations” by Mira Jacob, which relays discussions with the author’s Jewish husband and biracial son about Jews and politics, and several books about photographers and artists with Jewish heritage, including André Kertész, Alfred Stieglitz, Man Ray, Irving Penn, Marc Chagall and Amedeo Modigliani.
In addition, Lindbergh Schools in St. Louis banned “A Dangerous Woman,” a graphic biography of Jewish socialist radical Emma Goldman by Jewish writer and artist Sharon Rudahl. And Kirkwood School District in a St. Louis suburb banned “Women,” a photography book by Jewish photographer Annie Leibovitz with text by famed Jewish writer Susan Sontag, as well as another book by Leibovitz; and “Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation,” an essay collection edited by LGBTQ Jewish writers Kate Bornstein and S. Bear Bergman.
The text of the noteworthy amendment to Missouri S.B. 775 reads: “A person commits the offense of providing explicit sexual material to a student if such person is affiliated with a public or private elementary or secondary school in an official capacity and, knowing of its content and character, such person provides, assigns, supplies, distributes, loans, or coerces acceptance of or the approval of the providing of explicit sexual material to a student or possesses with the purpose of providing, assigning, supplying, distributing, loaning, or coercing acceptance of or the approval of the providing of explicit sexual material to a student.”
Because of the law’s wording, Friedman said, Missouri school districts — particularly Wentzville — were on guard for graphic novels and illustrated books that might contain objectionable images. The Holocaust books were earmarked by either parents or educators as “sexually explicit” for containing disturbing historical images, according to PEN America’s analysis.
“It’s those pictures, essentially, that we’re being told here are the reasons for these books not being on the shelves,” Friedman said.
The Wentzville, Ritenour and Kirkwood school districts did not return requests for comment from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. A Kirkwood representative previously told the Post-Dispatch, “The unfortunate reality of Senate Bill 775 is that, now in effect, it includes criminal penalties for individual educators. We are not willing to risk those potential consequences and will err on the side of caution on behalf of the individuals who serve our students.”
A spokesperson for Lindbergh Schools told JTA in a statement, “Lindbergh has taken necessary steps to ensure compliance with state law by carefully reviewing library and classroom resources, and removing items from student access if they contain visual images that meet the requirements set forth in SB 775.”
A group of students and the American Civil Liberties Union sued the Wentzville district this past spring over a different group of book bans, including Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye”; some of those books were restored to shelves after the lawsuit was filed.
If the books were indeed removed for pictures that were classified as sexually explicit, the Missouri bans would follow a similar pattern to that of the Tennessee and Texas school districts that removed “Maus” and the Anne Frank adaptation earlier this year. Parties in both districts had also objected to illustrated images in the books they said were sexually explicit.
The bans of the Jewish and Holocaust-themed books occurred alongside scores of other books that were not Jewish-themed, including a graphic novel adaptation of “1984”; Alan Moore’s “Watchmen”; the Children’s Bible; graphic novel adaptations of Shakespeare’s “Macbeth,” Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” and Lois Lowry’s “The Giver”; and how-to books about oil painting and watercolors.
Missouri’s governor signed a statewide Holocaust education mandate into law earlier this year.
“We’re grateful that Missouri as a state has made clear that it prioritizes Holocaust education,” Rori Picker Neiss, executive director at the Jewish Community Relations Council of St. Louis, told JTA. But, she added, “it does feel like banning these books does go against, while not the letter of the law, the spirit of the law.”
“Such overzealous book banning is going to do more harm than good. Book bans limit opportunities for students to see themselves in literature and to build empathy for experiences different from their own,” reads an open letter opposing the bans signed by Spiegelman and other authors including Lowry and Laurie Halse Anderson.
“Students in Missouri are having these educational opportunities denied.”
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The post Several Holocaust books, including ‘Maus,’ have been yanked from some Missouri schools amid state law appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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University of Michigan in Row Over Professor’s Endorsement of ‘Pro-Palestinian Student Activists’
The University of Michigan Union. Photo: Dominick Sokotoff/Sipa USA via Reuters Connect
The University of Michigan in Ann Arbor is a house divided after a professor used his commencement speech to praise pro-Hamas activists, dozens of whom participated in a destructive wave of protests that scarred Jewish students and prompted the intervention of the federal government.
“Sing for the pro-Palestinian student activists who have over these past two years opened our hearts to the injustice and inhumanity of Israel’s war in Gaza,” university faculty Senate chair Derek Peterson, whose governance position makes him one of the powerful people on campus, said on Saturday.
Hours later, university president Domenico Grasso denounced the remarks for having “deviated” from what Peterson had submitted for review before taking the stage. Expressing regret that Peterson had caused “pain … on a day devoted to celebration and accomplishment,” he stated that the Senate chair’s expressed views do not represent the institution’s, and, moreover, violated its commitment to neutrality on divisive political issues.
“Commencement is a time of celebration, recognition, and unity,” Grasso continued. “The chair’s remarks were expected to be congratulatory, not a platform for personal political expression. Introducing such commentary in this setting was inappropriate and did not align with the purpose of the occasion. In the coming weeks, I will work with university leadership to review and refine future commencement programming.”
The matter did not end there. Grasso’s statement rankled the school’s anti-Israel element, and within just over a day some 1,000 professors signed a petition demanding that Grasso retract his commentary and apologize not to any Jewish students who were outraged by the speech but rather to Peterson, whom they thanked “for his care and insight.” Firing off a litany of anti-Israel accusations confected by the Jewish state’s enemies, the petition concluded by turning the table: Grasso, it charged, had violated the university’s commitment to institutional neutrality.
“We can only conclude that there is nothing neutral about the institution’s supposed commitment to institutional neutrality,” the petition stated. “The institution’s supposed principles on diversity of thought and freedom of expression cease to operate when a faculty member expresses a ‘forbidden’ view.”
Peterson responded to this outpouring of support on campus by doubling down.
“It should not be controversial to have one’s ‘heart opened to the inhumanity and injustice of Israel’s war in Gaza,’ which is what I credited activists with doing,” Peterson told The Michigan Daily. “Having an open heart to other people’s suffering is a fundamental human virtue, and it is a quality that I hope we teach our students, whatever their political posture might be.”
For several years, spanning before and after Hamas’s Oct.7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel, The Algemeiner has reported daily on campus antisemitism incidents which involved identity-based physical assaults, verbal abuse, and others acts of discrimination.
Committed by the “pro-Palestinian student activists” whom Peterson extolled, they included spitting on Jewish students at the University of California, Berkeley while calling them “Jew”; gang assaults at Columbia University’s Butler Library; swastika graffiti; the desecration of Jewish religious symbols; and the expulsion of a sexual assault survivor from a victim support group over her support for Zionism. In another incident, a Cornell University student threatened to murder Jewish men, whom he called pigs, and to rape Jewish women, and perpetrate a mass shooting at the campus’ kosher dining hall.
Professors, while operating largely behind the curtain, assumed roles as purveyors of anti-Jewish content too. At Harvard University, a “Faculty for Palestine” group shared an antisemitic political cartoon which named Jews and Israel as enemies Black and Brown people. At Cornell, a professor said Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre, in which the group murdered children and pets while raping both women and men, as “exhilarating.”
On Tuesday, Alyza Lewin president of US affairs at the Combat Antisemitism Movement (CAM), told The Algemeiner that “the activists Derek Peterson endorsed are the same students responsible for normalizing a campus climate that equates with evil those who recognize Jewish peoplehood and the Jews’ ancestral connection to the Land of Israel.”
Lewin represents most of the Jewish community and its allies, many of whom have said in recent days that Peterson’s choosing commencement to proclaim solidarity with such a controversial and extremist political movement is indicative of a deeper problem in higher education.
“Protests on campus have repeatedly crossed the line: encampments, disrupted ceremonies, demonstrations at officials’ homes, clashes with police,” Nikki Haley, who previously served as governor of South Carolina and US ambassador to the United Nations, said in a statement on Tuesday. “The First Amendment must be protected, but it doesn’t absolve any one of consequences. Universities have deep culture problems they must address. If they don’t, they should face repercussions.”
Meanwhile, Ted Deutch, chief executive officer of the American Jewish Committee (AJC), said the “graduation is about more than commencement; it’s about campus culture.”
He continued, “Ensuring that moments like this and the broader campus environment reflect the university’s highest values require clear, consistent leadership from the university’s president and the Board of Regents, and I urge them to lead.”
Commencement speeches are a coveted theater for anti-Zionist activists searching for notoriety ahead of their transition to the real world. More often than not, the performances make them infamous, not least because pulling off the act requires deceiving the professors and administrators who approved their being conferred the high honor of addressing the graduating class.
Last year, New York University withheld the diploma of a Gallatin School of Individualized Study student who “lied” to the administration about the content of his commencement speech to conceal its claim that Israel is committing a genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, a falsehood parroted by both jihadist terrorist organizations and neo-Nazis. New York University promptly denounced the student.
Days later at George Washington University, one of its students, Cecilia Culver, not only uttered the same claim but added that her school’s hands are stained with “blood.”
George Washington University noted that Culver had been “dishonest” too and banned her from campus. The university also stripped Culver of her status as a “distinguished scholar.” Culver, whose misstep cost her a job Ernest & Young, is now suing the university for “defamation” and “retaliatory suppression of her protected expression.” The suit adds that her “professional reputation in the economics and policy community in Washington, D.C. and beyond … cannot be remedied.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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Tucker Carlson Praises JD Vance, Signals Increasingly Distant Relationship: ‘No One’s Seeking My Counsel’
Tucker Carlson speaks on first day of AmericaFest 2025 at the Phoenix Convention Center in Phoenix, Arizona, Dec. 18, 2025. Photo: Charles-McClintock Wilson/ZUMA Press Wire via Reuters Connect
Far-right commentator Tucker Carlson is signaling continued personal support for US Vice President JD Vance even as their differences over Israel and Iran come into sharper focus and questions arise about the current status of their relationship, a divide with implications for US national security policy and the future of Republican leadership.
In a new interview with The New York Times, Carlson reaffirmed his support for Vance, reinforcing a longstanding alignment and personal friendship between the two figures. But he also acknowledged that Vance is in a “tough spot” as part of an administration led by President Donald Trump that has taken decisive action, including military strikes, against Iran.
While praising Vance’s character, Carlson suggested that the vice president has been constrained by the limitations of his position. Nonetheless, the podcaster, former Fox News host, and outspoken anti-Israel voice speculated that Vance has tried to redirect the foreign policy objectives of the Trump administration in what he perceives as a more productive direction.
“I know him well and think so much of him as a person. And it is my guess that, based on his past behavior, that he’s doing everything he can to mitigate what he sees as the ill effects of [the Iran war]. But it’s kind of hard to call the shots when you’re vice president, because that’s not in the Constitution,” Carlson said.
Carlson, notably, did not indicate the last time he and the vice president spoke when asked, stoking speculation that the relationship between the two political power brokers has deteriorated.
“Oh, I don’t know. But I wouldn’t want to add to his problems at all,” said the online provocateur, who reportedly played a role in persuading Trump to name Vance as his running mate. “I would just say what’s obvious, which is that I’m hardly an adviser to this administration. And I think it’s also clear that Donald Trump makes these decisions.”
When Carlson was pressed to say the last time he spoke to Vance, he continued to avoid giving a direct answer.
“I don’t know. I mean, I would never characterize that,” he said. “I don’t want to cause him more problems. I would just say I’m not advising. No one’s seeking my counsel. I’m not trying to influence anything. I gave it my best shot. Didn’t work.”
While polling has shown Republicans overwhelmingly supportive of Trump’s military campaign against Iran, the tension between the Trump administration’s approach to Middle East and the Republican base is becoming increasingly central to inter-party discourse.
In the wake of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, many younger voters have, according to recent polling, expressed deep skepticism of US military operations abroad and support for certain traditional allies, especially Israel.
Vance rose politically in part on a more restrained foreign policy outlook, skeptical of overseas military engagement. Now, as vice president, he is tied to policies that emphasize confronting Iran’s regional aggression, including support for US actions aimed at degrading Tehran’s nuclear and ballistic missile capabilities and support for terrorist groups.
Carlson, by contrast, has intensified his criticism of such efforts, reflecting an isolationist strand of “America First” thinking that questions US involvement abroad. His rhetoric has raised alarm bells among many Republicans, including pro-Israel advocates, who argue that reducing pressure on Iran risks emboldening a regime that routinely chants “death to America, death to Israel” and has been, according to the US intelligence community, the world’s foremost state sponsor of terrorism for several years.
Carlson has gone further, however, to increase his criticisms of Israel in the two-and-a-half years following Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel. He has alarmed and mystified establishment conservatives by condemning Israel’s military operations in Gaza, accusing the Jewish state of committing “genocide,” and seemingly defending Hamas and Qatar, the terrorist group’s long-time backer. The podcaster has even suggested that Israel oppresses and murders Christians, despite the fact that they enjoy full equal rights and high levels of education in the Jewish state. At the same time, he has noticeably not criticized many Islamic countries for persecuting Christians, failing to acknowledge the oppression of Christians throughout much of Africa and the Middle East.
During the Times interview, Carlson chided US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, accusing the official of engaging in “nonstop treachery” against the vice president in service of advancing his own goals.
“There are people in the White House who want to hurt JD Vance and have wanted that since the very first day. They were bitter. They wanted Marco Rubio to be the choice as vice president,” Carlson said.
Republican leaders including Rubio have pushed back forcefully on the view that the US should take an isolationist approach to foreign policy, maintaining that a strong US posture is indispensable.
Against the backdrop of a shifting ideological landscape within the Republican Party, the Carlson-Vance relationship is becoming a defining lens on the party’s internal debate. Carlson’s personal backing offers Vance credibility with a key segment of the Republican base, but their policy divergence, particularly on Israel, places Vance at the center of a contentious debate regarding the GOP’s future posture toward the closest US ally in the Middle East.
Vance has refused to outright condemn Carlson and, on several occasions, has dismissed concerns about rising antisemitism on the political right, where many young voters have increasingly embraced unfounded conspiracy theories regarding the Jewish state.
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Boulder hostage-march firebombing suspect to plead guilty to state charges
(JTA) — The man charged with firebombing a Boulder, Colorado, march for Israeli hostages in 2025 will plead guilty to killing one person and attempting to kill others in the incident, according to documents filed in the case over the weekend.
Mohamed Sabry Soliman, who was arrested at the scene of the June 1, 2025, attack, is asking for his ex-wife and children to be able to remain in the United States as a condition of his guilty plea, according to the documents.
His ex-wife and five children, like him all Egyptian nationals who came to the United States in 2022 via Kuwait, were arrested by immigration authorities shortly after the attack. They were detained until Thursday, when they were released from a detention center in Texas, then briefly detained again on Saturday in Boulder and, their attorneys say, put onto a plane bound for Egypt before being freed once again. His ex-wife, whom he divorced in April, has not been charged with a crime and said she did not know about Soliman’s planned attack.
Soliman is reportedly pleading guilty to all state charges but still faces federal charges in relation to the attack, which he allegedly said he staged to “wanted to kill all Zionist people and wished they were all dead,” according to an earlier court filing. He has previously pleaded not guilty to the federal charges, for which prosecutors could seek the death penalty.
Thirteen people were physically injured in the attack, which took place on a pedestrian mall in downtown Boulder where supporters of the Israelis then held hostage in Gaza marched weekly. One, 82-year-old Karen Diamond, died weeks later of her injuries.
The post Boulder hostage-march firebombing suspect to plead guilty to state charges appeared first on The Forward.