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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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UCLA student government condemns campus Hillel for hosting former hostage
A campus event featuring freed Israeli hostage Omer Shem Tov drew the condemnation of UCLA’s student government on Tuesday. In an open letter, the UCLA Students Associated Council said that bringing Tov to speak to students “served to legitimize and normalize” atrocities in Gaza and Lebanon.
Shem Tov, 23, was kidnapped from the Nova music festival in Southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and held hostage in Gaza until his release in a prisoner exchange in February 2025. UCLA hosted him on April 14 for a Yom HaShoah event.
“While we affirm the humanity of all people impacted by violence, we reject the selective platforming of narratives that obscure the broader reality of ongoing state violence,” the student government letter wrote in the letter, which was addressed to the UCLA administration and UCLA Hillel among others. “Israel is currently continuing to carry out what has been widely identified by human rights advocates as a genocide in Gaza, while also expanding its illegal military campaign into Lebanon.
“In this context, elevating a single narrative, absent of critical political and humanitarian framing, serves to legitimize and normalize these ongoing atrocities.”
Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller, UCLA Hillel’s director emeritus, called the statement “completely ridiculous.”
“You can’t present the narrative of your experience without it being called ‘one sided,’” Seidler-Feller said. “There has to be a counter-story to persecution. Is there a counter-story to killing people?”
UCLA Hillel executive director Daniel Gold dismissed the criticism in Tuesday’s letter as antisemitic.
“Hillel at UCLA and Students Supporting Israel UCLA would like to apologize…for absolutely nothing,” he wrote in a statement. “Members of UCLA student government have once again shown they are anti-dialogue, anti-learning, anti-truth, anti-student and antisemitic.”
The USAC did not respond to a request for comment.
As college campuses across the country became a hotspot for pro-Palestinian activism following the Oct. 7 attack, UCLA, with an activist history and a large Jewish population, stood out as a major flashpoint. Its student encampment was the site of a riot in April 2024 and eventually cleared by police in riot gear.
The USAC has sided with pro-Palestinian protesters throughout. In a Feb. 2025 letter titled “We Are All SJP,” the USAC, which is democratically elected by the roughly 30,000-member UCLA student body, condemned Chancellor Julio Frenk’s suspension of Students for Justice in Palestine. The letter referred to Israel only as “the Zionist state” or put the country’s name inside quotation marks.
The University of California has since been sued by the Department of Justice, which said that UCLA created a hostile work environment against Jewish and Israeli faculty in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.
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Trump extends ceasefire with Iran, even after Iran balks at new round of negotiations
(JTA) — President Donald Trump announced on Tuesday that he would unilaterally extend the U.S.-Israeli ceasefire with Iran, even though Iran had not agreed to his conditions or even to return to the negotiating table.
Trump announced the decision on Truth Social just hours before the two-week-old deal was set to expire. Citing Iran’s “fractured” leadership, Trump wrote that he had been asked by Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif to “hold our Attack on the Country of Iran until such time as their leaders and representatives can come up with a unified proposal.”
Vice President JD Vance’s planned trip to Islamabad, where talks were set to take place, was postponed indefinitely after Iran failed to confirm its participation in negotiations.
Trump added that the United States would maintain its naval blockade of Iranian ports in the Strait of Hormuz, despite Iran’s repeated calls for the restrictions to be lifted.
The announcement marked a sharp departure from the president’s statements earlier in the day, telling CNBC that, if a deal was not made before the deadline, “I expect to be bombing.”
In a statement Tuesday, Sharif thanked Trump for his “gracious acceptance” of Pakistan’s request to extend the ceasefire, adding that the country would “continue its earnest efforts for a negotiated settlement of the conflict.”
The announcement adds to uncertain about the war’s future, including for Israelis who lived through six weeks of Iranian bombing, and renews questions about Trump’s commitment to achieving his war goals, which have varied and included blunting Iran’s nuclear ambitions, achieving regime change, and destroying Iran’s stockpile of ballistic missiles. He said earlier this week that he was asking Iran to limit its nuclear program for 20 years, five years longer than was required by the deal struck by Barack Obama in 2015. Trump exited that deal in 2018.
Last week, Trump announced a different ceasefire, between Israel and Lebanon, on Truth Social, contradicting Israel’s claim that the Iran ceasefire would not apply to its fighting with Hezbollah, an Iran-backed proxy in Lebanon.
Trump’s announcement of the ceasefire extension came during the night in Israel, after Israelis began their celebration of Independence Day. It drew criticism from one of his staunchest pro-Israel supporters, the Zionist Organization of America, whose national president Morton Klein said in a statement that “interminable delay is the standard Islamic Iranian regime negotiating tactic” and that acceding to it represented a victory for Iran. The statement did not mention Trump.
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Alan Dershowitz quits Democratic Party, calling it ‘most anti-Israel party in U.S. history’
(JTA) — Alan Dershowitz, the prominent pro-Israel attorney whose clients have included Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein, announced on Monday that he was leaving the Democratic party and registering as a Republican.
Describing himself as a “lifelong Democrat,” Dershowitz wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed that he had decided to “bite the bullet and register as a Republican,” citing Democratic support for an arms embargo on Israel last week and the Michigan Senate candidate Abdul el-Sayed’s anti-Israel rhetoric.
“There is no denying that the hard left, anti-Israel wing of the Democratic Party has moved from the fringe to the mainstream,” Dershowitz wrote, adding that “Republicans have their own antisemitic fringe, but for now it remains a fringe.”
The announcement formalized a political evolution for Dershowitz, who defended Trump during his first impeachment and has increasingly broken with Democrats over Israel in recent years.
In 2021, Dershowitz nominated Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, and Avi Berkowitz, Trump’s top Middle Eastern envoy during his first administration, for the Nobel Peace Prize over their hand in shaping the Abraham Accords.
Dershowitz — who has recently faced scrutiny over his ties to Epstein, and previously denied allegations of sexual misconduct made by one of Epstein’s accusers — panned the Democratic Party as the “most anti-Israel party in U.S. history” in the op-ed.
“I believe that the Democratic Party’s hostility to Israel represents a deeper and more dangerous shift away from the center and toward a radical approach that is bad for America and the free world,” Dershowitz wrote, adding that he intended to “work hard to prevent the Democrats from gaining control of the House and Senate.”
Dershowitz’s comments are in line with Trump’s statements about Jews and the Democratic Party. He has repeatedly expressed amazement at how any Jews could vote for the Democrats considering his own record when it comes to Israel.
The post Alan Dershowitz quits Democratic Party, calling it ‘most anti-Israel party in U.S. history’ appeared first on The Forward.