This past week two things happened that made my Jewish heart beat with extremes of both joy and sadness.
On Thursday evening the Fairfax County school board voted to adopt an inclusive 2022-2023 academic calendar. There will be a school closure on Yom Kippur and there will be a professional day on the first day of Rosh Hashanah. The calendar includes holidays of other religions that were not included before. With this decision the Fairfax County school board joined the other Northern Virginia public schools that already have an inclusive calendar. Every year, when I served at a NOVA congregation, I witnessed the internal tug-of-war that many parents (and their children) felt when having to decide between dealing with the consequences of missing school to go to synagogue on these major Jewish Holidays or to go to school, in order not to fall behind. Last year, when Arlington public schools gave those days off, I could feel the collective sigh of relief from many parents. This decision by the Fairfax County school board is a great victory for religious inclusiveness and a show of respect for the different religions practiced by the people who live here. My heart was filled with joy.
As I said in the beginning, my heart was also filled with sadness this past week. That happened when I read about the January 10th decision of the members of the school board in McMinn County, Tennessee, to remove a few books from the eighth-grade curriculum, one of them being the graphic novel Maus. If you haven’t read Maus, I highly recommend it. The book, written by Art Spiegelman, depicts Jews as mice and Nazis as cats in order to tell the story of his parents’ experience during the Holocaust. I remember reading this book when it first came out, during rabbinical school, in 1991. It is a very powerful book, one that lingers on the reader’s mind for a long time. I remember being very well impressed by the creativity of the graphic novel, the portrayal of the characters, and the development of the story. It is a careful and caring way to introduce Holocaust history to younger readers. It is absolutely appropriate for eighth graders. With this decision, Maus joins books that were banned from curricula, libraries, and public consumption in some areas of our country, such as Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, George Orwell’s Animal Farm, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, and many other books that I have read and loved.
The decision to ban this book saddened me, since this is a powerful book that can help people grasp the consequences of fascism, racism, and intolerance on the lives of individuals and nations. More than that, I am troubled by the idea that in 2022 in the United States there is a part of the population that believes in banning books. Burning books, banning books, removing books from circulation because their ideas challenge the leadership’s point of view are the actions that we witnessed in places with very reprehensible regimes, such as Nazi Germany, Asian communist countries, and South American dictatorships. Banning books in the United States horrifies, shocks and somewhat deflates me when I think that my fellow Americans are engaging in such a practice.
Let’s celebrate the victory of inclusivity in the Fairfax County Schools, and decry the poor decision of the McMinn County in Tennessee. Make your voice heard, speak publicly in praise of the Fairfax County School Board and against anywhere in our country that bans books. I hope that we witness more inclusivity and mutual respect, and less intolerance and narrow-mindedness. I wish that we grow in love and acceptance, and trim away racism and intolerance.