![]() ![]() This is why the McMinn County, Tennessee, school board’s unanimous decision to remove “Maus” from the district’s eighth-grade curriculum concerns me as an educator. ![]() It prepares students to have so many important conversations and sets them up to jump into the canon of Jewish graphic novels. Instead I teach about the entire industry built, in large part, on the legacy of “Maus.” The reason I feel comfortable excluding “Maus” from that syllabus is that every year, without fail, almost every student has already read it, many in an educational context. When I began teaching Jewish graphic novels I referred to the course as “The House that ‘Maus’ Built,” because I do not teach “Maus” in the course. I chose “Maus.” I had to convince people it was a worthy text, but convince them I did. ![]() I wrote my final paper on “Maus.” For my PhD comprehensive exams I needed to choose a text to study for one of my exams. In college I took a class on the Holocaust. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then “Maus” may as well be Proust, because it contains words in the millions in under 300 pages. Spiegelman took a genre that many could not see as literature and turned it into a medium that could tell stories in a way no other book could. It is also a second-generation story about the legacy of the Holocaust on Spiegelman, a survivor’s child. The very fact of “Maus,” the fact that I could hold in my hand something so simple and yet complicated, changed the way I thought about how we tell stories.Īrt Spiegelman’s nonfiction graphic novel uses the conventions of comic books to tell the story of his parents’ experiences as Polish Jews before, during and after the Holocaust. It was the first graphic novel I had read, and like many 12-year-olds I was just starting to think of myself as a person able to have independent ideas and opinions. I was 12 when the second volume of “Maus” was published, and I read both volumes in one long afternoon. But unlike many people, I can say that it set me on a direct path to my eventual career - as a scholar of religion, especially Judaism, and popular culture. “We believe it is a must-read for everyone.( JTA) - Like many people, I encountered “Maus” as a middle schooler. “Art Spiegelman’s masterpiece is one of the most important, impactful and influential graphic novels of all time,” the page said. Created with a target of $20,000, it had raised more than $80,000 by Monday. Davis also set up a GoFundMe campaign to buy additional copies. Richard Davis, owner of the Nirvana Comics bookstore in Knoxville, Tennessee, offered to loan The Complete Maus to any student. “I have taught Spiegelman’s books many times in my courses on the Holocaust over many years,” he added, on his website. “In response to Spiegelman’s Maus I and Maus II being removed from the schools by McMinn county, Tennessee school board members, I am offering this free online course for any McMinn county eighth-grade or high school students interested in reading these books with me,” said Scott Denham of Davidson College. One professor at a North Carolina college offered eighth-grade and high-school students in McMinn county a free online class. Variations took the first, second and third spots as bestsellers in literary graphic novels.Įfforts have also emerged to make Maus more accessible to students. In second world war history, Maus I, the first installment of the novel, also ranked No 1. As of Monday morning, The Complete Maus was second in Amazon’s overall bestseller category. There’s something going on very, very haywire there.”Īs news of the McMinn ban spread, Maus shot on to multiple top 10 lists in Amazon book categories. “I also understand that Tennessee is obviously demented. “I’ve met so many young people who … have learned things from my book,” he said. “It’s leaving me with my jaw open, like, ‘What?’” he said, adding that the board was acting in “Orwellian” fashion. Spiegelman, 73, told CNBC he was “baffled”. I think we need to relook at the entire curriculum.” You put this stuff just enough on the edges, so the parents don’t catch it but the kids, they soak it in. Why does the education system promote this kind of stuff? It is not wise or healthy.”Īnother board member, Mike Cochran, said: “If I was trying to indoctrinate somebody’s kids, this is how I would do it. “We don’t need to enable or somewhat promote this stuff,” McMinn county board member Tony Allman said, adding in reference to the murder of 6 million Jewish people in the second world war: “I am not denying it was horrible, brutal and cruel. The book depicts Jewish people as mice and Nazis as cats. By the American cartoonist Art Spiegelman and first published in 1986, Maus describes the experiences of Spiegelman’s parents in Nazi concentration camps and his mother’s suicide.
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