Conservative activists, led by a local pastor and outspoken Israel advocate, pushed the district, Mission CISD, to excise books mostly about gender, sexuality and race. Their demands represented an extreme version of a nationwide culture war over books that has played out in recent years — and ensnared a number of books with Jewish themes.
In Mission, the long list of books on the chopping block includes a recent illustrated adaptation of Anne Frank’s diary; both volumes of Art Spiegelman’s Holocaust graphic memoir “Maus”; “The Fixer,” Bernard Malamud’s novel about a historical instance of antisemitic blood libel; and “Kasher in the Rye,” a ribald memoir by Jewish comedian Moshe Kasher.
There is no such sexual material in the book. An innocent teenage girl asked a raunchy question to a friend she had a crush on because that’s the kind of behavior teens display while they grow up and develop themselves. And she got shut down. Nothing graphical was ever shown. It’s showing only what was written by that same normal girl disconnected and hidden from the world as they hide from murderous tyrannical nazi’s. Raw and unfiltered thoughts and feelings of a normal developing teen, as the girl wrote it for herself, not us. As the Anne Frank Foundation said in the video “A book written by a 12 year old can be read by 12 year olds.”
