The great ‘Maus’ giveaway is on as bookstores, professors and churches counter Tennessee school board’s ban
Art Spiegelman, author of Maus, poses in Paris, March 20, 2012. (Bertrand Langlois/AFP via Getty Images)
(JTA) — A rural Tennessee school board’s decision earlier this month to remove “Maus,” the celebrated graphic novel about the Holocaust, from its curriculum has attracted fierce backlash from other pockets of the state and beyond.
A nearby comic-book store is pledging to give away the book for free, an area church plans to hold a discussion on its themes and a college professor intends to offer free classes on the book to students in the county.
Nirvana Comics, a comic-book store in Knoxville, announced Thursday on social media that it would be giving away copies of Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book to any interested students, saying, “it is a must-read for everyone.” According to local news station WBIR, the store was expecting a large shipment of the books to arrive soon, and was “in discussions with a much larger organization to expand the program.”
Reached by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, a bookseller at Nirvana Comics declined to discuss the details of the “larger organization,” but noted that the store had started a GoFundMe to support the book giveaway, and had raised around $3,000 to date.
The store is located about 60 miles northeast of McMinn County, whose school board voted 10-0 on Jan. 10 to remove the book from its middle-school classes, citing its use of profanity, nudity and depictions of “killing kids” as reasons for its inappropriateness. The story found wider exposure this week after a local muckraking news site publicized the board meeting. Spiegelman, who based the book on his father’s experience in Auschwitz, called the board’s move “Orwellian.”
In the county itself, a local Episcopal church in Athens announced it would be conducting a discussion of the book Feb. 3. The event will include discussion about the complicity of many churches in the systematic murder of Jews during the Holocaust, as well as modern-day antisemitism.
Scott Denham, a Holocaust and German Studies professor at Davidson College in North Carolina, launched an online course about the book specifically intended for 8th grade and high school students. On the course’s website, Denham said the lessons would not be public and would only be offered to students in McMinn County.
A representative for Denham said the professor was currently experiencing a family emergency and wasn’t available to elaborate on his plans for the lessons.
As of Friday, Jan. 28, “Maus” — originally published in two volumes in the late 1980s and early ’90s — sat at #23 on Amazon’s bestseller list. The county school board’s rejection of the book generated international news coverage, with prominent authors including Neil Gaiman harshly criticizing the board’s decision. Organizations like the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum emphasized the book’s frequent use as a Holocaust education tool for middle and high school-aged readers.
—
The post The great ‘Maus’ giveaway is on as bookstores, professors and churches counter Tennessee school board’s ban appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
