Athens, Tennessee: A Tennessee school district has voted to ban a Pulitzer Prize winning graphic novel about the Holocaust due to “inappropriate language” and an illustration of a nude woman, according to minutes from a board meeting.
The McMinn County School Board decided on January 10 to remove Maus from its curriculum, news outlets reported.
Art Spiegelman won the Pulitzer Prize in 1992 for the work that tells the story of his Jewish parents living in 1940s Poland and depicts him interviewing his father about his experiences as a Holocaust survivor.
In an interview, Spiegelman told CNBC he was “baffled” by the school board’s decision and called the action “Orwellian”.
“It’s leaving me with my jaw open, like, ‘What?’” he said.
The minutes from the school board meeting indicate objections over some of the language used and, at first, director of schools Lee Parkison suggested redacting it “to get rid of the eight curse words and the picture of the woman that was objected to”.
The nude woman is drawn as a mouse. In the graphic novel, Jews are drawn as mice and the Nazis are drawn as cats.
“It shows people hanging, it shows them killing kids, why does the educational system promote this kind of stuff? It is not wise or healthy,” school board member Tony Allman said about the book, which was part of the district’s eighth-grade English language arts curriculum.
Read the article in The Sydney Morning Herald (AP).