I was about twelve when I first read Maus. At the time my family was spending Shabbat at my aunt and uncle’s, and we had finished Friday night dinner. While my siblings and cousins played a game, I was searching for something to read.
Even as a young boy I loved to read, and back then I especially loved graphic novels, so when I pulled Maus by Art Spiegelman off the shelf, I was intrigued. The art style was certainly different from the Archie comics I was used to, but I figured it could be something to pass the time before bed. And so I brought the book to my bed and fell into the story of Vladek Spiegelman.
I was not ready for what I experienced.
Within minutes I was sitting straight up on my bed, eyes glued to the pages. I didn’t move, I didn’t even breathe at certain points. I read the entire book in one sitting, and then the sequel. Afterwards, all I could do was sit quietly on my bed and ponder.
I probably could have used another year or two before reading Maus, but as a student at Yavneh Academy, my education included learning about the hate our people experienced during the Holocaust. We were taught of Hitler’s quest to secure the “Aryan Master Race.” I also had stories from my grandfather, who was on the last boat to leave Nazi Germany and who lost most of his family in the war.
Yet some of the things were taught with a touch of vagueness. I could put together images in my mind, but a child’s imagination can’t picture bodies thrown into a mass grave, death marches, or the cremation of Jews en masse after they had been stripped and murdered in the gas chambers.
Now, in front of me was the full brutal picture of Hitler’s atrocities. It affected me more than any book had until that point.
I grew up within a very Jewish bubble. I went to yeshiva for grade school, my family keeps kosher, and I strive to be a good example of what a Jew should be.
And I’ve had obscenities hurled at me from passing cars while I was out walking on Shabbat. When I was in college at Rutgers, living at the Chabad house on College Ave, I woke up one day to find that the front of our building had been pelted with eggs. Since then I’ve heard of swastikas being painted on dorms. Antisemitism takes many shapes nowadays, but the thing I’ve realizee is that it’s becoming very casual.
In 2020, Nick Cannon, a celebrity I had enjoyed on “All That” and “America’s Got Talent,” aired a podcast together with another hip-hop star, “Professor” Griff. Together they touted antisemitic conspiracy theories and praised Nation of Islam minister Louis Farrakhan, who once referred to Jews as termites. And that’s not even mentioning their bizarre comments about white people.
While the things he said were abhorrent, somehow even worse were the throngs of people I saw on social media supporting him. And this was not a small vocal group, there were threads upon threads of people saying he said nothing wrong. That scares me even more than Nick’s ignorant comments. (Cannon later apologized repeatedly.)
The thing I’ve learned about antisemitism is that, for the most part, it’s casual. It takes quiet steps, peeks its head out, sneers, and then retreat with a giggle. But once you start looking for it, you’ll notice it in many places.
The censorship of Maus is another step in antisemitism’s casual march. Do I think twelve-year-olds should be reading it? No, it’s too graphic and brutal and should be read at a more mature age. But I do think high-schoolers and adults of sound maturity should. Absolutely. To scrub it from libraries and rob any chance of people reading it is just another way to slowly hide the atrocities Hitler committed.
The other day, I saw a post online about a book burning in Tennessee. Elsewhere, someone had taken a picture from the event and cropped it atop one of the book burnings in Nazi Germany. As one person commented, sharing a quote from Heinrich Heine: “Where they have burned books, they will end in burning people.”
