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BANNING MAUS A MISTAKE

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MEDICAL EXCELLENCE

MEDICAL EXCELLENCE

CONSIDERED OPINION

DR. YVETTE ALT MILLER COURTESY: AISH.COM

Banning Maus from schools is a mistake

A Tennessee school board’s decision to remove the Pulitzer-prize winning book from its curriculum furthers the ever-increasing ignorance about the Holocaust.

While much of the world prepared to mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day in January, 2022, one school district in Tennessee decided to remove the two-volume Holocaust graphic novel Maus: A Survivor’s Take from its school curriculum.

Art Spiegelman, a prominent cartoonist and the son of Holocaust survivors, published the first volume of Maus in 1986 and the second volume in 1991. This unusual work, which describes Spiegelman’s father’s harrowing experiences during the Holocaust, won a Pulitzer Prize for best fiction, the first and only graphic novel to do so. All of the characters in Maus are drawn as animals. Jews are depicted as mice, Nazi as cats, Poles as pigs and Americans as dogs.

The books toggle back and forth between an adult son’s conversations with his father, who is an unhappy, crotchety old man and the terrible memories his father describes. The effect is both to draw readers in with compelling illustrations and dialogue, while also providing some sense of distance from the terrible story within Maus’s pages.

Reading Maus can be a gruelling experience. Volume I is subtitled “My Father Bleeds History” and begins with the son, an artist named Art, visiting his father Vlatek and his father’s wife Mala. The names are those of Art’s actual family. During the Holocaust, Art Spiegelman’s parents, Anja and Vlatek, endured terrible hardships and survived Auschwitz. Anja Spiegelman died by suicide in 1968.

Vlatek begins to describe his once happy life in Poland in the 1930s, but his memories soon grow dark. After the Nazis invaded Poland, food grew scarce. Jews were forbidden from taking part in an increasing portion of public life. Maus depicts the growing horror in bold black and white sketches, which fit the sombre mood of the book. In one early panel, Vlatek returns home looking upset. “There was another riot downtown today,” he tells his wife and young son. “Everyone yelling, ‘JEWS OUT! JEWS OUT!’ … Even two people killed. The police just watched!”

Vlatek and Anja watch as their friends and relatives are murdered one by one. They send their son Richieu away to live with his aunt in a different town, hoping he will be safe there, only to learn that when Anja’s sister discovered that all of the Jews in her town were about to be deported to Auschwitz, she poisoned herself, her two children, and Richieu. Volume II, subtitled “And Here My Troubles Began,” describes Vlatek’s experiences in Auschwitz, where he was forced to remove the remains of Jews who’d been murdered in the gas chambers.

Novelist Umberto Eco observed that “Maus is a book that cannot be put down, truly, even to sleep … slowly through this little tale comprised of suffering, humour and life’s daily trials, you are captivated by the language of an old Eastern European family …” When it first came out, the Los Angeles Times called it “enormously effective … an extraordinary accomplishment, a new way of looking at the experience” of the Holocaust.

Maus’s raw power made it a natural choice for teachers in McMinn County, Tennessee, who have used it as an “anchor text” for their 8th grade English class’ months-long unit on the Holocaust. Yet there have long been some complaints in the district.

Some parents objected to images of naked mice in the Auschwitz scenes. Some also complained about the book’s use of profanities in some of its dialogue. To assuage these concerns, teachers in the district covered up the images of naked mice and swear words in the text. Yet objections remained.

McMinn County teachers were meant to begin assigning Maus to this year’s 8th grade students in January 2022, but they waited, sensing that the book might be banned. And that’s what happened after an acrimonious school board meeting on January 10. “It shows people hanging, it shows them killing kids,” complained school board member Tony Allman. “Why does the educational system promote this kind of stuff?” he questioned. “It is not wise or healthy,” Allman declared at the meeting.

Some people present at the meeting defended Maus. “I was a history teacher and there is nothing pretty about the Holocaust and for me this was a great way to depict a horrific time in history,” explained Julie Goodin, an instructional supervisor in the district. The district’s other instructional supervisor, Steven Brady, defended the book, saying “When we think about the author’s intent, I could argue that his intent was to make our jaws drop. Oh my goodness, think about what happened.”

Their defence fell on deaf ears. In a unanimous vote, the 10-member McMinn County school board voted to remove Maus from the district’s curriculum. In a statement on Thursday, January 27, they defended their actions, explaining that Maus is inappropriate because “of its unnecessary use of profanity and nudity and its depictions of violence and suicide.”

Yet Mr Brady and Ms Goodin captured why it is crucial that books like Maus are read. The Holocaust was a uniquely horrific event in history. It’s not easy or pleasant to study it. But if we don’t remember the Holocaust, if we don’t arm ourselves with the knowledge of what happened and honour the memory of the Holocaust’s millions of victims, then we have learned nothing.

As the Allied forces advanced on Auschwitz 77 years ago in January 1945, the Nazis responded by desperately trying to erase evidence of their crimes. They dynamited the gas chambers in which nearly a million Jews had been murdered. They forced 60,000 Jews on death marches through the freezing January winter towards Germany, so that when Allied troops finally entered Auschwitz they wouldn’t witness the full extent of the Nazis’ crimes.

In many quarters, those attempts to erase and minimise the world’s knowledge about the Holocaust are still going on.

Holocaust distortion and denial are rampant, and they’re having an effect. A 2020 survey showed that 63% of American millennials didn’t know that six million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust. Globally, only 54% of people have even heard about the Holocaust. Ignoring or minimising the Holocaust is being complicit in the Nazi effort to hide their depravity from posterity. When I heard about McMinn County’s school board removing Maus from the 8th grade curriculum, I asked my own son, who’s also in 8th grade, what he thought. To the objection of Maus’s nudity, he was incredulous: “They’re naked mice!” he pointed out, not people. “Maybe this was just an excuse,” he wondered.

One school board member who objected to Maus at the meeting, Mike Cochran, said he didn’t object to students learning about the Holocaust in general. Maus was simply too disturbing a book for kids to read.

Yet the Holocaust is disturbing. And with so much ignorance about the Holocaust today, it’s more important than ever that we ensure the Holocaust is being taught effectively in schools, and that we educate ourselves and our communities.

Art Spiegelman’s two volumes of Maus is a good place to start.

A Tennessee school board’s decision to remove the Pulitzer-prize winning book from its curriculum furthers the ever-increasing ignorance about the Holocaust

AROUND THE COMMUNITY

GANDEL FOUNDATION

As countries around the world commemorated International Holocaust Remembrance Day on 27th January, Australia’s firstnational survey of Holocaust knowledge and awareness had some alarming findings.

Notably, 24% of the population aged 18 years or older has little to no knowledge of the Holocaust, with that number rising to 30% among millennials.

More than 70% know nothing about Australia’s own connections to the Holocaust.

However, there is overwhelming agreement among Australians (88%) that “we can learn lessons for today from what happened in the Holocaust”. 78% of Australians think that Holocaust museums and memorials are valuable.

Two-thirds (66%) believe it should be compulsory for schools to teach students about the Holocaust.

The survey was commissioned by the Gandel Foundation, one of Australia’s largest independent family philanthropic funds.

The Gandel Holocaust Knowledge and Awareness in Australia Survey was undertaken by a team of researchers at Deakin University.

It was broadly based on similar research in the USA, Canada, the UK, France and Austria. The study was conducted in September 2021, followed by analysis of the findings.

There were more than 70 questions posed, with 3,522 responses from Australian adults across all states and territories.

That made it the largest survey of its type yet undertaken.

The sample matches key demographic parameters – including age, gender, education and geographic location – of the Australian population.

A key objective of the Gandel Survey was to understand not just how much Australians know factually about the Holocaust, but also how aware they are of the catastrophe and its impact.

While a number of findings were largely positive, there were still some critical gaps identified. Overall, Australians of all ages showed comparatively high levels of Holocaust knowledge, with almost 70% correctly identifying that the Holocaust refers to the genocide of Jews. 80% knew that Holocaust occurred between 1933 and 1945, and just over half (54%) correctly identified that the number of Jews murdered was six million.

Respondents also registered low levels of Holocaust denial and overt antisemitism.

Only 25% of Australians have visited a Holocaust museum in Australia or overseas, while 81% have never heard an in-person talk or lecture from a Holocaust survivor.

The Gandel survey found that higher levels of knowledge about the Holocaust are associated with undertaking specific school courses or visiting museums, rather than general levels of education.

Notably, the survey also found that, on average, those with comparatively higher level of Holocaust awareness had warmer feelings towards minority or disadvantaged groups.

The research team made eight recommendations in the report.

They included a call for the introduction of a consistent approach to Holocaust studies in schools across Australia, with proper and accredited teacher training.

Further, there is a need for resources that explore Australia’s Holocaust connections and the development of strategies to drive engagement with Holocaust museums.

Challenging antisemitic stereotypes through educational programs and enabling students to hear Holocaust survivor testimonies was also considered important.

CEO of the Gandel Foundation, Vedran Drakulic OAM said while a lot has been achieved recently to strengthen Holocaust education, much work remains to be done.

“The Gandel family is committed to continuing their decades-long support for the development of Holocaust education across Australia, to help build a more compassionate, cohesive and humane society.”

The researchers would like to see the survey repeated in five and then 10 years.

Holocaust knowledge fractured

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AROUND THE COMMUNITY

NOMI KALTMANN COURTESY: TABLET MAGAZINE

In the early 1990s, Yehuda Kaplan was gravely ill with lymphoma and was urgently seeking a bone marrow transplant. That is a lifesaving procedure that removes blood-forming stem cells from a healthy donor’s bones and transplants them into a person who does not have enough healthy blood cells due to a serious illness. While the transplants are highly effective, they are quite rare, as they require both the donor and recipient to be a perfect genetic match.

Kaplan said that in Melbourne, where he was living, there was “not a lot of awareness” about the procedure. “So, we went to the leadership of the Australian Jewish community, rabbis as well as doctors and specialists, and asked them to promote the idea of joining the bone marrow registry in the community.”

In response to Kaplan’s public campaign, hundreds of Australian Jews responded to the call from community leaders, donating small vials of blood and joining the Australian Bone Marrow Registry. While Kaplan didn’t end up getting a bone marrow transplant because no match was found, the call for potential donors helped spearhead awareness of bone marrow transplants in Australia, particularly among Australian Jews. And Kaplan ended up surviving lymphoma using an experimental treatment.

Now decades after this event, within Australia Jews continue to join the bone marrow registry in numbers disproportionate to the size of the community. From these donors, matches for gravely ill persons have been found all over the world, including in America, Europe and Israel.

Soon after the positive response to Kaplan’s call for donors, and in response to growing global awareness that Jews were more likely to match with each other, Gift of Life Australia was created by Sydney-based Jewish geneticist Shula Endrey Walder.

In response to multiple international requests for assistance to find bone marrow matches for sick Jews around the world, in the early 1990s she decided to encourage more Australian Jews to join the bone marrow registry. Prior to Gift of Life Australia, smaller organisations, such as Keren HaYeled in Melbourne, had been active in recruiting bone marrow donors in Australia.

The original American organisation called Gift of Life was created by Florida resident Jay Feinberg. In 1991, when he was ill with leukemia, he launched a global search to find himself a match. “The collaboration [between Australia and America] started in the early days when Shula Endry Walder, of blessed memory, contacted Arlene Feinberg, my mother, and offered to run drives to help find a match for me,” Feinberg said. “Donors recruited are included in the Australian Bone Marrow Registry, which is a long time international colleague and partner of the Gift of Life Marrow Registry,” in the United States.

“Bone marrow is the largest medical collaboration on the planet. If you are on the registry [somewhere], you are on the registry everywhere,” said Dovid Slavin, a rabbi who also holds a doctorate in philosophy, and who has been a board member of Gift of Life Australia since its inception. “In Australia, the bone marrow registry is run by the government, which subcontracts the collection of blood samples to the Australian Red Cross. Any sample collected by Gift of Life Australia is then given to the Red Cross and added to the Australian Bone Marrow Registry, which then hooks in with the global bone marrow registry.”

At the time Gift of Life Australia was founded, the Jewish community was considered one of the “hard to match communities” in Australia. “There were not many people from our community on the registry,” said Debbie Redelman, another long time Gift of Life Australia board member. “So, the Australian Bone Marrow Registry contracted Gift of Life Australia to collect samples [from the Jewish community] to increase the chance of finding matches.” Jewish donors are much more likely to be matched with other Jewish recipients because tissue type is inherited, so the best chance of finding a transplant is from someone with the same genetics (often family members) or from people of a similar ethnic background.

In Australia, Slavin estimates that 10,000 Jewish Australians have been signed up to the registry by Gift of Life Australia and more than 30 have provided transplants to recipients around the world. For a community of approximately 100,000, this is quite a high number, considering that the Australian Bone Marrow Registry only performs a handful of transplants each year for the whole country.

In America, Gift of Life operates differently. It is privately run and operates its own registry, which then shares its data with other bone marrow registries across the world. To date, it has recruited over 300,000 Jewish Americans to join the registry and has facilitated 20,974 matches and 4,012 transplants.

Collecting DNA samples to the registry is also done differently, with the Australian register operated by the Red Cross, therefore requiring all Australians to provide a small blood sample to join the registry, rather than a cheek swab scraping, as is standard protocol in America. However, that is about to change.

In Australia, the COVID-19 pandemic put a stop to almost all in-person collection drives and many prospective donors found it difficult to join the registry as many Australian cities locked down for months. As pandemic restrictions ease, there are plans for mail-order kits that will allow people to self-swab their cheeks and join the registry without the need for a blood sample.

As this transition takes place and more people sign up to join the Australian Bone Marrow Registry, there is a greater chance of matches being created. That widens the chances that desperately ill people can find a perfect match from the Australian Jewish community.

Esther Lever remembers lining up with her parents in Melbourne to donate a small vial of her blood in the early 1990s, in response to the community call for donations to help Yehuda Kaplan. She wasn’t a match, though, and didn’t think much about it after that. However, in 2006, more than a decade after donating her blood, she received a phone call out of the blue. “The Alfred Hospital received a phone call from the world bone marrow registry advising that I may be a potential match for someone,” she said.

After undergoing further testing Lever was stunned to find out that her DNA was a genetic match, with one hematologist telling Lever that the odds of two nonfamily members having this kind of match were about “one in a million.” The transplant was a success. Eleven months later, Lever received a phone call from Schneider’s Children Hospital asking if she would be interested in meeting up with her beneficiary. She was and the coming together was emotional for both. Lever’s stem cells were transplanted into 15-year-old Einat Zinger, an Israeli who’d been battling cancer since she was 12.

“When we met, we stood there and hugged, and everybody was crying,” said Lever.

That night, the story of the miraculous match was the top news story in Israel. To this day Lever and Zinger remain friends, with Lever flying to Israel for Zinger’s wedding in 2016. Lever hopes that stories like hers will continue to encourage other Jews in Australia to join the registry.

Close to the bone

How Australian Jews became blood marrow donors to the world

Esther Lever with Einat Zinger on her wedding day in 2016. The two remain friends after Lever donated her bone marrow to Zinger in 2006 (photo: Esther Lever)

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