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COITURS
Cirk M
.BUY—SELL—TRADE

Censorship: An Aversion To Sex,
Slugs, And A 'Godless' Diary

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p

arents in Michigan
were offended by pro-
fanity in Catcher in
the Rye. They insisted the
book be removed from public
high schools.
Families in Missouri la-
beled offensive the drawing
of a naked boy in Maurice
Sendak's In the Night Kit-
chen. School officials con-
curred, and ordered short
pants drawn on the boy
before the book was
distributed to kindergarten
classes.
In 1982 an Alabama state
textbook committee rejected
The Diary of Anne Frank for
use in classrooms. The
reason: the book was "a real
downer."
For hundreds of years —
practically since the advent
of publishing itself — books
have been burned or banned,
deemed "offensive,"
"shocking" and "morally
degrading." Many of the
censored works are by Jew-
ish authors. These, and
others, will be recalled this
week (Sept. 26-Oct. 3) during
Banned Books Week, in-
stituted 11 years ago by the
American Library Associ-
ation and the American
Booksellers organization.
Freedom of speech and of
the press are guaranteed in
the First Amendment. But
exactly what those words
mean is open to interpreta-
tion.
For the Escondido, Calif.,
elementary school district, it
meant the freedom not to
read about slugs. Seven
years ago, the district bann-
ed Slugs by David Green-
berg, citing as especially
offensive a drawing of the
creatures "being dissected
with scissors." The book,
district officials said,
"should not have been
allowed in the libraries in
the first place."
Judy Blume has for years
been under fire for her works
addressing the concerns of
adolescent youth. Groups in
Minnesota, Alabama, Ohio
and Wisconsin banned Are
You There, God? It's Me,
Margaret. Objections ranged
from "It is built around just
two themes: sex and anti-
Christian behavior" to "It is
sexually offensive and
amoral."
Parents from Virginia, in
1982, and Alabama, in 1983,
moved to ban The Diary of

Anne Frank, also on charges
that the book contains sex-
ually offensive material.
Five years ago, in a widely
publicized case, Judge
Thomas Hull of Tennessee
excused fundamentalist
Christians in public schools
from reading the diary,
which they called "Godless."
Anne Frank's work also
ran into trouble with Con-
cerned Women for America
(CWA), headed by Beverly
LaHaye, whose husband was
co-founder of the Moral
Majority. CWA objected to
the book because it implied
that all religions are equally
valid, Mrs. LaHaye said.
The most frequently at-
tacked book of the 20th cen-

Anne Frank: "Godless material."

tury is J.D. Salinger's Cat-
cher in the Rye, published in
1951. Forty-one attempts to
ban the book were made
from 1966 to 1975 alone.
Groups most often object to
its profanity, as was the case
in the most recent report,
1989, when Catcher was
banned from high school
classrooms in Boron, Calif.
Books describing anti-
Semitism have been banned
both in the United States
and abroad.
In 1976, a school in Island
Trees, N.Y., banned Bernard
Malamud's The Fixer, the

story of a Jew falsely accus-
ed of blood libels in Russia,
along with nine other books
labeled "immoral, anti-
American, anti-Christian, or
just plain filthy."
And Italy, Yugoslavia and
Ireland all at one time bann-
ed J'accuse, Emile Zola's
work on the trial of Capt.
Alfred Dreyfus.
Other works by Jewish au-
thors which have been
banned at one time include:
• Catch 22, by Joseph
Heller.
• The Stepford Wives, by
Ira Levin.
• Goodbye, Columbus by
Philip Roth.
• "Death of a Salesman"
by Arthur Miller.
• Howl and Kaddish by
Allan Ginsberg.
Jewish calls for censorship
are rare, arising for the most
part when works contain an-
ti-Semitic passages. In a
1949 case, Rosenberg vs. the
Board of Education of the
City of New York, Jewish
parents in Brooklyn objected
to their children reading Ol-
iver Twist. They claimed
that Charles Dickens' por-
trait of the wicked Jewish
"Fagin" violated their chil-
dren's right to an education
free of religious bias.
And in 1983, a Miami
commissioner objected to
Mother Goose: Old Nursery
Rhymes because it contained
the verse, "Jack sold his gold
egg, To a rogue of a Jew,
Who cheated him out of,
Half of his due."
Probably the earliest ac-
count of Jewish book censor-
ship by Jews was the objec-
tions to Maimonides' Guide
for the Perplexed. Though
today regarded as one of the
greatest of all scholars,
Maimonides (1135-1204) was
denounced in his lifetime.
Jewish authorities also
have called for the burning
of books advocating Zionism,
and those written by the
false messiah Shabbati
Tzvi.

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