8 | FEBRUARY 10 • 2022 

column
You Can’t Just Swap Out Maus 
for Another Holocaust Book. 
It’s Special.
L

ike many people, I 
encountered Maus as 
a middle schooler. But 
unlike many people, I can say 
that it set me on a direct path 
to my eventual career — as a 
scholar of reli-
gion, especially 
Judaism, and 
popular culture.
I was 12 when 
the second vol-
ume of Maus 
was published, 
and I read both 
volumes in one long afternoon. 
It was the first graphic novel 
I had read and, like many 
12-year-olds, I was just starting 
to think of myself as a person 
able to have independent ideas 
and opinions. The very fact 
of Maus, the fact that I could 
hold in my hand something 
so simple and yet complicated, 
changed the way I thought 
about how we tell stories.
Art Spiegelman’s nonfiction 
graphic novel uses the con-
ventions of comic books to tell 
the story of his parents’ expe-
riences as Polish Jews before, 
during and after the Holocaust. 
It is also a second-generation 
story about the legacy of the 
Holocaust on Spiegelman, a 
survivor’s child. Spiegelman 
took a genre that many could 
not see as literature and turned 
it into a medium that could tell 
stories in a way no other book 
could. If a picture is worth a 
thousand words, then Maus 
may as well be Proust, because 
it contains words in the mil-

lions in under 300 pages.
In college I took a class on 
the Holocaust. I wrote my final 
paper on Maus. For my Ph.D. 
comprehensive exams, I need-
ed to choose a text to study for 
one of my exams. I chose Maus. 
I had to convince people it 
was a worthy text but convince 
them I did.
When I began teaching 
Jewish graphic novels, I 
referred to the course as “The 
House that ‘Maus’ Built” 
because I do not teach Maus 
in the course. Instead, I teach 
about the entire industry built, 
in large part, on the legacy of 
Maus. The reason I feel com-
fortable excluding Maus from 
that syllabus is that every year, 
without fail, almost every stu-
dent has already read it, many 
in an educational context. It is 
a modern classic. It prepares 
students to have so many 
important conversations and 
sets them up to jump into the 
canon of Jewish graphic novels.
This is why the McMinn 
County, Tennessee, school 
board’s unanimous decision to 
remove Maus from the district’s 
eighth-grade curriculum con-
cerns me as an educator. A text 
that has had such a positive 
impact on untold thousands 
of students, and that I count 
on a plurality of my students 
to have encountered before 
they arrive in my college class-
room, is under threat. The 
idea that with each passing 
year fewer and fewer students 
may not have had the chance 

to wrestle with Maus is deeply 
troubling. Having to begin 
the course with a basic intro-
duction to sequential art and 
Jewish themes would cost not 
only time, but also the ability 
to engage in more sophisti-
cated conversations. Having 
to catch students up on Maus, 
for me, would mean losing 
other extraordinary titles such 
as Joe Kubert’s Yossel or Amy 
Kurzweil’s Flying Couch, and 
would substantially change the 
narrative arc of the semester.
The McMinn school board 
says its decision was based on 
“rough language” and depic-
tions of nudity. A great many 
mocking responses to this have 
pointed out that the characters 
in the book are anthropo-
morphized animals, includ-
ing the Jewish victims of the 
Holocaust, who are depicted as 
mice. But it was not nude mice 
that spurred this criticism. 
The minutes of the school 
board meeting suggest that 
the images they’re reacting to 

are from the interstitial comic 
“Prisoner on the Hell Planet” an 
earlier Spiegelman cartoon that 
appears midway through the 
graphic novel and uses a differ-
ent graphic idiom.
Prisoner on the Hell Planet was 
the initial comic Spiegelman 
drew to process his mother’s 
suicide, which its distraught 
narrator cannot separate from 
the horrors she endured under 
the Nazis. His mother died in 
1968, when Spiegelman was 
20, and he drew Prisoner on 
the Hell Planet in 1972. Maus 
was first serialized in 1980 
and published in book form 
in 1986. The comic includes 
images of his mother slitting 
her wrists with a razor and of 
Anna Spiegelman’s naked body 
in a tub filled with her own 
blood.
This is not vulgar nudity — 
and the rejection of the book 
based on these images suggests 
that the McMinn County 
school board has not under-
stood what Spiegelman did 

Jennifer 
Caplan
JTA.org 

PURELY COMMENTARY

ACTUALITTÉ/FLICKR COMMONS

Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel Maus on sale at a French bookstore in 
2017. 

