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.