When Jeff Crim learned that the McMinn County School Board in Tennessee had voted to remove the acclaimed graphic novel Maus from its eighth-grade curriculum, he was, in a word, mad.
Crim, pastor of Ascension Lutheran Church in Chattanooga, Tenn., phoned his friend Craig Lewis, rabbi of the neighboring Mizpah Congregation in Chattanooga. “I called him and said, ‘I’m mad, are you mad?’ And he said, ‘Yeah.’”
So Crim contacted the literary agency for the book’s author, cartoonist Art Spiegelman. To his surprise, Spiegelman’s agent answered the phone himself. Crim introduced himself and started explaining the situation in McMinn County, but the agent cut him off. “He said, ‘I know about all that, I’m fielding media inquiries—you’ve got five seconds.’ And I said, ‘OK. Pastor mad. Rabbi mad. Want to do something?’ And it rolled from there.”
“(The agent) said, ‘You’ve got five seconds.’ And I said, ‘OK. Pastor mad. Rabbi mad. Want to do something?’”
Where it rolled to was Ascension co-sponsoring a Feb. 7 virtual interreligious discussion with Spiegelman about Maus, its place in schools and in Holocaust education since its publication, and recent news events surrounding it.
Maus unfolds as a series of conversations Spiegelman shared with his father about the father’s experiences as a Holocaust survivor. Originally serialized in Spiegelman’s magazine Raw from 1980 to 1991, when it was collected as a two-volume set by Pantheon Books, Maus depicts Jews as mice and Nazis as cats. It is the first and only graphic novel to have won a Pulitzer Prize.
Co-sponsoring the event with Ascension and Mizpah were the Jewish Federation of Greater Chattanooga, the B’nai Zion Congregation in Chattanooga and the news publication the Tennessee Holler. The discussion was moderated by Whitney Kimball Coe, director of national programs at the Center for Rural Strategies, and comic book historian Jacque Nodell. More than 10,000 people around the world watched the event’s livestream.
“Keep it honest and keep it clear”
“I wasn’t really trying to do anything other than tell a story that felt compelling enough to … share,” Spiegelman said at the event. “I wasn’t thinking about who I was going to be sharing it with, I was thinking of it more as, ‘If I keep it honest and keep it clear, it will do its job.’ And that meant finding ways to make that clarity without making it more clear than it can be. In other words, I don’t want to dumb it down.”
Spiegelman said he was unhappy initially when he heard that Maus was being added to curricula—he remembered being bored by the books he read for school. His intention wasn’t to educate but to tell a candid story whose subject matter and characters’ behavior were visceral and difficult. “If I was trying to make a tool to teach the Holocaust, it would start feeling medicinal,” he said in the discussion.
But he eventually came to appreciate the role Maus has played in helping young people grapple with historical events that can traumatize survivors and their descendants. “If you speak to them honestly, they know it,” he said. “They can tell the difference. The thing is to just be receptive to the kids and to help them understand whatever it is they want to understand.”
Childhood, Spiegelman said, “is a time when people are trying to understand things and when kids, more than ever, are the most open, and they’re the most willing to understand. I know this (now) better than I did when I was suspicious of Maus being taught.”
“The thing is to just be receptive to the kids and to help them understand whatever it is they want to understand.”
Spiegelman said he now feels that reading Maus as part of a curriculum may be the best way to experience the book, with context, discussion and supplemental materials provided in school. At his request, event organizers took questions from students in McMinn County.
When asked about the importance of accompanying students through those conversations and whether pulling Maus from the curriculum abdicated that accompaniment, Spiegelman said, “I just think it’s all about control, and control that doesn’t need to be exercised. What needs to be exercised is empathy and intelligence.
“Telling the truth is difficult. It took this thorny path.”
Crim agreed: “One of the things that is absolutely central to our Lutheran identity is confession. We don’t hide the difficult parts of our personal selves or our corporate selves. We’re honest about them. And when we’re honest about those, they become transformative. They become avenues for grace. They become avenues through which we’re able to see how to move forward.”
For Crim, “banning something like Maus that is an effective way of talking about this terrible thing in human history that we all corporately … share a piece of (is tantamount to) sweeping it under the rug. And as Lutherans, that is not our witness to the world.”
