Florida school district removes Holocaust novel

‘The Storyteller’ was removed from Martin County school district after parent filed complaint, apparently over depictions of sexual assault by Nazi guards.

By World Israel News Staff

A school district in south Florida has removed a Holocaust novel, after a parent filed a complaint.

The novel, Jodi Picoult’s 2013 The Storyteller, centers around a Jewish granddaughter, Sage Singer, of a Holocaust survivor, who discovers that her neighbor is an ex-Nazi officer who served at the Auschwitz concentration camp. The officer asks the protagonist to help him commit suicide, spurring Sage to seek help from the U.S. Department of Justice to verify the officer’s identity.

In her effort to learn ascertain whether her neighbor is in fact the former SS officer he claims to be, Sage learns details regarding the Auschwitz camp from her grandmother, a survivor of the camp who reluctantly opens up about her experiences there.

In February, the Martin County school district in southeast Florida removed the book from a high school library, in response to a complaint filed under the state’s Stop WOKE Act.

The parent who filed the complaint, Julie Marshall, is head of the local chapter of the conservative group Moms For Liberty, which has lobbied for the removal from school libraries of dozens of books it deems inappropriate for children, either because of their sexual content or ideological bent.

“At this point, we believe we have challenged the most obscene and age inappropriate books,” Marshall told The Washington Post.

Marshall did not comment on why she believes The Storyteller is inappropriate for high school students, but she has previously told the local school board that the vast majority of her objections to books were based on their sexually explicit content.

Picoult told the Post that the book’s removal was “shocking, as it is about the Holocaust.”

The Storyteller includes graphic depictions of sexual assault by Nazi guards at Auschwitz.

The novel is not the first Holocaust or Jewish-themed book to be purged from school libraries in recent years.

At the beginning of the 2022-2023 school year, Missouri schools pulled hundreds of books from their shelves, including Art Spiegelman’s Maus and several other titles on the Holocaust.

Earlier last year, a local Tennessee school board drew an outcry from Jewish groups after Maus was removed from its curriculum.

The school board had cited “nudity” and “inappropriate language” as justification for the ban.

A graphic comic adaptation of Anne Frank’s Diary was briefly banned from a Texas school district last year, following complaints over the diary’s sexual references.