Pulitzer Prize novel on antisemitism banned in S. Carolina schools

The Fixer was pulled from library shelves after complaints of inappropriate content were made to the local school board.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

A Pulitzer Prize-winning novel on antisemitism has been banned from a South Carolina school district after a conservative activist complaint about its inappropriate content, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA) reported Thursday.

The Fixer, by famed Jewish writer Bernard Malamud, tells the story in fiction form of Jewish laborer Mendel Beilis in Kyiv who was accused in 1911 of murdering a Christian boy to use his blood for making matzah. It is considered a potent statement against Jew hatred and blood libels, as well as a compelling depiction of man’s suffering, winning the prestigious prize for fiction in 1966.

The woman who demanded its removal, Ivie Szalai, a member of a right-wing group called Moms for Liberty, included it in a list of nearly 100 books that she told the Beaufort Country school board late last year should be taken out of the schools.

“I know that many of the books in question may have extremely helpful material for many students, but that does not negate the fact that many of them contain explicit sexuality, even some pornographic, X-rated scenes,” she told the board.

School Superintendent Frank Rodriguez immediately acquiesced to the demand, even though Szalai and other critics did not use the district’s own procedures for submitting complaints, which includes a detailed analysis of the books’ contents.

Szalai told a local paper, The Post and Courier, that she felt the three-page form “was designed to discourage submittal.”

She said that she had compiled her list based on a website created by a former Moms for Liberty activist. The site, called BookLooks, gave The Fixer a “minor restricted” rating in warning that it “contains controversial religious and racial commentary; hate involving racism; violence including self-harm; and profanity.”

It is unsurprising that a book about antisemitism would have these features.

Beaufort County School District spokesperson Candace Bruder told JTA that the books were removed “to protect our employees from … harrassment,” after threats were made against the district and activists filed requests to find out the home addresses of local librarians.

Rodriguez had left a way for the books’ reinstatement, setting up committees including educators, librarians and community members to assess a group of ten per month while they stayed off the shelves. A vast majority of the titles have since been returned to the libraries. The verdict on The Fixer is due in two weeks.

This is the second time Malamud’s book has been banned. In 1975, a New York school board removed it and six others, saying they were ““anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-Semitic and just plain filthy.” Students who objected to the move took the case all the way to the Supreme Court, where they won in 1982, although the justices did write in their ruling that school boards can have a say in what goes into their institutions’ libraries.

When that first ban was instated, Malamud was still alive, and he criticized the move sharply.

“I wish those school board members and others who want to ban books would make an effort to understand them before shoveling them off library shelves,” he said. “If they read ‘The Fixer,’ they might be clamoring to have more students read it.”

The American Library Association documented over 680 attempts last year to take more than 1,650 books off library shelves, the highest number in over two decades.

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