A California Democrat posted “Holocaust book, Maya Angelou’s autobiography among nearly 400 items pulled from Naval Academy library in DEI purge” (CBS) to a group as an example of an outrage committed by Donald Trump. His introduction to this article: “Ahhhh…shades of the Mao Tse Tung-led purge by the Chinese Communist Party of books they didn’t like during the “cultural revolution”…”. From CBS:
Books on the Holocaust, histories of feminism, civil rights and racism, and Maya Angelou’s famous autobiography, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” were among the nearly 400 volumes removed from the U.S. Naval Academy’s library this week after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s office ordered the school to get rid of ones that promote diversity, equity and inclusion. … In addition to Angelou’s award-winning tome, the list includes “Memorializing the Holocaust,” which deals with Holocaust memorials..
Some Jewish Democrats in the group agreed with him that these book removals were an outrage on a similar scale to what happened in China during the Cultural Revolution.
Let’s have a look at the very first book of the headline, Memorializing the Holocaust. According to Amazon, the full title includes the word “Gender“, a word that appears 15 times on the selling page, and the book is properly categorized in “General Gender Studies”. The author is “Professor of Sociology and Women and Gender Studies”. Here’s the Amazon description:
How do collective memories of histories of violence and trauma in war and genocide come to be created? Janet Jacobs offers new understandings of this crucial issue in her examination of the representation of gender in the memorial culture of Holocaust monuments and museums, from synagogue memorials and other historical places of Jewish life, to the geographies of Auschwitz, Majdanek and Ravensbruck. Jacobs travelled to Holocaust sites across Europe to explore representations of women. She reveals how these memorial cultures construct masculinity and femininity, as well as the Holocaust’s effect on stereotyping on grounds of race or gender. She also uncovers the wider ways in which images of violence against women have become universal symbols of mass trauma and genocide. This feminist analysis of Holocaust memorialization brings together gender and collective memory with the geographies of genocide to fill a significant gap in our understanding of genocide and national remembrance.
The book is so important to our wider culture and has touched its readers so deeply that, after 15 years on Amazon, it has garnered exactly zero reviews. (Maybe it is required reading in some college-level gender studies courses? The book is “57,829 in Books” for sales, much higher than Queer Black Dance, featured in an independent bookstore.)
I find the CBS article and the reaction to it interesting because they show how easily discontent can be manufactured by our media. Nobody in the group, other than me, bothered to find out whether the “Holocaust book” was about the Holocaust. All of the Democrats accepted CBS’s headline characterization of the book and reflexively condemned Trump and Hegseth.
Poking fun at the Holocaust book fits the worldview and narrative of this blog perfectly. But that’s easy pickings. Why not stretch yourself and try something more challenging? What about Maya Angelou’s book? I don’t know what the collection goals of the Naval Academy library are, but what’s your argument for pulling it?
Point of this text beautifully illustrated. Triggered by keyword, not reading beyond.
The Maya Angelou book would be important to read if the U.S. military were fighting Black teenage mothers in Arkansas. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Know_Why_the_Caged_Bird_Sings
She may ask, but can’t answer. As a queer, reverse cis-gender transvestite woman I’m offended that you would even have the audacity to ask about Maya Angelo’s book. Maya is a member of the oppressor, colonizers who have treated real woman like me as trash for decades. On the victimology scale, Maya doesn’t even register. Shame on you and yours!
> What about Maya Angelou’s book? I don’t know what the collection goals of the Naval Academy library are, but what’s your argument for pulling it?
My high school removed this book in 2002. The feminists who demanded it be banned were unhappy with the author’s autobiographical description of being impregnated by her mother’s boyfriend, without consent. The book doesn’t show her as traumatized. She keeps the kid. A teacher at my school was incensed that this book didn’t tell the reader that abortion was the correct thing to do in this circumstance.
I don’t know why people in the Naval Academy want to ban it today. I do know that if left-leaning people were trying to ban it, the same press outlets who are upset about this would tell us that of course this book should be banned, as it is anti-abortion propaganda aimed at vulnerable marginalized BIPOCs.
Perhaps Naval Academy can replace gender study book by Janet Jacobs with book Q.E.D. by Gertrude Stein, American Jewish writer and early adopted o LGBTQ+ lifestyle, who had Nazi admirers and admired some Nazis.
Wikipedia states that “Her activities during World War II have been the subject of analysis and commentary. As a Jew living in Nazi-occupied France, Stein may have been able to sustain her lifestyle as an art collector, and indeed to ensure her physical safety, only through the protection of the powerful Vichy government official and Nazi collaborator Bernard Faÿ. After the war ended, Stein expressed admiration for another Nazi collaborator, Vichy leader Marshal Pétain.[8][9]”
It is hardly implausible that Fay could save Stein, a proprietor of a Paris intellectual salon, from Hilter’s wrath. Reportedly, top Nazi Heydrich could not even temporary save his Orthodox rabbi Hebrew teacher from deportation to a Nazi death camp. Some note that Hitler himself had a thing for Hertrude Stein. After Hitler’s niece committed suicide in Hitlers custody it was said that Hitler was sexual deviant, at least asserted by British intelligence service after rather extensive investigation.
Because The Masters golf tournament was running long, I took to Twitter to find out what would be airing on 60 Minutes afterwards. Much to my surprise I found that their Twitter feed had not been updated since February 19; I had to use Bluesky to find out
Today I picked up African aviator Beryl Markham’s memoir, West With The Night. She was white. a woman and an African bush pilot in the early twentieth century.
I wonder if they have that book?
How about The Monks of War by Desmond Seward, a history of “Military Religious Orders,” Definitely worth reading if you want to get in the mindset of our current DoD.
Warthog pilots are always female. The Air Force is the only branch of the armed services that does not fly helicopters.
Whoops! Loose lips sink ships.
Why misinform when approximate list of helicopters in US Airforce is publicly available? Think DoD needs to concentrate on already approved Sun Tzu Art of War and on history of Opium Wars, and apply it in reverse.
If a book is already in the library, what is the compelling reason to remove it? I don’t quite understand why as a society we are so concerned about which books are available in our libraries. This seems to miss the real issue:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/11/the-elite-college-students-who-cant-read-books/679945/
Re: college students who can’t read books
From the article:
“It’s not like I can say, ‘Okay, over the next three weeks, I expect you to read The Iliad,’ because they’re not going to do it”
This is on the educators for coddling instead of educating – which is also related to DEI.
If a book is already in the library, what is the compelling reason to remove it? Because they can.
Anon: If you’ve ever been to a public library you might have noticed a books for sale shelf. Libraries deaccession materials every day because (1) space is finite, and (2) new books are published. Maya Angelou’s book was published in 1969. Let’s look at some of the most popular books of 1969 and see if a library will still want to have multiple copies, or indeed any copies, of these books. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Selling_of_the_President_1968 is about Richard Nixon’s 1968 campaign, i.e., it’s about a president that most working-age people today have never heard of (recall that I was in Berkeley recently and a University of California student had no idea who Abraham Lincoln was or what he’d done other than being president during some time period that she didn’t know about). Another 1969 bestseller was Jennie the Life of Lady Randolph Churchill the Romantic Years 1854-1895. How many people today are aware that a person named Lady Randolph Churchill once existed or would be willing to read 400 pages about her?
Maybe you think that fiction would be timeless? According to Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Love_Machine_(novel) was a huge bestseller. I’ve never heard of it. Wokipedia: ” tells the story of ruthless, haunted Robin Stone and his life and career in the cut-throat world of 1960s network television. Handsome but promiscuous, the latter earning his nickname the Love Machine after he describes television with the same sobriquet, Robin is loved beyond all reason by three women: Amanda, the beautiful but doomed fashion model; Maggie, the beautiful but headstrong fellow journalist escaping a cruel society marriage; and Judith, the beautiful but aging wife of fourth-network founder Gregory Austin.”
Excellent points regarding the reasons libraries might want to refresh their inventories. Changing tastes is certainly one of them. You would also expect libraries to carry different books to reflect the cultural preferences of their readers. “The Economist” used to publish lists of bestselling books by country, and the rankings were surprisingly different. These differences apply even to so-called “classics” — a book that was part of the curriculum in, say, Spain (other than Don Quixote) is unlikely to be part of the curriculum in the UK.
That said, why should books be added or purged for what appear to be ideological reasons? Are we heading back to the days of the “Index Librorum Prohibitorum”?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Index_Librorum_Prohibitorum
Why do books have to be swapped out due to ideological changes? Because ideology changes! Let’s go back to 1996 when Bill Clinton was signing the hateful Defense of Marriage Act banning federal recognition of (a) two guys being married, (b) three guys and a goat being married, (c) one guy and four girls being married, etc. In that benighted time no library needed books on the Rainbow Flag Religion because it plainly wasn’t yet the official state religion of the United States. Today, by contrast, every public library needs books for patrons of all ages on the miracles of Rainbow Flagism. Gender-affirming surgery wasn’t paid for by taxpayers 30 years ago while today it is (though Maskachusetts hatefully limits each Medicaid beneficiary to just a single gender change). So a library needs a lot more books on gender affirming surgery.
I guess you’re right — some purging might be necessary to make room for ideological changes and, more importantly, as you correctly point out, advances in science.
@Anonymous,
> If a book is already in the library, what is the compelling reason to remove it?
Because a public library is a public library (aka, not private) and cannot be in the business of championing or promoting any group or ideology. Enough said.
Still not convinced? Try walking into a public library and suggest to the librarian to display books that promote the idea of no sex before marriage. Last year, out of frustration and experiment I did, and I was given a look.