Responsa is an editorial column written by members of the Jewish Currents staff and reflects a collective discussion.

We are sharing an excerpt from our newly-published Florida issue Responsa below. You can read the full article on our website.

In the fall of 2023, a Miami-Dade County middle school participated in a Holocaust education program with the organization Names Not Numbers, which brings professional filmmakers to schools to capture student interviews of Holocaust survivors. According to the teacher who shared this account (and who requested that he and his school not be named for fear of retaliation), on filming day the students escorted their guests to the school library in search of that most ubiquitous of interview backdrops: a loaded bookshelf. When they got there, however, they found the shelves empty and the books strewn across the floor; administrative assistants—the school no longer employs librarians for budgetary reasons—were sorting through the piles in an attempt to comply with Florida House Bill 1467, which requires that all school books be reviewed for “pornographic” or “inappropriate” content, under threat of felony charges. The arrival of the students, alongside those elders who would momentarily testify about the fate of societies that ban books, sent the assistants scrambling to restock at least the portion of the shelves that would enter the camera’s frame. But the scene’s significance was not lost on the teacher, who later described feeling unsettled by the collapse between past and present, the uncanny experience of discovering oneself within history.

Library shelves covered in construction paper, blocked off in tape, or sitting completely empty have become a common Floridian spectacle since the passage of HB 1467, part of Governor Ron DeSantis’s broader efforts to suppress instruction on shameful legacies of racism and to force queer life back into the shadows. Last year, nearly 2,700 books were flagged for restriction or removal by Florida schools and public libraries. For many American Jews—the majority of them self-professed liberals—these tableaus of censorship have raised the specter of Nazi Germany. “Why is this a Jewish issue?” Florida-based Reform rabbi Jeffrey Salkin wrote in a Religion News Service column last year. “Because we Jews know how this ends.” The resonance has become particularly stark as Holocaust literature has increasingly been caught in the dragnet: Four Florida counties have pulled a graphic novel adaptation of The Diary of Anne Frank from the shelves due to a section, true to the original unabridged diary, in which Frank explores her sexual feelings toward other girls. Other Holocaust books banned in various counties for their supposed moral infractions include Jodi Picoult’s bestselling novel The Storyteller, Art Spiegelman’s classic graphic memoir Maus, and William Styron’s blockbuster Sophie’s Choice. Such draconian policies have mirrored or provided models for similar censorship campaigns in other states, including Texas, Tennessee, and Missouri.

In response to the precipitous rise in book bans since 2021, mainstream Jewish institutions have sounded the alarm. That year, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) published a short resource on the dangers of book banning, arguing that “children’s books open doors to conversations about identity, diversity, bias, and social justice—conversations that are an integral part of a young person’s education.” A few of the organization’s chapters in the South, as well as some Jewish Federations, have also spoken up against right-wing censorship campaigns in their local contexts. In 2023, the Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC) of Greater New Orleans even adopted a resolution declaring that book bans are “antithetical to Jewish values.”

And yet, judging by the actions of many of these same institutions, it would seem that censorship is simpatico with Jewish values when the subject is Palestine. For example, in December, the Jewish Federation of Greater MetroWest New Jersey announced that after “over a year of intense lobbying,” it had successfully convinced Newark Public Schools to remove A Little Piece of Ground, a novel about a Palestinian boy living in Ramallah, from the sixth-grade curriculum. In a rationale that echoes DeSantis’s 2022 Stop WOKE Act, which prohibits the acknowledgment of systems of racial supremacy, Federation CEO Dov Ben-Shimon wrote that “for the 12-year-old child who was assigned this book . . . there was no conclusion they could possibly reach except that Israel is the aggressor, and the Palestinians are the victims.” Ben-Shimon specified that while the organization was loath to be seen as encouraging book banning in the “current climate,” the extraordinary stakes compelled them to intervene. Across the country, such suppression has been not the exception but the rule. Amid the rise of right-wing attacks on critical race theory, ethnic studies, and DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) in recent years, Jewish institutions have fought in courtrooms, local committee meetings, state departments of education, and university presidents’ offices to ensure that Palestinian history is not taught anywhere, from K-12 through higher ed.

These dynamics have profoundly intensified since the start of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, as Jewish groups desperate to preserve US support for Israel have thrown their weight behind attacks on academic institutions. Faced with truths they cannot bear, Jewish communities have cried “Less Truth!”; inevitably, though to their own surprise, that impulse has united them with others intent on suppressing in­convenient histories. By marshaling their resources to whip major US political and cultural institutions into a moral panic over alleged antisemitism, these groups—including those that have long understood themselves to be at odds with the right—have become instrumental to the right’s agenda of corporatizing universities, defunding public education, rolling back tenure, and repressing dissent. In the process, Jewish organizations have handed those violently authoritarian movements an essential alibi in the figure of a perfect victim, whose eternal and indisputable plight becomes a means to recast aggression as defense. Here, the proclaimed vulnerability of the Jew testifies not to the need for liberal democracy—which American Jews have long credited with their flourishing—but to the need to destroy it altogether. Politicians across the political spectrum have already leveraged this figure to justify the mass arrest of nonviolent protesters by heavily-armed police in scenes that highlight the utter insufficiency of our democracy even as they augur its collapse. In this light, the empty libraries of DeSantis’s Florida herald a dire future—an unsubtle warning of the consequences of this devil’s bargain.