Art Spiegelman’s achingly poignant and powerful graphic novel, “Maus: A Survivor’s Tale,” has been in the news recently with the decision by the board of education of McMinn County in southeastern Tennessee to ban the book from its eighth-grade curriculum. The graphic novel was awarded a Pulitzer Prize and recounts Spiegelman’s parents’ experiences from their time in Auschwitz during the Holocaust. The novel draws Jews as mice, Germans as cats, and Poles as pigs and is ultimately a mix of historical fiction and memoir which captures the horrors of the Holocaust and its postwar consequences on the Jewish community. Fortunately, the McMinn county decision has generated a powerful Streisand effect and it now appears that “Maus” will be more readily available and more widely read than it would have been had the local school board not foolishly censored ideas and banned the book.

Sadly, the nation has recently seen an uptick in book banning in our schools and our libraries and a general and dangerous impulse to cancel ideas and speech. Meanwhile many Americans willfully and knowingly self-censor to avoid mobs on social media and very real personal and professional consequences. But one bright spot in this mess surrounding “Maus” is that it is now very powerfully evident that as a medium, the graphic novel offers an incredibly deft and direct way to connect with readers and can very meaningfully promote discussion around difficult topics and questions across a wide cross section of readers. As such, I want to suggest that teachers and school districts think about incorporating more graphic novels into their lesson plans. This medium can reach students differently from text-only books and films and may actually help promote more speech, inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and debate.

Consider
the widely popular “X-Men” franchise and the complex anti-hero Magneto who is — like
so much in life — deeply complex. The books and even the movies make
it unambiguously clear that he was a Holocaust and concentration camp survivor
who witnessed his family destroyed in front of him and whose views about social
difference were shaped by the horrors of Nazi Germany. For his opposition
to conciliatory and pacifist attitudes and aggressive approach to civil
rights, his character has been compared to the likes of Malcolm
X and Jewish
Defense League founder Meir
Kahane.

Stories like “Maus” and the character of Magneto can and have already introduced younger readers to the complexities of the world, filling a concerning gap in historical knowledge. A 2020 survey found that one in 10 Americans under the age of 40 do not recall ever having heard the word “Holocaust” before. Sixty-three percent of Millennials and Gen Zers did not know six million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust, and 41 percent of Millennials think that two million or fewer people died. Comic books like “X-Men” make young readers aware of this history, keeping alive a tragic legacy at risk of being forgotten.

The Holocaust is only one of many very salient and complex themes regularly present in comics and graphic novels which often feature questions of families and relationships, love and loss, diversity and multiculturalism, and the human condition. And comics and graphic novels have been shown to draw large numbers of people from disparate backgrounds together. They also have the capacity to present material that is viewed as more academic and often more dense and harder with which to meaningfully connect.

But it is worth noting that there is far more diversity of work beyond the Holocaust, including Guy Delisle’s 2012 masterpiece, “Jerusalem: Chronicles from the Holy City,” which takes on a stranger-in-a-strange-land point of view and seeks to examine the many conflicts that Christian, Jewish, and Muslim populations that call Jerusalem home count as quotidian: checkpoints, traffic jams, and holidays. Another is “Berlin,” a three-part work which presents an intricate look at the fall of the Weimar Republic through the eyes of its citizens and beautifully captures the human psyche and struggles that many face daily. There are also books such as George Takai’s “They Called Us Enemy” or John Lewis’ “March,” which vividly detail moments of American turmoil and eventual growth and healing.

My point is really simple: Graphic novels like “Maus” resonate with educators, school boards, and — most importantly — students because they present history and memoirs in compelling and approachable ways. I have been reading graphic novels for over three decades and have learned so much more about the human condition and social change from these beautiful works. Students should read “Maus,” and schools and their administrators should not do what the Nazis did — ban books, silence speech, and trample on free thought. Moreover, educators should really think about adopting more graphic novels because many can connect more deeply with the material than pure works of written history and thus bring history, biography, and social change deeply into the hearts and minds of our nation’s students.

Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College and a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute

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