Texas district reinstates Anne Frank’s diary on to school bookshelves

The Texas school district that ordered a version of Anne Frank’s diary to be removed from its shelves last week says it has added the book back into its schools after igniting a media firestorm, as outside groups prepared to send hundreds of copies of the famed Holocaust text to the district.

Keller Independent School District outside Fort Worth had returned Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graphic Adaptation as of Friday, along with the Bible and a children’s graphic novel, the district told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

The district also updated its database of books that have been challenged by parents to indicate that these texts had been reinstated.

The 2018 graphic reimagining of the famous Holocaust diary was caught up, along with the Bible, in a conservative-led push to remove “pornographic” material from the district.

The resulting attention made the district the poster child of a national controversy about conservative campaigns to remove books from schools, particularly ones dealing with race, gender and sexual identity.

Some Jewish-themed books have been ensnared in the campaigns.

The head of the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee, Hadassah and other Jewish groups had condemned the Keller school board’s actions.

The district soon insisted that the books were only “under re-evaluation.”

Board president Charles Randklev lashed out at the media and outside critics of the district during the board’s public meeting Monday.

“The media has done an absolute[ly] terrible job on covering what’s happened over the last week within Keller ISD,” he said in a statement, to applause and some yells in the room. “For the record, Keller ISD is not banning the Bible or Anne Frank.”

Attacking what he said was “a misinformation campaign of lies” and an “unhinged mob,” Randklev said the board’s aims were “to protect our children from pornographic material” and “championing transparency by opening up the procurement and challenge process to the public.”

Prior to the board’s announcement that the graphic diary would be back on shelves, multiple organisations said they intended to send copies of different versions of the diary to the district, in a repeat of events from earlier this year when copies of Maus flooded into a rural Tennessee school district that had removed the book from its curriculum.

New Jersey-based kosher meat provisioner Abeles & Heymann announced Monday morning that the company would “gift” 50 copies of both the original and graphic versions of Frank’s diary to the district.

“Antisemitism and Holocaust denial take many forms. Removing a book that tells the true story of a Jewish girl who was killed by Nazis is one of them,” Seth Leavitt, the CEO of Abeles & Heymann, said in the release Monday.

“I’m sending these books so that the people of Keller, Texas have the opportunity to read her story. We cannot erase history.”

In addition, Laney Hawes, a Keller parent who voted on the initial committee to keep Anne Frank in schools and has since become a leading local voice against the board’s policies, said that a different outside benefactor, Nancy Schultz, would be shipping another 100 copies of the books to Keller. Hawes told JTA that Keller would now have enough copies of the diary to put in libraries in the district across multiple grade levels.

“Before this there were only a handful of copies of the books in our school district,” she said. “Now we hope to have them in every single middle, intermediate, and high school library.”