A Texas public school fired an eighth-grade English teacher who assigned the reading Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graphic Adaptation, a graphic version of Anne’s unforgettable diary. The adaptation is particularly contentious because it depicts passages in which Anne describes her genitalia, expresses curiosity about the female body, and talks about menstruation. (Anne’s father, Otto, exerted editorial control over the original manuscript, and some editions of Anne’s diary have omitted these passages, as well as other material he disapproved of, like criticisms of his marriage.)
This graphic adaptation has been the subject of similar controversies before. A Florida principal removed it from the school’s library after a Moms for Liberty group complained. One Texas school district temporarily removed it from its library shelves after a parent objected, then returned it.
And I don't know if that district made the right call, but let's call a duck a duck here, alright? Something few are willing to do these days because being hateful is much more fun and convenient.
Anne Frank's diaries are still available in those libraries. This one just isnt.👇 pic.twitter.com/q32L0S5E6T
— Theo Jordan (@Theo_TJ_Jordan) April 11, 2023
The most recent episode — which is likely not over, since the fired teacher has reportedly hired an attorney — is being portrayed as conservatives wanting to ban Anne’s diary entirely, when in fact the dispute was over the graphic adaptation. Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, tweeted, “Texas teacher fired for reading Diary of Anne Frank to class-THIS Speaks for itself!!!” Ben Collins, a reporter with NBC News, tweeted to his more than 400,000 followers that “this is the apology a Houston school district sent to parents for assigning an illustrated version of Anne Frank’s Diary to students” and that “the teacher was fired for assigning it,” with an image attached. When a reply pointed out that the objections were not to the diary itself, he responded, “who gives a sh*t.”
Generally, I’m against sanitizing the contents of books. I find the aversion to the sexual passages in the diary naïve: It shouldn’t surprise anyone that a teenage girl wrote about undergoing puberty in her diary. Still, I think parents could reasonably argue that schools should assign an edition of the diary without descriptions of puberty, and that such an edition wouldn’t detract from the larger educational mission of studying the Holocaust.
But whatever one thinks about presenting students with a revised or an unrevised text of Anne Frank’s diary, that is completely distinct from whether middle-school students benefit from reading a graphic-novel version for class.
Why were eighth graders assigned to read a graphic adaptation of Anne Frank’s diary rather than her own writing, whether the latter contained the sexual passages or not? Anne Frank received her diary on her 13th birthday. Students in eighth grade are usually ages 13 or 14. If she was old enough to write the diary, then they are old enough to read it.
The graphic adaptation betrays Anne by reducing her hardship to cartoonish drawings with captions, and it betrays teenage students by assuming they aren’t emotionally and intellectually mature enough to grapple with the material. Perhaps most egregiously, it’s a simplification that dishonors the care that Anne devoted to her writing. The issue is not whether teenagers are prompted to engage with her explicit passages; it’s whether they’re prompted to engage with her writing at all.