ORLANDO, Fla. — A high school along Florida’s Atlantic Coast has removed a graphic novel based on the diary of Anne Frank after a leader of a conservative advocacy group challenged it, claiming it minimized the Holocaust.
“Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graphic Adaptation” was removed from a library at Vero Beach High School after a leader of Moms for Liberty in Indian River County raised an objection. The school’s principal agreed with the objection, and the book was removed last month.
The book at one point shows the protagonist walking in a park, enchanted by female nude statues, and later proposing to a friend that they show each other their breasts.
Under the school district’s policy, the principal makes the decision on a challenged book. If someone disagrees with a decision to keep the disputed book on the shelves, it can be appealed to a districtwide committee. The Anne Frank graphic novel had been checked out twice before it was removed, Cristen Maddux, a spokeswoman for the School District of Indian River County, said Monday.
Vero Beach is 105 miles southeast of Orlando.
Other books about Anne Frank and copies of the published diary she wrote chronicling her time hiding from the Nazis with her family and other Jews in German-occupied Amsterdam remain in the school systems’ libraries. The Jewish teenager’s diary was published in 1947, several years after she died in a concentration camp, and it has become a classic read by tens of millions of people around the world.
By law, Florida schools are required to teach about the Holocaust, and nothing has changed in that respect, Maddux said.
“The feedback that the Holocaust is being removed from the curriculum and students aren’t knowledgeable about what happened, that is not the case at all,” Maddux said. “It’s just a challenged book and the principal removed it.”
Besides the Anne Frank graphic novel, Moms for Liberty in Indian River County objected to three books in the “Assassination…
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