by Jamal Ali

Book banning, usually associated with right-wing extremists in red states aiming to protect children from “woke” ideologies, appears to be alive and well in Newark. Despite the assertion of members of the Newark Board of Education that “we do not ban books in Newark,” officials in Newark Public Schools seem to have succumbed to pressure from an outside interest group and removed the book A Little Piece of Ground from the sixth-grade curriculum. When the book was added to the sixth-grade reading list for Newark schools in the summer of 2022, it immediately drew the ire of pro-Israel organizations, who were outraged that it fails to depict Israel in a favorable light. Rounds of intense lobbying and persistent pleading to Newark Public Schools were initially rebuffed but eventually paid off, as the book was removed from the curriculum only a year later. Its removal was confirmed by District spokesperson Nancy Deering in January 2024.

A Little Piece of Ground is a novel by Elizabeth Laird and Sonia Nimr. Laird is British, and Nimr is Palestinian. Both are accomplished writers of Young Adult fiction. Set in the West Bank, the book depicts the life of a Palestinian teenage boy named Karim who, while suffering from the cruelty and arbitrariness of Israeli occupation, including being shot in the leg, also tries to live a typical teenage life, with typical teenage interests. 

Karim dreams of being a soccer player. He and a friend find a piece of land that would make a perfect soccer field, and over time set about clearing it and preparing it for play. The book details a number of harrowing incidents. On a car trip to the family olive groves, the car carrying Karim and his family is stopped by Israeli soldiers. Karim’s father is forced to exit the car, strip to his underwear, and line up with other men similarly denuded. Later, when they eventually arrive at the family olive grove, they find that an Israeli settlement had been built nearby. When they go to harvest their olives, they are chased away and shot at by armed settlers who tell them to never pick olives there again.

Later, Karim is forced to hide in an abandoned car for two nights near the soccer field to avoid being caught by the Israeli soldiers who are operating nearby. When he thinks the tanks are gone, he leaves, only to be discovered and shot in the leg by an Israeli sniper. His brother Jamal finds him and helps him sneak to the hospital, all the while running from hiding place to hiding place to avoid the Israeli soldiers who are enforcing a curfew. The hospital stay is difficult. No one is allowed to leave during the curfew. Doctors and nurses are not permitted to be relieved by a new shift, and food and water supplies begin to run low. Karim and the people of his village are frequently subjected to curfews imposed by the Israeli army, during which time no one is allowed to leave their home. The curfew is sometimes lifted for a short period, at which point all of the families of the town converge on grocery stores and other establishments to replenish their supplies in preparation for the impending reimposition of the curfew.

When the book was first adopted into the curriculum, the request of pro-Israel activists to remove it were rejected. “I told them to kick rocks,” said the Superintendent of Newark Schools, Roger León. The Zionist Organization of America sent a letter to León, claiming that “[t]he book is filled with misleading anti-Israel statements and outright lies . . . this book will poison impressionable children . . . to hate Jews, Israelis, and the State of Israel.” Linda Scherzer, the director of the Jewish Community Relations Council of the Jewish Federation of Greater MetroWest (MetroWest), attempted to meet with León but was not granted an audience. 

Elisabeth Schwartz, a Zionist activist, attended the November 2022 and the December 2022 meetings of the Board of Education and encouraged them to remove the book from the curriculum. “I don’t understand why a book that’s divisive and hateful and paints Jews and Israelis as inhumane is being taught to sixth graders in the Newark Public Schools,” she told the board. Teaching A Little Piece of Ground, she claimed, was equivalent to using racial slurs. “The book is a guidebook on how to hurl racial epithets.” She explained that her nephew was killed seven years prior by a Palestinian terrorist, who took the lives of two additional victims as well. “His murderer not only killed him,” she said, “but another person and another Arab.” The killer, she added, receives “martyr payments” from the Palestinian Authority, which proves that “this is not a society that has shown itself to want peace.” She urged the Board to remove the book from the reading list. “I want you to pull this book from the curriculum,” she said.

Dawn Haynes, President of the Board of Education at the time, rejected these pleas. “I did have a chance to look at the book and I cannot agree with you,” she responded. “Our Office of Teaching and Learning passed the curriculum and several board members are OK with it.”

León told one parent that after the Hamas attacks on Israel of October 7, 2023 and the subsequent Israeli assault on the Gaza Strip, pro-Israel organizations stepped up the pressure to have the book banned in Newark schools, but that the book had already been removed from the curriculum by that time. It was removed from the reading list in the summer of 2023, he said. Zionist groups in early 2024 took credit for the removal of the book. In a JewishLink article from January 2024, Scherzer suggested that the removal of the book was a result of her efforts. “Dealing with this book needed the most time, attention, and effort than anything else in the seven years at Federation,” she said, “but I just couldn’t give up.” As Steve Strunsky reported, Dov Ben-Shimon, CEO of MetroWest, announced in a Facebook post on Jan. 2 that the book was removed. In a blog post from December 2023, he also wrote that the removal occurred “after over a year of intense lobbying efforts on the part of our Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC).”

The process by which the book was removed remains unknown, as do the identities of the decision makers who agreed to its removal. Without naming names, Ben-Shimon said in the same post that Scherzer and others held meetings “with Newark Board of Ed members, school officials, legal advisors in the governors office and the City of Newark, among others.” Strunsky also noted Ben-Shimon as saying that after initially resisting the call to ban the book, school district officials relented after hearing from supporters of his organization “who had deep connections within the City of Newark.”

To pro-Palestinian activists, the removal of the book from the curriculum on the basis of its pro-Palestinian viewpoint is part of a wider campaign to silence the voices of those who criticize Israel and advocate for Palestinian rights. “The effort to ban of A Little Piece of Ground is part of the broader Zionist campaign to silence the growing movement for Palestinian lives and liberation by smearing it as anti-Jewish,” said David Letwin, a lecturer at Rutgers-New Brunswick’s Mason Gross School of the Arts, who himself is Jewish. Karl Schwartz, a Newark resident and librarian in Newark Public Libraries, said, “The censoring of a book about Palestine in Newark schools is just a small example of a wave of McCarthyism that is sweeping educational institutions across the country. As hundreds of college students have been arrested for showing solidarity with the Palestinian people and students face suspension and expulsion for exercising their First Amendment rights, we must all stand up against censorship wherever it is happening.”

Whitney Strub, a Newark resident and associate professor of History at Rutgers-Newark who specializes in the history of censorship, points out that there are numerous examples of pro-Israel censorship that have occurred under the radar. “Pro-Israel censorship is widespread but not always visible,” he said. He pointed out that before A Little Piece of Ground was removed, a video on the history of Palestine was quietly taken out of the Newark Schools curriculum as a result of pressure from the Zionist Organization of America. “Sometimes the examples are highly public, such as the University of Southern California’s recent cancellation of its own valedictorian’s speech.” Referring to the removal of A Little Piece of Ground and to the removal of a poem by a Palestinian poet from a display in a Toronto library, he added, “In such local cases as Newark and Toronto, we really only know about them because the organizations working to suppress Palestinian voices bragged about their success. Clearly this situation demands greater vigilance and more investigation from anyone concerned with free expression in America.”

On January 25, 2024 and again on February 29, 2024, a group of Newark parents and activists for Palestinian rights attended the monthly meeting of the Newark Board of Education to address the ban. They argued that the book is not antisemitic, but rather depicts the harsh daily lives of Palestinians in a realistic way. They encouraged the Board to reinstate the book, and demanded answers regarding the process whereby the book was banned.

“If there was any antisemitism in this book, I wouldn’t be standing here, but there’s not,” said Geoff Johnson, a parent of Newark Public School students. “It certainly humanizes Palestinians.” Alexandra Jameson, a resident of Newark, aspiring teacher and an aunt of a student in Newark Public Schools said, “The portrayal of Israel and Israelis in this book are not extreme. They are realities Palestinians must face day in and day out.” Sarah Alaeddin, a Palestinian-American and a member of Montclair State University’s Newark Teacher Project said that the book “illustrates the realities that Palestinians have historically faced and continue to face to this day.” Mary Rizzo, an Associate Professor of History at Rutgers-Newark and a Newark resident stated, “There is nothing in this book that is not accurate to the Palestinian experience. There are curfews. There are security forces. There are checkpoints. So if we start to ban things when they depict reality, we are on very dangerous ground.” Sherry Wolf, a Jewish pro-Palestinian activist and union organizer who worked as a proofreader for Haymarket Books while the American version of the book was in preparation, dismissed the notion that the book was in any way insulting to Jews. “I’m gonna tell you right now what’s not in the book,” she said. “The word ‘Jew’ and the word ‘Judaism’ is nowhere in the book. The word ‘Hamas’ is nowhere in the book.”

The Board, insisted the activists, should reinstate the book into the curriculum of Newark Schools and not give in to pressure from outside groups. “I call on you to reverse this ban,” said Strub. Letwin urged the board, “For the sake of justice, and for the sake of this board’s integrity, say ‘no’ to the silencers of the marginalized voices you yourselves claim to elevate and immediately reinstate A Little Piece of Ground.”

They also queried the Board regarding the genesis of the ban. Karl Schwartz said, “We want the Board to answer: how exactly did this happen? Who are the people in this group? What is the relationship the Board has with them? Would the Board allow a group like Moms for Liberty to lobby them to get books with LGBT characters removed from the curriculum too? How are these decisions made? . . . It’s very concerning when a private group is able to do something like that and have outside influence on the curriculum. We want to stand for intellectual freedom and academic integrity.” “Why was this book removed?” asked Geoff Johnson. “When? By whom? Show your work. Be transparent.”

Strub also had a warning for those who banned A Little Piece of Ground: “The people who ban books never look good. When people write the histories of these topics, the people who banned Catcher in the Rye, the people who banned Lena Horne, the people who banned Heather has Two Mommies in the 1990s, they all come away as the bad guys in the historical narrative.”

The Board was bewildered by the implication that they were responsible for a book ban. Some members mentioned that they had been approached previously about removing the book from the curriculum, and that they refused. They were unaware of any further book ban. “I don’t remember a book ban even being voted on,” said Board member Crystal Williams. Dawn Haynes, Co-Vice President of the Board, referenced the previous appeal by Elisabeth Schwartz: “It was extremely clear then that we do not ban books in Newark. We were very clear that that was not to happen.” She added, “None of the nine members . . . had anything to do with a book banning here in the city of Newark. We do not agree with book banning at all. Specifically one that talks about a community of oppressed people that was written twenty years ago.” Both Haynes and board member Allison K. James-Frison cited the resolution that had recently been passed by the Essex County School Boards Association which took a stand against the banning of books.

Superintendent León read prepared remarks addressing the controversy. “The idea that a book is banned, censored–that doesn’t happen here. . . . We constantly add, and then add some more, books for our students to read. This adding, and adding more, of materials is not new or unusual. We make decisions like this every school year.” He mentioned that the district received criticism when the book was adopted, and further criticism when it was removed. “To the extent that either decision was perceived as anything other than what it actually was,” he said, “that perception was and is misguided.”

León’s remarks offered little satisfaction to the activists who had come to argue against book banning. Johnson called León’s response “meaningless.” “He served us word salad, refusing to give any meaningful information to Newark families,” he said. “You still have not told us why or how the book A Little Piece of Ground was removed from the sixth-grade curriculum.”

According to many of the activists who attended the board meeting, removing this book from the curriculum on the basis of anti-Israel bias represents the silencing of Palestinian voices. “In order to tell a story from a Palestinian perspective, which the novel does eloquently,” says Geoff Johnson, “the Israeli government and armed forces will need to be portrayed as the oppressor and Palestinians as the oppressed. . . . To ask for that not to be included in a book about Palestinian life would be no different from demanding that a novel about the lives of Black South Africans under apartheid not portray the white supremacist government and society as an oppressor of Black South Africans, which would be absurd. . . . In an apparent effort to avoid one kind of bigotry, antisemitism, that is not present in this novel, you have instead perpetrated another kind: the silencing of Palestinian stories.”

“Why don’t Palestinian lives matter?” asked Strub. “Why don’t Palestinian voices matter? Why does Palestinian literature have an asterisk by it that allows you to censor it so easily?” Alexandra Jameson said, “By removing this book from the curriculum, you have . . . shown the Palestinian community here in Newark that their experiences are invalid and that their story does not deserve to be heard.” “Book bans of all kinds silence marginalized people,” said Sarah Alaeddin, “and I don’t think the people of Newark are in support of that.”

Some argue that removing a book from a curriculum is not a true ban. Superintendent León reminded those present at the meeting that “no student or staff member has been forbidden to read any material or any literature. There is no removal of any books that we have from any of our school libraries.” To others, however, the removal of a book from a school curriculum as a result of outside pressure constitutes a true ban. Strub referred to the removal of A Little Piece of Ground as an “egregious case of censorship.” “This is a book ban,” he said at the board meeting. “This is censorship. It is abundantly clear that when an outside organization comes, asks you to remove and suppress a text, and you do it, that is censorship, and that is a book ban.” Karl Schwartz pointed out that it is “similar to how far right groups like Moms for Liberty have been able to remove books with LGBT characters and books deemed to have ‘critical race theory’ from many schools, especially in conservative states across the country.”

To the activists concerned about book bans in Newark, many questions remain unanswered. Since it is clear that Superintendent León and the Newark Board of Education did not impose a ban on A Little Piece of Ground, then who did? Was the book removed as part of a standard curricular decision? León hinted that it was. “All materials that are before our students are decided by committees of teachers and administrators in the District, and the Office of Teaching and Learning,” he told one parent. “We decide what we teach and how we teach it.” He also agreed that the book is not antisemitic, and said it is conceivable that Newark Public Schools may incorporate the book into its curriculum at some point in the future. If the removal of A Little Piece of Ground was a normal curricular decision, then why did pro-Israel groups take credit for having the book removed from Newark schools, saying that the removal was the result of intense lobbying on their part and was done with help from their supporters with “deep connections in Newark”? Why did they announce the removal of the book in early 2024 if the book had been removed in the summer of the previous year? Who are their supporters with “deep connections” who assisted in facilitating the book ban? Catherine Carrera of Newsbreak reported that a City spokesperson said the mayor’s administration was “unaware of any meetings” that the city held with Jewish Federation of Greater MetroWest. Neither the Office of the Governor, nor the Office of Teaching and Learning in Newark, nor the Jewish Federation of Greater MetroWest could be reached for comment. What is certain is that pro-Palestinian activists and those who oppose book bans will continue to seek the answers they are looking for.

Those who wish to get involved may contact members of the Newark Board of Education, and should note that the Board’s monthly meetings are open to public comment.

Jamal Ali is an Assistant Teaching Professor of Arabic at Rutgers University-New Brunswick, where he teaches all levels of Arabic language. Born and rasied in Southern California, he has a PhD in Near Eastern Languages and Cultures from UCLA and has lived extensively in the Middle East. He is the author of several teaching and reference books on Arabic and is currently working on a translation of a 10th-century Arabic linguistic text.