Fagin in Oliver Twist and Shylock in Merchant of Venice were both Jews who were drawn unfavorably. But if that were the test for literature's acceptability in the schools, it ventures, then surely Othello would need to be banned in the South for its challenge to white supremacy; the works of Thomas Wolfe from the schools of the North, for his occasional disparagement of blacks and Jews; the earlier works of John Dos Passos, Theodore Dreiser, Frank Norris, and Upton Sinclair, for their unfavorable casting of the businessman; Henry James from the British schools for his painting Americans as honest if crude, while the British were deemed sleek and deceitful.

Portia in The Merchant of Venice showed qualities of fairness and justice; Oliver Twist, himself, possessed admirable qualities. Neither, it concludes, should be taken from the shelves simply because they were cast alongside unfavorable representations of characters identified as Jews. And that was so, even if it meant that some students would form negative stereotypes from these characters.

Incidentally, while the piece is not specific as to passages from the authors listed as among those who would need be banned if the criterion was some temptation to the censorious by way of identity of the unsympathetic character as belonging to a group, rather than presentation of the characters as null ciphers but for their actions and morals, the following passage from Chapter 9 of Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel generally fits that which the piece doubtless had in mind:

Or, crouched in the concealing shrubbery of Gant's yard, they waited for romantic negro couples climbing homewards, jerking by a cord, as their victims came upon the spot, a stuffed black snake-appearing stocking. And the dark was shrill with laughter as the loud rich comic voices stammered, stopped, and screamed.

Or they stoned the cycling black boy of the markets, as he swerved down gracefully into an alley. Nor did they hate them: clowns are black. They had learned, as well, that it was proper to cuff these people kindly, curse them cheerfully, feed them magnanimously. Men are kind to a faithful wagging dog, but he must not walk habitually upon two legs. They knew that they must "take nothin' off a nigger," and that the beginnings of argument could best be scotched with a club and a broken head. Only, you couldn't break a nigger's head.

They spat joyously upon the Jews. Drown a Jew and hit a nigger.

The boys would wait on the Jews, follow them home shouting "Goose Grease! Goose Grease!" which, they were convinced, was the chief staple of Semitic diet; or with the blind acceptance of little boys of some traditional, or mangled, or imaginary catchword of abuse, they would yell after their muttering and tormented victim: "Veeshamadye Veeshamadye!" confident that they had pronounced the most unspeakable, to Jewish ears, of affronts.

Eugene had no interest in pogroms, but it was a fetich with Max. The chief object of their torture was a little furtive-faced boy, whose name was Isaac Lipinski. They pounced cattishly at him when he appeared, harried him down alleys, over fences, across yards, into barns, stables, and his own house; he moved with amazing speed and stealth, escaping fantastically, teasing them to the pursuit, thumbing his fingers at them, and grinning with wide Kike constant derision.

Or, steeped catlike in the wickedness of darkness, adrift in the brooding promise of the neighborhood, they would cluster silently under a Jew's home, grouped in a sniggering huddle as they listened to the rich excited voices, the throaty accentuation of the women; or convulsed at the hysterical quarrels which shook the Jew-walls almost nightly.

Once, shrieking with laughter, they followed a running fight through the streets between a young Jew and his father-in-law, in which each was pursued and pummelled, or pursuing and pummelling; and on the day when Louis Greenberg, a pale Jew returned from college, had killed himself by drinking carbolic acid, they stood curiously outside the dingy wailing house, shaken by sudden glee as they saw his father, a bearded orthodox old Jew, clothed in rusty, greasy black, and wearing a scarred derby, approach running up the hill to his home, shaking his hands in the air, and wailing rhythmically:

"Oi, yoi yoi yoi yoi,
  Oi yoi yoi yoi yoi,
  Oi yoi yoi yoi yoi."

But such a passage, if it was one of those held in mind by the editorial, would not constitute, in itself, derision or disparagement, but rather stand as an authentic chronicle, as any good reporter might relate, of the state of things as Mr. Wolfe remembered it from the Asheville of his childhood, turned by the novelist's craft into the towns of millions in Altamont, perhaps, aided in amalgam measurably by the latter Twenties conversations picked up in the streets of New York City where he indited the novel, intending it as a reflection for universal consumption of how ugly such childish behavior is, whether in children or adults.

Such, we posit, is far more powerful than merely self-righteously branding something racist, anti-Semitic, anti-business, what have you, betraying more about the person seeking the ban than the honest chronicler seeking, in literary manner, a reflection in the golden eye of the reader. To ban it for such contents only highlights those passages and characters for all the wrong reasons, creating a boxed, rather than expansive, view of the world, inclusive of all persons within it, not just one group or another, recognizing the while that everyone is an individual and no one should, because of behavior deemed unsuitable to the accepted social conventions of the particular surrounding milieu, be cast as part of a subset of humanity, replete with all preconceived attendant characteristics, merely by dint of readily observable traits, whether it be blue eyes, curly hair, different pigment of the skin or any other difference from thou, including associated closely held opinions, beliefs, and perspectives.

And was not that really the point of Shakespeare's presentation of Shylock, not solely as the Jewish money-lender ready to exact his bond of a pound of flesh but also as the person who, himself, bled, laughed, was subject to the laws of mortality, felt shame when spat upon in public, and would be avenged when wronged?

The point ought be to teach students how to read and understand literature with objectivity, not to ban it for erroneous perceptions held by those who, for deficiencies in their own education or simply wont of proper attention, never learned the art.

A piece from the Christian Science Monitor, titled "A Word to the Unwise", states that there was wisdom in the old story in which the mother advised her children to be good and not to put peas in the baby's ears. There was, to the contrary, danger in the misguided attempt to keep subversive doctrines off college campuses.