Bowing to pressure from conservatives, the superintendent of a Texas school district agreed earlier this month to remove 676 books from its libraries, including seminal texts on the Holocaust and antisemitism, according to a report by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
That superintendent, Carol Perez, is now facing her own removal by a board of trustees that recently voted to initiate a separation process on the grounds that her 10-year contract is illegal, clearly violating a Texas law that limits such contracts to five years.
Though the censorship has not been cited as a cause for removal, the decision by the trustees came just weeks after she provoked backlash by immediately surrendering to a demand from right-wing activists to purge “very sexually explicit” and “filthy and evil” books, rather than asking them to go through a formal challenge process first.
The activists, led by a local pastor and outspoken Israel advocate Luis Cabrera, had been pushing the Mission Consolidated Independent School District in south Texas to remove books about gender, sexuality and race; two groups that he is an active member of — Citizens Defending Freedom and Remnant Alliance — also wants to rid libraries of books about the Holocaust.