In the fall of 2023, a Miami-Dade County middle school participated in a Holocaust education program with the organization Names Not Numbers, which brings professional filmmakers to schools to capture student interviews of Holocaust survivors. According to the teacher who shared this account (and who requested that he and his school not be named for fear of retaliation), on filming day the students escorted their guests to the school library in search of that most ubiquitous of interview backdrops: a loaded bookshelf. When they got there, however, they found the shelves empty and the books strewn across the floor; administrative assistants—the school no longer employs librarians for budgetary reasons—were sorting through the piles in an attempt to comply with Florida House Bill 1467, which requires that all school books be reviewed for “pornographic” or “inappropriate” content, under threat of felony charges. The arrival of the students, alongside those elders who would momentarily testify about the fate of societies that ban books, sent the assistants scrambling to restock at least the portion of the shelves that would enter the camera’s frame. But the scene’s significance was not lost on the teacher, who later described feeling unsettled by the collapse between past and present, the uncanny experience of discovering oneself within history. …more
