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Feature: Book critics un-'Bow'ed
Controversy over alleged pro-Christian book fails to convert San Rafael education board

by Ronnie Cohen

Emily Packer was studying for her bat mitzvah last year when her seventh-grade social studies teacher assigned The Bronze Bow. The historic novel set in Roman-occupied Israel at the time of Jesus Christ confused and upset Emily. She and her Jewish classmates at Davidson Middle School believed the story of a young Jewish rebel who comes to believe in Jesus denigrated their own religion and contradicted their religious training.

"It's an anti-Semitic book," Emily said. "I didn't think I should be reading it in my social studies class. It's like they were questioning my beliefs about what I've been taught through my religious studies. It was going against everything I was taught."

Emily told her parents about the book. After they read it, they talked to the social studies teacher and the principal about removing it from the curriculum. More than a year later, the book, written in 1961 as a text for a Sunday school teacher's class, remains assigned reading in seventh-grade honors social studies at Davidson and Venetia Valley schools.

This week, two dozen parents, teachers, rabbis, priests and other religious leaders urged the San Rafael City Schools' Board of Education to remove the book from the curriculum.

"This book is a religious book," Rev. Carol Hovis, executive director of the Marin Interfaith Council, told the board. "The author wrote it for children to know and love Jesus. If we're going to build relationships between Jews and Christians and Muslims, then a book like this needs to be in a different setting than a public school."

At least three board members agreed that The Bronze Bow, which has been taught in San Rafael schools since 1999 as part of a unit on ancient Rome, should be taken off the seventh-grade reading list. But the board put off voting and instead decided to revisit the issue before the end of the school year.

The school board's inaction frustrated Emily's mother, Margaret Perlstein, who wants to spare her younger child the pain Emily endured while studying The Bronze Bow. "It's been a long, hard road," Perlstein told the board. After the meeting, she said, "We had momentum, and I'm afraid we'll lose it."

School board member Jenny Calloway summed up the board majority's stated (but so-far unofficial) position: "The book isn't worth it for me."

"It's caused enough controversy," said board member Greg Knell. "It doesn't add enough."

A district curriculum advisory committee had recommended keeping the book, but allowing students to choose a different one. Aref Ahmadia, a parent representative on the curriculum advisory committee and chairman of the Marin County chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, made the successful motion in October to leave the book in seventh-grade honors social studies. "It's a great book. I got attached to it," said Ahmadia, who grew up in Lebanon and recognized The Bronze Bow's landscape as the landscape of his childhood.

"If I oppose this book, it's opening a can of worms," Ahmadia said during an interview in his San Rafael cafe before this week's school board meeting. "Then who's going to be standing next in line [to question books in the curriculum], the Shiite, the Sunni, other sects of the Jews, the Christians?"

Board member Jon Loberg suggested a seventh-grader who elected to read a different book than his or her classmates would be chastised as an outsider. "There are plenty of other great books out there," Loberg said. "My recommendation is pull it from the reading list and put it in the library where it belongs."

School board president Natu Tuatagaloa was the only board member who clearly advocated keeping the book in the classroom. "The passion for this topic is incredible," he said. "I don't personally think taking a book out of the curriculum is the right choice. There are issues with the way the book needs to be taught. I think it develops conversation."

• • • •

IT IS A conversation Emily Packer, her Jewish friends and some of her Christian friends would prefer not to have in school.

Another Jewish student in Emily's class said she was shocked her teacher required the class to read The Bronze Bow. "None of the Jewish characters are positively portrayed," said the student, who spoke privately and on the condition of anonymity. "The hero is angry until he discovers Jesus. Then he loses his anger and starts to forgive people and decides that he can be a better person.

"It made us wonder if my teacher was anti-Semitic, and we wondered why we were reading this book, which was so obviously slanted."

Even more troubling for the Jewish students reading The Bronze Bow last year was one of the questions they were asked about the book. "Why do you think the people believed they were healed by Jesus?" a literature response guide asked.

The question stunned Emily. Not knowing how to respond, she suggested a placebo effect.

Emily and her family talked about The Bronze Bow with their rabbi, Stacy Friedman of Congregation Rodef Sholom. Friedman read the book, simmering over its negative depiction of Jews and its glorification of Christ. She told the school board that finding the book on a public school curriculum reminded her of growing up in Salt Lake City, where she graduated from high school on a Friday night, her Sabbath, after listening to a prayer about Jesus.

"The Bronze Bow denigrates Judaism and Jewish rituals," Friedman said. "I teach Jewish children every day. This smacks in the face of everything I am trying to do."

• • • •

IN A SEPARATE interview, Friedman said: "The book shows Jesus and his teachings in a light far more compelling than Judaism. It reinforces the very prejudicial notion that the Jews killed Jesus. That the Jews killed Jesus was at the core of anti-Semitism, and the impetus for hundreds of years of torture and hatred and murder of the Jews."

In 1962, the year after Elizabeth George Speare wrote The Bronze Bow, it won the prestigious Newbery Medal. Upon accepting the award, Speare explained that she wrote the book while teaching Sunday school because she "longed to lift the personality of Jesus off the flat and lifeless pages of our textbook."

Friedman noted that Speare wrote the book a few years before the Vatican repudiated Jewish guilt for Jesus' death.

"At first glance, this book does not seem like anything more than a coming-of-age story," Perlstein told the school board. "Nevertheless, it ends up being a conversion story. What is conversion except a determination that one religion is superior to another and then choosing it? How can that possibly fit into a public-school curriculum? How can a book that declares that the rabbis are so angered with Jesus that they may want to kill him be considered non-inflammatory and religiously neutral?

"Our Constitution demands separation of church and state. Our state education code demands materials be presented with religious neutrality. This book clearly crosses both those boundaries."

In a separate interview, Leonard Levy, one of the Davidson parents leading the movement to rid the curriculum of The Bronze Bow, said, as a filmmaker he visualized Jesus bathed in light throughout the novel.

Rev. Bruce Bramlett, who lives in Terra Linda, asked the school board: "Why do you feel it is important to teach bad history? It's not even right history. This is about the longest hatred ever experienced on this earth. It is about anti-Semitism. It's sort of like the racism that invades our culture. To use this book as even a fictionalized version of history ought to be challenged by this board."

Other than Davidson and Venetia Valley, Perlstein said the only Marin County school she found that was assigning the book was Hall Middle School in Larkspur. But last month, Perlstein said, Hall's English teachers considered the arguments of the Davidson Bronze Bow opponents and decided to replace the book.

Initially, Perlstein believed it would be as easy at Davidson.

"I think we really need to think about empathy," parent Alicia Malet Klein, who described herself as a practicing Catholic, told the school board. "I have been asking myself not, 'why not this book,' but 'why this book.' "

Contact Ronnie Cohen at ronniecohen@comcast.net.