Substacks
Talk it out Judd Legum
On Monday, Popular Information reported that Scholastic is facilitating the exclusion of books that feature people of color or LGBTQ characters from its book fairs. The company, under pressure from right-wing ideologues, has created a collection of these titles and is offering school officials the ability to remove all of them. Our report broke the news on what books are being targeted, a list that includes biographies of civil rights icon John Lewis and Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.
Here’s an update on what’s happened since:
1. The story was picked up by numerous major media outlets, including The New York Times, CNN, NPR, CBS, Insider, The Daily Beast, The Daily Mail, and The Intercept.
2. Librarians across the country are protesting Scholastic’s policy, with some deciding to cancel their Scholastic book fairs. Several of Scholastic’s authors are also publicly criticizing the company.
3. PEN America, one of the nation’s leading non-profits dedicated to free expression, has written an open letter to Scholastic calling on the company to end the policy.
We’ll keep you updated as this story develops.
Today, however, I want to hear from you. What’s on your mind? What topics should be on Popular Information’s radar? You can leave your thoughts in the discussion thread linked below, starting now. I’ll be dropping by later today to answer any questions.
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In 2019 a curator from the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C., and an elderly scholar from Jerusalem were at work on an odd manuscript: a pocket-sized Hebrew book of uncertain age and origin.
Over the years, the manuscript had been variously identified as a fragment of the Talmud, a seventeenth-century book of Psalms, a relic from Babylon, a ninth-century prayer book, and a remnant of a famous medieval repository of texts from a synagogue in Cairo. It was rare enough to draw the attention of scholars, if not the public. Some of the pages contained a previously unknown poem for the Jewish festival of Sukkot. On one page, an untrained scribe, perhaps a child practicing lessons, wrote out the Hebrew alphabet. Other pages had a version of the Haggadah, the text read by Jewish families at the festive Passover meal.
The Jerusalem scholar, Malachi Beit-Arié, had a hunch that the book’s story was other, and older, than it seemed.
Beit-Arié, 82 at the time, was one of the world’s preeminent authorities on Hebrew manuscripts, and his hunches were taken seriously. (He died four years later, in 2023.) The research team sent four parchment fragments for carbon dating, then waited for several months in suspense.
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