What About the Book?

Joseph Goldstein is an elderly New York lawyer and ex-city magistrate who likes to tilt at educational windmills--and sometimes bowls them over. In 1940 he helped unseat Bertrand Russell from a teaching chair at the College of the City of New York on the grounds that Russell's writings were "lecherous, salacious . . . lustful." Last week Goldstein took off on another joust: unless two books which he considered "a menace" were banned from classrooms and public-school libraries within five days, he threatened to sue the Board of Education. The two books were Oliver Twist (the British film version of which has been withheld from U.S. movie theaters as a result of protests from Jewish groups--TIME, Oct. 4) and The Merchant of Venice.

In a petition to the board, Goldstein charged that the books plant "in the student in our public schools the seeds of anti-Semitism . . . [which] will pay dividends in hate, prejudice, intolerance and bigotry for generations to come." The character of Dickens' Fagin, Goldstein maintained, "holds the Jew up to ... contempt, ridicule and depicts the Jew as as fiend ... a murderer . . ." Shylock was hardly better; "the synonym for usurer, cheat . . . hater of all Christians."

By approving such reading matter, Goldstein charged, the board is defeating its own purpose of instilling in the children tolerance and "a love of neighbor and mankind." Since the schools are supported by Christians and Jews alike, he argued, the board's approval of such books is "an illegal, arbitrary and defenseless exercise of power . . ."

Lawyer Goldstein said that "at least a dozen organizations" were backing him, but he was not ready to name them last week. Apparently he did not speak for B'nai B'rith's Anti-Defamation League, whose national director, Benjamin R. Epstein, declared: "We believe Mr. Goldstein's threatened resort to litigation . . . is unwise. A decent respect for academic freedom means that the police power of the state is resorted to only in those cases where the material is intended to undermine the democratic fabric and even then, only in extreme cases."

At week's end city educational authorities, with a defiant glint in the eye, dared Goldstein to do his worst. Said Dr. Paul A. Kennedy, assistant superintendent of schools: "I see he's going to pick our books for us! He is not ... We're just going to continue in our regular, slow, somewhat dumb schoolteacher fashion to do the best we can for the children."

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