Michelangelo’s statue of King David doesn’t look Jewish to our eyes. A few of the parents at the Tallahassee Classical School in Florida would prefer their kids not to look at all.

The art classes in its sixth-grade curriculum (the equivalent of Year 7) cover the Renaissance, and the syllabus includes looking at photos of the nude David.

Three parents complained that their children were upset, and that they should have been notified in advance. One of the parents used the word “pornographic”. The school board forced the principal, Hope Carrasquilla, to resign.

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Michelangelo’s David (Getty Images)

In America, unlike Britain, schools are funded from local taxes and school boards supervise the curriculum. When parents run for election to school boards, they aren’t just asserting their philistinism or their piety. It’s their civic duty.

This is what decentralised local democracy looks like in a multicultural, multireligious society.

The impulse is to deride the Tallahassee parents as philistine. But when Charedi Jews or strict Muslims raise similar objections, we tend to acknowledge the rights of conscience.

This is not just hypocrisy on our part. It reflects a deep-rooted ambivalence in American culture, and Western culture more widely.

Christianity claims to reconcile Hellenic and Judaic inheritances, but pagan nudity is not a Judaic inheritance. Americans are torn between the word and the flesh, puritanism and hedonism, high-mindedness and pornography.

To aid their reflection, members of the Tallahassee Classical School’s board might add Chaim Potok’s My Name Is Asher Lev to their reading list.

Not likely. Over in Martin County, Florida, 92 novels have been removed from high school libraries. Most of the complaints about “obscene and age-inappropriate” material were registered by Julie Marshall, the head of the local chapter of a conservative group called Moms for Liberty.

Some of the novels were by Jewish authors, including Judy Blume, whose coming-of-age novels have long enraged social conservatives, and Jodi Picoult.

Julie Marshall hasn’t read Picoult’s The Storyteller, but she knows obscenity when she hears about it. I haven’t read The Storyteller either, so I’ll quote a news report from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

In the novel, the granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor discovers that her elderly neighbour was a Nazi officer in concentration camps. It contains “several sexually graphic scenes, including depictions of sexual assault by Nazi guards”, and the neighbour asks the girl to help him commit suicide.

This is a rerun of the fuss in Tennessee in February 2022, when a school board withdrew Art Spiegelman’s Maus because it contained images of nudity and suicide, and “rough, objectionable language”. Spiegelman said the board “may possibly not be Nazis, maybe”.

This week, Picoult responded with similar innuendo. She said the timing felt “strangely ironic”, given that she has co-written a musical adaptation of Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief, which includes a book-burning.

Truly, there’s no business like Shoah business. As you’re all adults, you can decide for yourselves at what age you want your children to read the “graphic” scenes of Nazis sexually assaulting Jews in The Storyteller or tap their toes to the genocidal jingles in The Book Thief.

Personally, I find this kind of profiteering from mass murder somewhat distasteful. If it’s not great art — and no one’s claiming that Picoult is a Michelangelo of the middle school — then it tends towards the pornographic.

And the distortions of fictional narratives are demonstrably counterproductive to the aims of Holocaust education, which is to teach the facts. But “You do you”, as we say here.

Whatever you think, none of this is about silencing Jews, burning books, or fascism. Similarly, complaining about Michelangelo’s David might be misplaced, but it’s not anti-Italian activism.

Like Tennessee, Florida mandates Holocaust education in all schools. The issues are how it is taught, whether teaching and library materials meet the legal standard, and how far parental rights extend into the curriculum.

The liberal activist teachers impose, the conservative activist parents depose. The mainstream parents pay their taxes, but they and their children are cheated. The sensitivities of minorities, Jewish or Christian, are collateral damage. But the rights of minorities are interdependent.