Nancy Drew and the Case of the Politically Incorrect Children’s Books

The young sleuth’s early mysteries were racist and anti-Semitic. Can problematic vintage texts still be valuable for kids?

By Marjorie Ingall for Tablet Magazine

When I was 10, I loved the The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries on TV. My first seditious Jewish act was playing hooky from a Holocaust memorial service, pretending to be sick so I could stay home and watch a rerun (a rerun!) of an episode in which Shaun Cassidy’s shirt was unbuttoned.

But I turned up my nose at the Hardy Boys books. I was a Nancy Drew girl, all the way. In print, when not being played by the floppy-haired 1970s equivalent of One Direction, the Hardy Boys were boring as Weetabix. They were upright Boy Scouts, doing what boys were supposed to do. Nancy, on the other hand, was singular. If Harry Potter was The Boy Who Lived, Nancy was The Girl Who Dared. She was brave, rash, fierce. She had a snazzy car. She solved crimes that flummoxed the cops, snuck around in old abandoned houses, got locked in closets by bad guys … and she always kept her cool. Her mom had died when she was little, but her dad adored and trusted her and gave her free rein to save others. She was in charge, not her boyfriend, Ned Nickerson. She was beautiful, but she wasn’t an object. She was a doer.

Little did I know Nancy Drew had such a troubled past.

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More than 200 million Nancy Drew books have been sold in the United States since their debut in 1930. Nancy has starred in numerous movies and updated reboots, graphic novels, and electronic games. Earlier this year, when Ruth Bader Ginsberg was asked who her heroes were, she said, “I suppose mine was Nancy Drew, because she was a girl who was out there doing her work and dominating her boyfriend.” (Back in 2010, she said more seriously, “I think that most girls who grew up when I did were very fond of the Nancy Drew series. Not because they were well-written—they weren’t—but because this was a girl who was an adventurer, who could think for herself, who was the dominant person in her relationship with her young boyfriend. So, the Nancy Drew series made girls feel good, that they could be achievers and they didn’t have to take a back seat or be wallflowers.”)

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Britain’s refusal to defend Christians in the Middle East is shameful

Ed West for Mosaic Magazine

I have an ebook published called The Silence of Our Friends, on the persecution of Christians in the Middle East and the apathy of the West about this tragic and historic event. (A link will appear at the top of this page – in the meantime please spread the word.)

I say apathy, but lots of people are concerned, and in the past year and a half such books as Christianophobia, Persecuted and The Global War on Christians have tackled worldwide persecution; there has also been increasing awareness following violence in Syria and Egypt over the summer, and last month Baroness Warsi became the first minister to raise the subject.

Not that the British Government will actually do anything, as was made clear last week when Foreign Office Minister Mark Simmonds told MPs that Britain will not defend persecuted Christians. Responding to backbenchers who said that Christians were being singled out for attack, the minister said that all groups were suffering under intolerant regimes, a logic Alan Johnson of the Telegraph calls ‘universalise-to-minimise’. The less you specifically focus on an issue, the easier it is to ignore.

Simmonds stated that ‘our response to the persecution of Christians should not be sectarian. We should not be standing up for … Christians in particular, we should be supporting the right to freedom of religion.’

He also argued that ‘there is a risk of isolating them from the wider populations, identifying them as something of a fifth column and even exacerbating the persecution’, which has been the line used by Britain and America for many years.

Taking aside the issue of ‘freedom of religion’, which is interpreted very differently by the Foreign Office’s friends in the Organisation of the Islamic Conferences to how it is by westerners, this argument doesn’t really stand up.

Islamists see Christians as a fifth column, whatever the West does, because that’s their mindset. Anti-Islamist Muslims meanwhile have an active personal interest in preventing Christian persecution and expulsion, since it will make life worse for them too.

But Muslims of all shades, who see western Christian leaders abandoning Christian minorities before discriminatory laws and state-inspired violence, aren’t going to think ‘oh wonderful, the British don’t believe in discrimination’; they are going to think that these people have no faith, no courage and no decency – in short, they’re decadent. And they would not be wrong.

The British and Americans have been doing this ‘let’s not be seen to take sides’ act since the invasion of Iraq. When the bombing of churches escalated in 2004, and when the Baghdad government denied basic services to Christian villages, religious freedom advocates like Nina Shea pressed the Americans to do something.

As Shea told me, ‘A number of us tried to bring it to their attention, and basically Condi Rice told me that the US just did not want to appear sectarian… Yet of course they removed a Sunni government and helped the Shia, and then championed Sunni appointments because they didn’t want Sunnis left out. But they said nothing about smaller, less violent minority religions, they just didn’t count.’ That has been repeated with US policy towards Egypt.

What a ‘non-sectarian policy’ therefore entails is discrimination in favour of the strongest and most aggressive groups. Iraq’s pre-war Christian population of 1 million has now fallen to 150,000, many of them elderly; still, the Foreign Office tells us, this issue is being taken very seriously and the issue is raised through the appropriate channels etc etc.

There’s an old saying attributed to the Arabs – better to be the enemy of the English, for that way they will buy you, for if you are their friends they will most certainly sell you. In its foreign policy, Albion remains as perfidious as ever.

Sir Nicholas Winton

Nicholas Winton is known for organising the rescue of 669 Czech children from Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia during the 9 months before war broke out in
1939. The story became known to the public in 1988 when it featured on That’s Life, a BBC TV programme hosted by Esther Rantzen. In 2003 he was
knighted by Queen Elizabeth II for Services to Humanity for this work. There are many websites which tell this story in detail.

This site is maintained by the family of Sir Nicholas to give information about his recent activities and to facilitate contact.  Please visit and spread the word.

The EU is right about Western Sahara — which means it is wrong about Israel

Eugene Kontorovich for Mosaic

Commentary: The European Union makes up its own rules for engaging with occupied territories.

JERUSALEM — The European Union recently affirmed that there is no international legal problem in signing a deal with an occupying power that extends to the territory it occupies, or from foreign companies doing business in occupied territory.

It did so when it provisionally approved a fisheries agreement earlier this month with Morocco that extends into the territory of occupied Western Sahara, which is beyond Morocco’s recognized sovereign territory.

Moreover, the EU actually pays Morocco for European access to Western Saharan resources. On all these points, the agreement directly contradicts what the EU, in negotiations with Israel, calls fundamental principles of international law.

In recent years, Europe has contested Israel’s insistence that its EU agreements do not apply to Israel’s activities in the West Bank. The EU stance has been celebrated by some as an example of European commitment to international law. The EU’s new deal with Morocco appears to be contradicting those principles.

Moreover, the European Parliament’s legal advisor issued a formal opinion earlier this month making it clear that it is the EU’s treatment of Morocco, not Israel, that accords with international law.

By inventing rules of international law, the EU actually sends the message that Israel might never “comply” with international law, because where Israel is concerned, this “law” is a moving target, that can be concocted from thin air.

Morocco invaded Western Sahara in 1975 and has occupied it since, claiming it as its own territory. The Security Council has condemned Morocco’s presence and demanded a complete withdrawal.

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The Mousy Museum Lady Who Documented Nazi Crimes

Last month, Bavarian authorities confirmed that in 2012 a German art dealer's son was found with 1400 art works confiscated during World War II. The pieces, including some by Chagall and Matisse, are valued at over $1 billion.

Wondering how so much artwork could be lost for so long?

The 2006 documentary The Rape of Europa did, too. The film, which details the Nazi plundering of Europe's fine art and the Allies' concurrent efforts to save what they could, contains incredible footage and stirring, memorable stories. In one sequence, volunteers pack up the entire contents of the Louvre and send it off to be hidden in castles and bunkers. Most striking, is the story of Rose Valland, a seemingly unassuming museum employee who secretly documented nearly every piece of pillaged artwork in Paris, and its provenance, risking her life in the process.

The Rape of Europa illustrates the extreme lengths Nazis went to hide the stolen art and the various efforts to salvage them, from the US army unit devoted to saving antiquities, to partisans sheltering works in their homes.

Many suspect that Nazi art storehouses remain. This week's news suggests they could appear at any time.

- Tamar Fox for Jewniverse