Selma Blair Instagram – I read NIGHT by Eli Weisel when I was 11, not long after I held The Diary of Anne Frank late into the evening, making the idea of this young girl a confidante. It started me writing. Night changed my life. I soon devoured Primo Levi and other books I could find on survivors. Night is a masterpiece. Some say the greatest and definitive novel to read about the holocaust. A boy of great faith, our author, loses all the light of his previous life when confronted with the horrors of Auschwitz. Faith was lost among the unimaginable. Years later, he wrote this. It is brutal. It is important. It is the winner of a Nobel Peace Peace and it is being banned in schools. Freedom of speech and the importance of truth and documentation of history are cornerstones of our American ideals and values. There is grace in knowledge and understanding how the machinations of evil became the most horrific chapter of our modern existence. The accounts show strength in abomination. Parents and lawmakers who wish to ban this book from the canon of our education, I remind you that this is mirroring the Nazi’s and fascists in that when the goal is to control the messages in our literature and art, we risk losing the memory of how things happen. The history is not the danger to our children’s minds. Eli Weisel lived through these hell nights. This genocide. This torture. This horror. So that we do not have to. He wrote, “The witness has forced himself to testify. For the youth of today, for the children who will be born tomorrow. He does not want his past to become their future.” Read this book. I warn of passivity in the face of book banning, Of our American Democratic rights. Read this book and tell me what you think. I wish us grace. I wish us to be able to confront the truth. And Never Forget. #LetAmericaRead. See the link in bio for more information.