The latest cycle of public panic over book-banning—as distinct from the constant, threatening drumbeat of book-banning itself—kicked off last January when The New York Times reported that a school board in McMinn County, Tennessee, had withdrawn Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel/memoir Maus: A Survivor’s Tale from the eighth-grade Holocaust education curriculum.

Robert Pinsky’s father, an Orthodox Jewish optician in Long Branch, New Jersey, liked to sum up success stories with a favorite phrase: “It all worked out okay.”