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Palo Alto librarians were instructed this week to inspect the Holocaust section in every city branch after a Rinconada Library patron found numerous books defaced by antisemitic stickers and messages.
The patron, local resident Ethan Klivans, told this publication that he was browsing books at the Rinconada branch on Wednesday afternoon when he found an Adolf Hitler sticker while flipping through “Simon Weisenthal: Life and Legends” by Tom Segev. Inside the book, a biography of the famed Nazi hunter, he saw a sticker with an image of Adolf Hitler and a caption celebrating the killing of Jewish people.
He then began to check other books in the Holocaust section. They were similarly defaced with stickers that celebrated or denied the Holocaust, he said.
“It was awful to see that type of stuff,” Klivans told this publication.
Klivens said that he alerted the librarian at the reception desk about the defaced book and was assured that staff would take care of it. He said a library employee was sent out to remove a few books with the offending stickers. But even after that, most of the books with the antisemitic imagery remained on the shelves, he said.
Klivens said he was surprised by the lack of urgency among library staff, who he said were talking amongst themselves and with other library patrons after the revelation.
“There was zero alarm over this, which was a real shocking thing.” Klivens said.
Frustrated by what he considered to be a lack of urgency by the library manager to inspect and remove all the defaced books, he then contacted Library Director Gayanthri Kanth to complain about the problem. In a letter, he said he believed the library was “negligent in his capacity as a custodian of the library’s collection.”
“I wanted to save future patrons from seeing what I saw, and had I not gone back to check the other books in the Holocaust section, they would have remained in circulation,” he wrote.
Kanth responded on May 30 with an email apologizing for exposure to the offensive material and assuring Klivens that branch managers had been instructed to be “more proactive and responsive in the future.”
She also told him that staff had methodically scrutinized all the titles in the Holocaust section and was “working on updating its process to address such incidents in a quick and thorough manner.”
Library staff in all other branches were instructed to “inspect books in the same subject range and remove them from public access if additional hate stickers were located in them.” The matter, she added, has also been forwarded to the Palo Alto Police Department.
Library staff are also working to restore the material that had been defaced, she said.
“Thankfully, we are able to restore most of the collection,” she wrote. “Library staff have also started working on a purchasing list to replace the books that have been defaced beyond the ability to repair.”
Kanth told this publication that once library staff was notified of the defaced books, they did a search of all books pertaining to the Holocaust history. After finding the 940 books in this category, staff pulled all the books that they could locate that were defaced, Kanth said in an email. She said that 31 books at the Rinconada Library were defaced and that none of the other branches were affected.
She acknowledged that staff had initially overlooked some of the defaced books because they were damaged in different ways than the initial books.
“We appreciate a community member bringing this issue to our attention and after notification, staff searched books in the subject matter area of the initial book damaged,” Kanth said. “Other damaged books were missed through the initial search due to some books damaged differently. Inspection of books was expanded, with more removed from circulation.”
Thank you for covering this story. People need to be aware that this is going on in our community.