NJ Moves Forward With The Fight Against Censorship With The Freedom To Read Act
Senator Andrew Zwicker is a physicist and a member of the New Jersey Senate representing Central NJ’s 16th Legislative District. He serves as Chair of the Legislative Oversight Committee, Vice-Chair of the Higher Education and Labor Committees, and sits on the Budget and Appropriations Committee. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, the American Association of Physics Teachers named him as one of the 75 leading contributors to physics education in the U.S., and the R&D Council of NJ named him the 2023 Educator of the Year. Andrew was raised in Englewood, NJ where his love of learning and passion for science came from his mother, a public school English teacher, and father, a chemical engineer. Tomorrow morning Gov. Phil Murphy will sign his Freedom To Read Act.
When I was a young boy, I developed an early love of reading that my mother, a public high school English teacher, nourished. She and I often went to the library together, and she filled my nightside table with books for me to read before falling asleep. While book banning has been an issue for as long as there have been books, my mother would have been flabbergasted that in 2024, we are fighting for something as fundamental as the freedom to read, with an unprecedented number of books under attack in our nation’s public schools.
In the 2023-24 academic year, PEN America tracked more than 10,000 book bans in public schools, and the stories being silenced are disproportionately those of marginalized communities: