Education: What About the Book?

Joseph Goldstein is an elderly New York lawyer and ex-city magistrate who likes to tilt at educational windmills—and sometimes bowls them over. In 1940 he helped unseat Bertrand Russell from a teaching chair at the College of the City of New York on the grounds that Russell's writings were "lecherous, salacious . . . lustful." Last week Goldstein took off on another joust: unless two books which he considered "a menace" were banned from classrooms and public-school libraries within five days, he threatened to sue the Board of Education. The two books were Oliver Twist (the British film version of which...