In the midst of Banned Books Week, USC Libraries opened the “Forbidden Pages: Past and Present Exhibition” at Doheny Library.
The exhibit consists of items that have gone through multiple attempts at censorship, according to the USC Libraries website. It focuses on themes of “Dangerous Words,” “Obscenity and Censorship,” “Silencing the Other” and “Pages of Protest.”
The artifacts in the exhibit include books, photographs, newspaper articles and other materials from USC Libraries. Lion Feuchtwanger’s novel Jud Süß, which was pulled from the Nazi book burnings in Berlin in 1933, had fragments of pages in the exhibition.
The display also includes pieces from the ONE Archives, one of the world’s largest collections of LGBTQ+ historical materials, which preserves rare books, pulp fiction, and activist artwork that faced severe censorship throughout the 20th century.
“[Banned Books Week] is an important week of events that supports intellectual freedom, students’ access to information and the freedom to choose in libraries” said Taylor Dwyer, the curator of the Feuchtwanger Memorial Library, a special collections library at USC. Dwyer worked closely with the ONE Archives to identify books that had been banned throughout history.
According to the American Library Association’s (ALA) Office for Intellectual Freedom, there have been 4,235 unique titles challenged in 2025, which was the second highest ever to be documented.
“We should care because banned books come down to control and freedom. In free societies, we have to support our right to read freely,” said Dwyer.
The exhibition, which opened on Oct. 5, coincided with a discussion panel also presented by USC Libraries, “Freedom to Read: Censorship in Schools and Libraries,” which focused on censorship and defending the right to read.
The panel was moderated by Huriya Jabbar, a professor of education policy at USC’s Rossier School of Education. The panelists included Erin Spivey, a former librarian and current candidate for Huntington Beach City Council, and Ernesto Cisneros, a public school teacher and nationally acclaimed author.
“Hearing from a former librarian who had been fighting against book bans, and a teacher and writer who had been censored himself, about the ways they’re pushing back was really motivating and inspiring” said Jabbar.
In high schools across the United States, book bans recorded per school year rose from 2,532 in 2021 to 11,982 in 2026, according to the nonprofit group PEN America. “Public schools have become a key target of the culture wars,” said Jabbar. “Controlling access to information and knowledge is a longstanding tool of authoritarian politics.”
Kate Zepeda, a journalism major studying at Doheny Library for midterms, stopped by and noticed the collection. “I think the exhibition is really important because it shows censorship throughout history, and how a lot of places, like schools and the government, try to censor important subjects that aren’t socially acceptable to talk about, or more like taboo.”
“Censorship is still kind of an issue and it takes away a lot of important literature about important subjects we should have a conversation about,” said Zepeda.
Edited by Leo Li and Katherine Contreras Hernandez