Picture it: Houston, 2025. A mother and her young daughter walk into the doctor’s office one afternoon. In the waiting area is a little free library built to look like a red British telephone box. As they scan the shelves, the mother sees a book, well-known to her and once quite controversial but now almost forgotten. She plucks it down from the shelf, thrilled to find inspiration where she least expected it. That book…was The Fixer by Barnard Malamud, and this post will explain its surprising connection to The Golden Girls and Banned Books Week!

Banned Books Week was founded in 1982 as an annual event to call attention to censorship and promote the freedom to read. As both a librarian in real life and the “Official” Golden Girls Librarian (that’s what I like to call myself), upholding those principles is very important to me. I also love digging in to the history of why certain books were so controversial in the past. While challenges and bans of current books are overwhelmingly focused on LGBTQIA+ and BIPOC authors there is still a lot to be learned from the classics. As Sophia said in the “Till Death Do We Volley” episode, what, we can’t learn from history? This is especially true since the most banned book in schools for the 2024-2025 school year was A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess which was originally published in 1962! But what does any of this have to do with The Golden Girls?

In the “Dorothy’s New Friend” episode Dorothy learns a valuable lesson about loving and appreciating your true friends for who they really are after she briefly becomes friends with Barbara Thorndyke, a “snooty” local author who condones antisemitism. Shortly before Barbara arrives Rose enters the living room reading a tabloid, which Dorothy quickly stashes under a couch cushion. This sets up the following scene and the central theme of the episode, which is that Blanche and Rose aren’t as smart as Dorothy and Barbara.

Rose mistaking Malamud for Mallomars is about as good a Rose moment as you can get. What makes both the writing and acting in this scene so brilliant is that you don’t even really have to know who or what either of those things is to laugh. The joke tells us, of course, but it’s all in the subtext. We understand right away that Barbara and Dorothy see themselves as being better than Blanche and Rose. They see themselves as part of the “literary intelligentsia” for knowing who Malamud is. There’s a little more under the surface here, though.

It’s very likely that younger fans of The Golden Girls today have never heard the name Bernard Malamud let alone read any of his books, but he was once very well known. For my part, I had heard of him, which is to say that I knew he was an author, but I couldn’t have told you the titles of any of his books until I started researching the origin of Banned Books Week a few years ago. Malamud was a 20th century American novelist and short story writer. He won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for his 1966 novel, The Fixer, and his earlier novel, The Natural, was adapted into a 1984 film starring Betty White’s ultimate crush, Robert Redford.

As it turns out, The Fixer was also part of the landmark Island Trees v. Pico Supreme Court case of 1982. Malamud’s novel about antisemitism in the Russian Empire portrays a fictionalized account of the Beilis Case of 1913 in which a Jewish man, Menahem Mendel Beilis, was wrongfully accused of murder and eventually acquitted. Along with eleven other books deemed “anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-Semitic, and just plain filthy” by the Island Trees Union Free School District of Long Island, New York it was removed from junior and high school libraries in the district in 1976. A group of five high school students led by Steven Pico and represented by the ACLU filed a lawsuit against the school board arguing a violation of their First Amendment rights. Although the court concluded that “school boards may not remove books from library shelves simply because they dislike the ideas contained in those books,” it was a split decision that ultimately left the scope of their ruling unclear. Unfortunately this has only contributed to the increased efforts of groups like Moms for Liberty to continue to ban books from schools today.

At the end of “Dorothy’s New Friend,” after Barbara Thorndyke has already proven herself to be anything but a pal and a confidant, she takes Dorothy aside and tells her that Sophia’s date, Murray Guttman, can’t come to the “restricted” Mortimer Club because he’s Jewish. Fortunately, this is the last straw for Dorothy, and she finally sends Barbara on her snooty way. Malamud was also Jewish, which the writers of this episode certainly would’ve known. His name made for a memorable punchline, but it also adds an extra layer to Barbara’s character as someone who’s only interested in herself. Of course she would be ok reading and admiring a Jewish author but when it comes to principles, well, she doesn’t actually have any. Unfortunately, history continues to repeat itself as the American Library Association noted a significant in crease in book bans beginning in 2021, and PEN America has counted an astounding 22,810 instance of books banned in public schools from 2021 through 2024. Contemporary Jewish authors such as Art Spiegelman have also faced bans within the past couple of years.

Like Dorothy, you can take a stand, too. October 11, 2025 is the Let Freedom Read Day of Action, and Unite Against Book Bans has put together a super useful toolkit of things you can do to help fight book bans whether you have just 5 minutes or an hour. You can also use services like Resistbot or 5 Calls that help you contact your representatives and tell them to support the freedom to read in schools and your community.