"A different type of superhero movie.” – The Hollywood Reporter

Join us on Tuesday, March 10th at 6 pm ET.  REGISTER ON THIS PAGE TODAY!

March is National Reading Month—a time to celebrate books, literacy, and the freedom to explore ideas. At a moment when access to books is increasingly under attack across the country, join us for a timely and urgent conversation with filmmaker Kim A. Snyder, Director/Producer of the documentary The Librarians.  This important film premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival and has won more than 20 festival awards nationwide.

Across the United States, book bans and censorship campaigns are accelerating, often driven by organized political and coordinated extremist movements seeking to reshape public institutions. The film highlights librarians as frontline defenders of the First Amendment and intellectual freedom during an unprecedented wave of book challenges.

In this live conversation, Director/Producer Kim A. Snyder will discuss how these efforts to restrict books raise urgent concerns about intellectual freedom, First Amendment rights, and the health of our democracy. As public institutions face pressure to remove books based on religious or ideological objections, this moment also invites us to examine what the constitutional principle of separation of church and state means for our libraries, our schools, and our communities.

In The Librarians, Snyder centers the voices of librarians, educators, students, and community members navigating coordinated efforts to remove books and restrict access to information. In this behind-the-scenes discussion, she will share what she witnessed in communities facing book challenges, how these campaigns are organized, and why the fight over public libraries is fundamentally a fight about First Amendment rights, public education, intellectual freedom and whose beliefs govern our shared civic spaces.

While hosted by our Jewish Women and Religious Freedom in Pittsburgh Project, this webinar addresses what is happening  around the country! Join us to go behind the headlines and explore how we can respond—locally and nationally—grounded in Jewish values and a commitment to intellectual freedom.

Following this webinar, if you live in or around Pittsburgh:

• Join us for an in-person screening of The Librarians at Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh on March 19: https://bit.ly/bookbanscreening

• And for our interactive Banned Book Bingo community event on March 29: https://bit.ly/banbookbingo

For Jewish women in particular, this conversation carries deep resonance. Jewish history teaches us the dangers of suppressing ideas and silencing minority voices. Defending the freedom to read is inseparable from defending religious freedom, pluralism, and equal participation in public life.

This program is the first of three connected events in our Pittsburgh based Freedom to Read Without Religious Coercion series. In partnership with the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh and the Judith Fingeret Krug First Amendment Fund of the Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh, these events are presented by Jews for a Secular Democracy’s Jewish Women and Religious Freedom in Pittsburgh Project. The project is sponsored by the Jewish Women’s Foundation of Greater Pittsburgh, underwritten, in part, by Trustee Nancy Weissman, in memory of her beloved mother-in-law Trustee Jackie Wechsler.