The Yankee at the Seder by Elka Weber (Southern United States) Rebecca's Journey Home by Brynn Olenberg Sugarman (Vietnamese adoption)

The Wooden Sword by Ann Redisch Stampler (Afghanistan)

Yuvi's Candy Tree by Lesley Simpson (Ethiopia) How I Learned Geography by Uri Shulevitz (Turkestan, modern-day Kazakhstan) Much, Much Better by Chaim Kosofsky (Iraq) Never Say a Mean Word Again by Jacqueline Jules (medieval Spain)Įverybody Says Shalom by Leslie Kimmelman (Israel) Shanghai Sukkah by Heidi Smith Hyde (China) The Secret Shofar of Barcelona by Jacqueline Dembar Greene (Inquisition Spain) (Note: Books listed range from classic to recent as a librarian I advocate picking up out-of-print titles from your local library.)Īround the World in One Shabbat by Durga Yael Bernhard (worldwide) I hope readers will explore the titles listed here that not only touch but embrace these themes. Weingrad says 'The global span of Jewish culture, the treasures of the textual tradition, the variety of Jewish sensibilities: these remain largely untouched.' Untouched? Untrue. But take the time to dig a little deeper and you will find the riches he decries as missing.

It's true that these are well-used tropes, executed with varying levels of success. If you take a superficial look at the genre of Jewish kidlit you may come away sharing Weingrad's impression: 'cartoon animals teaching holiday basics in stilted rhymes, an overrepresentation of sentimental grandparents (to the frequent exclusion of parents), and shtetl-and-steerage depictions of New York’s Lower East Side as the Sinai of American Judaism' and a 'Bible that stops with Noah’s ark'. At that time, I wrote this blog post to provide the context that was missing from her article. Now it's happened again in Mosaic with commentator Michael Weingrad's article 'Why Are Jewish Children's Books So Bad?' and again I feel compelled to respond. It happened in The Forward in 2012, when Deborah Kolben saw the deaths of Simms Taback and Russell Hoban as signaling the end of the genre ( 'Who Will Light Up Jewish Kids Lit?'). Every few years, someone blogs about the terrible state of Jewish kidlit.

Playing with Matches by Suri Rosen