When I was a little girl attending public school in northern New Jersey, I would get excited every time I saw a Jewish person represented in a story. Growing up on a steady diet of Dr. Seuss, “The Black Stallion” and “A to Z Mysteries,” I noticed that there were hardly any Jewish characters in…
In Jewish ritual life, not everyone is a leader, but everyone has a role. Traditionally, that role has been circumscribed for women, but a growing number of children’s picture books have sought to expand its norms, depicting women as rabbis, cantors, and other figures of authority. From Mindy Avra Portnoy and Steffi Karen Rubin’s “Ima…
Prolific children’s author Monica Brown’s new “Lola Levine” series aimed at children aged 7 to 9, featuring five books so far, is earning enthusiastic reviews and reader responses. Each story, complemented by black-and-white drawings by illustrator Angela Domínguez, explores the challenges faced by a bookish and athletic young heroine of Peruvian and North American Jewish…
In the 1921 Yiddish children’s book “The Wind That Got Angry,” by Moyshe Kulbak, an “old, wandering wind” finds himself booted out of his village when a thaw sets in. He tries to find somewhere in the woods to rest. He’s tired and wants to sleep, but no one wants him around. The oak tree…
My Facebook newsfeed is always alive with kittens, but last week it was alive with political kittens. Israeli author Nurit Sternberg has written a children’s book called “,” about two kittens “rescued” from last summer’s fighting zone in Gaza and brought to Israel by the IDF soldier Matan Meshi. Both the kittens and Meshi happen…
In 1951, Follett published Sydney Taylor’s “All-of-a-Kind Family,” the first children’s book for a mass audience that featured American Jews. It’s been in print ever since. The Jewish tenements on the Lower East Side at the turn of the century glow with nostalgia; think Proust’s madeleine as a challah. Taylor’s editor worried that readers wouldn’t…
Wikimedia Commons The Jewish book award season is in full swing. The winners of the 2015 National Jewish Book Awards were announced last week. Today, the Association of Jewish Libraries released the list of laureates of the Sydney Taylor Book Award that honors new books for children and teens about the Jewish experience. In the…
● Beautiful Yetta’s Hanukkah Kitten By Daniel Pinkwater, illustrated by Jill Pinkwater Feiwel and Friends, 32 pages, $17.99. Spared from the butchers’ knife, Yiddish-speaking Yetta makes her home in Brooklyn, trying to find a new family and do good where she can. A Holocaust survivor? Not exactly. Yetta is big white chicken with long eyelashes…
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