Jewish American Children's Literature

Abstract

All four terms in the field of American Jewish children’s literature are much debated by scholars. Should the corpus include only books originally published in America? Is a book Jewish because of the author, the characters, the themes, or something else? Should the corpus include any texts children read, or only texts produced specifically for children? Are pedagogical materials part of “literature?” All of these questions persist and inform how each scholar approaches the field. The first original English-language Jewish children’s books published in America were textbooks and curricular material, beginning with Think and Thank by Samuel Cooper, published by the Jewish Publication Society (JPS) in 1890. Prior to that, Jewish Sunday schools in the early nineteenth century used modified Christian texts, and books imported from England, Europe, and Palestine were available in Yiddish, Hebrew, or English translations. The years between 1890 and 1930 saw intense production of educational children’s materials by Jewish presses including JPS, the Bloch Publishing Company, and Behrman House. The 1935 publication of Sadie Rose Weilerstein’s The Adventures of K’tonton: A Jewish Tom Thumb from the National Women’s League marked a turn from educational texts to stories about contemporary American Jewish children, and the 1951 publication of Sydney Taylor’s All-of-a-Kind Family from the Follett Publishing Company marked the beginning of books with Jewish characters and themes from non-Jewish American presses. Over the second half of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, Jewish publishers continued to produce texts for children, and Jewish representation in books marketed to all children continued to grow. Global networks and PJ Library’s free book program begun in 2005 influenced texts on offer to contemporary American Jewish children, as did the development of a robust Haredi children’s publishing industry around 1980. In line with scholarship on children’s literature more broadly, the first conversations about Jewish children’s books appeared in journals for educators and librarians, moving into discussions of literary criticism in the second half of the twentieth century. Some of the major themes in contemporary scholarship of Jewish children’s literature are the Holocaust; gender roles; antisemitism; and diversity within Jewish representation along axes of race, ethnicity, and practice. Many sources useful for studying this corpus are larger studies of American Judaism or American Jewish literature with only one or two chapters on children’s literature. This trend is shifting now, however, and the field is growing in breadth and depth.