Building an Inclusive Tent for Jewish Children’s Literature

This was originally a speech I gave at the Highlights Foundation Symposium on Jewish Children’s Literature in March 2019.

I didn’t have a Jewish naming ceremony. When I was ten years old, my formal Jewish education began and on the first day of Hebrew school, our teacher asked us for our Hebrew names. I didn’t have one. My brother’s Jacob, so he just converted his name into Yaakov, but Katherine doesn’t convert as easily.

So I chose one.

Chaya, named after the character in the Devil’s Arithmetic by Jane Yolen, and the first and only Jewish character I’d encountered in fiction at that time.

We name ourselves.

Naming ourselves is both an old and new Jewish concept. At the beginning, we defined who we were, but we made missteps. In an attempt to be true to his faith, Abraham sends an elderly idol worshipper out of his tent, and God chastises him and sends him after the old man, insinuating that hospitality and openness and respecting another’s faith were more important Jewish values than casting out those who worshipped idols. Jacob claims Esau’s birthright, naming and defining himself and thus the Jewish people. But that’s a complicated story too — even though God affirms that birthright, Jacob’s claimed it by deception.

We defined our Judaism through a highly scientific method called ‘guess and check.’ That’s essentially what Jewish history has been, both in the Torah and in everything since Torah. Guess, and check.

But for a long time, we did the guessing, and the checking.

Until, at some point, we let others define our Jewishness for us. Sometimes that comes from non-Jewish spaces. For example, whether or not we qualified for death under the Nazis. Sometimes that comes from Jewish law. For example, whether or not our mothers are Jewish. Though, as an aside, only non-Jewish people have ever policed me to my face on matrilineal Judaism.

Because as a patrilineal Jew, born to a lapsed Catholic mother and a deeply secular Jewish father, especially with my coloring, I’ve dealt with a lifetime of people questioning my Jewishness. They tell me that I wouldn’t have died in the Holocaust with my blonde hair and blue eyes. They tell me I’m not really Jewish because my mother never converted — ignoring, even when told, that my mother was deeply committed to our Jewish education. Ignoring, even when told, that the Reform movement has long accepted patrilineal Jews. (In drafting this, I went down the rabbit hole and read the 1983 declaration and almost subjected you all to the long history and rationale for accepting patrilineal Jews. Please be grateful I deleted that rather boring history lesson.)

But I am Jewish, because I was born to a Jewish parent and a non-Jewish parent, who said I am Jewish. That is enough for my community.

We name ourselves.

Something I hope we’ll wrestle with this weekend is what makes a book Jewish. Is it enough to have an Ashkenazi last name? Is Epstein or Silverman enough to make a book Jewish? But what about those of us with Anglicanized last names? Is it enough that a character once mention Hanukkah? What do we do with the long and vital history of secular Jews? How do we signal that in a book? Is a book written by a non-Jewish person using Jewish themes, mysticism or history a Jewish book? If the author is Jewish but no character is Jewish, is the book Jewish because of its writer?

It is a Jewish tradition to answer one question with more questions.

You may have answers to some of these questions. You may have answers to none of them. You might be uncomfortable with my answers or my questions, or with the questions and answers of people around you.

That’s okay. It’s okay to be uncomfortable with defining books, especially if it feels like we are, by some extension, defining ourselves. Naming ourselves.

Maybe it is as easy as saying “This book is Jewish.”

Maybe it isn’t.

We name ourselves, even when it’s hard.

How do we define Jewish values as separate and unique from other values? How we code and define Jewish books? Is it by author name? How does that hurt — or help! — Jewish authors with assimilated or Anglican names? Or, in a Jewish book world dominated by Ashkenazi voices, Sephardi authors? What makes a book Jewish enough for Jewish book awards? What makes a book not Jewish enough?

Maybe Jewish books hit a certain definition from the US judiciary: we know it when we see it. But then, when we don’t agree, what do we do with those books?

I want to acknowledge here that I’m lucky: I don’t sit on an awards committee. And I don’t have to read thousands of submissions each year to PJ Library, deciding where our limited dollars and slots will go to bring the BEST Jewish children’s books to kids.

I don’t have to spend my time, or this speech and thus your time, thinking about whether the most Jewish content in a book equals the best Jewish content — though I think that’s a vital question. One we should be asking.

But I do spend a lot of time thinking about what makes a book Jewish and how I can best advocate for Jewish children’s literature, and I think that I’ve made missteps in the last few years in how I’ve considered Jewish children’s literature. I think I skipped a few steps.

I identified a problem I saw — a dearth of Jewish children’s literature, especially in Young Adult, outside of holidays and the Holocaust, and particularly that a majority of the celebrated Holocaust fiction centered non-Jewish characters. In 2015, I very unscientifically polled over a thousand non-Jewish people — via Twitter — about where they first learned about the Holocaust. A vast majority of them — and nearly 100% of the Americans — learned about the Holocaust in school, no earlier than fourth grade, and in English class, where they read Number the Stars or a similar novel. Even where they were reading The Diary of Anne Frank, they were reading in English class, not history class, alongside other fiction. I found that — and still find it — deeply concerning in how the Holocaust and Jewish people are mentally filed and categorized by growing and learning brains.

I looked at that problem and thought that we needed more Jewish children’s literature not just for Jewish kids — because mirrors are vital — but for non-Jewish kids too, because windows and sliding glass doors build empathy and relationships. And I believe are an essential counter-measure to the rise of antisemitism.

But I became, over the three and a half years since I had this awakening, too limiting in how I labeled and identified Jewish books. And I’ve had to take a step back and change my mind. I was like Abraham, thinking I was doing right, and instead, I was gatekeeping at a tent that was big enough for more than my worries and anxieties about Jewish kidlit.

Because I’m going to advocate here for a wide tent. I think that right now, Jewish children’s literature, especially Young Adult where I’ve spent most of my time, is going through growing pains and changes. We need to advocate for Jewish books that are tangentially Jewish and Jewish books that make us uncomfortable and Jewish books that are more religious than we’re used to seeing in mainstream publishing. We need books that cover all types of religious observance, without judgment or ranking. We need to advocate for books that talk about Israel in ways that make us comfortable — whatever what that is. We need to advocate for books that talk about parts of Judaism that kids may find limiting and restrictive, and we need to advocate for books that find Judaism liberating.

And when I say Judaism, I don’t just mean the faith. I mean the whole identity.

We name ourselves.

And right now, we need to be thinking about how we name Jewish kidlit.

I think that a kid with the last name Silverman in a book gets to count, even if that’s the only Jewish part of the book. Because that’s a real experience in America.

And by opening it up to say, “The kid with the last name Silverman counts even if that’s the only Jewish part of his identity”, we’re opening the door to more Jewish stories who may feel currently excluded from the dominant narrative.

I want to see YA that explores these questions. What does it mean to be secular in America? How do you navigate something like being ethnically Jewish and having the last name Silverman, but not feeling Jewish in any other way, in the wake of something like the Tree of Life shootings? How does that feel? How do you conceptualize your identity that way? How does it feel to have a Jewish last name — and to have people make assumptions about you because of it, when you don’t feel attached to that identity at all?

And what is it like to be a Jew of Color in America? What happens when racial and ethnic and religious communities clash as they have often? How does that pull at identity? What happens in that discomfort? How do young voices navigate that? What books are we giving them to help them navigate these uncertain waters?

How do you talk about and navigate the issues around Israel both within Jewish communities and outside of Jewish communities?

As I mentioned at the beginning, the inability to talk about, contextualize and find space to talk about Israel bounced me out of the Jewish community as a fourteen year old, and I doubt that I’m the only one. I wish I’d had a book that say, “Yeah, it’s complicated. But ignoring it doesn’t make it less complicated” and helped me find the words and space to navigate that.

These are real struggles for kids in America right now too.

These are stories I want on the page.

I also want a YA rom-com set in a yeshiva, and I want a MG mystery series with a kid who keeps Shabbat, etc, etc. I want the fun stories too, I promise!

But I don’t think we get there if we’re asking for Jewish books to fit a certain mold and look and act a certain way on the page. I don’t think we get there if Jewish books must have religious content to be Jewish. I don’t think we get there if Jewish books suffer from what a fellow PJ Library Author Israel Adventure participant playfully called “Ashkenormativity.”

I don’t think we get there if Jewish books are only about white Jews. I don’t think we get there if Jewish books are able-bodied, and cis, and heteronormative, with intact standard nuclear families. I don’t think we get there if Jewish books are predominantly set in the Northeast, major cities, or the suburbs of major cities.

We need to be advocating a wide tent because the only way to get all the stories that could exist is by making a space that feels boldly and enthusiastically inclusive. Ambitiously inclusive.

Building this inclusive tent isn’t going to be easy. In fact, I think it’s going to be hard. It’s going to require patience and listening and a willingness to be uncomfortable. And most of us, especially as adults, aren’t comfortable being uncomfortable anymore. We’re going to have to retrain our brains to take in new information, to listen and learn, to understand that we’re not going to like the answers to all the questions, and we’re not going to have the answers to all the questions. It means we’re going to have to talk about anti-Blackness in the Jewish community. It means we’re going to have to do hard work to make a white-Jewish dominated space open to the voices of Jews of color. It means that we white Jews going to have to know that some stories are not ours to tell. It means we’ll need to understand that our personal discomforts can’t be a barrier for someone else’s story. (But I draw the line at Messianic Jews.)

But to write Jewish children’s literature that is truly inclusive, that reflects the wide diversity of Jewish experiences around the globe, that reflects the wide range of religious or cultural identities within Judaism, to write Jewish children’s literature that is truly for child readers and not to reinforce our own adult identities, we have a responsibility to build that tent.

I’m not an expert at building a tent. And I don’t think that it’s a solitary activity.

Here are some ideas about how we can all work toward building that tent.

● Mentoring — particularly reaching out and into communities that have been marginalized within the current Jewish children’s literature canon. Mentoring Jews of color, disabled Jews, LGBTQIA+ Jews, and Jews by choice. And if organizations — cough, PJ library, cough — can facilitate those mentorships, that’ll help us reach into communities that you and I might not know.

● Inclusive workshops and retreats — offering scholarships to Jewish writers, with a special emphasis on the aforementioned hypermarginalized populations

● Inclusive workshops and retreats — workshops, including ones like this in the future, should not be held over Shabbat.

● Supporting with your dollars, your tweets, and your school visits Jewish literature that breaks outside of the holiday and Holocaust norm.

● Work on being uncomfortable. There’s no growth that happens in comfort zones. I can tell you that as someone with a severe anxiety disorder and OCD that exposure therapy applies to all parts of our life. If you don’t follow any Jews of color on social media, do that. If you’ve never read a book by a Jew of color, do that. If you’ve never read a book, or a blog post, or an article, about being trans and Jewish, do that. If you’ve never read a kidlit book or a story by an Orthodox Jewish person, do that. If you’ve never read a book or blog post or article by someone who disagrees with you on Israel, do that. Move outside of your comfort zone of the Jewish experience.

I’m not asking you to be perfect at tent-building. I think sometimes, when we talk about activism and working toward a better world, people think that if they don’t do it perfectly, that’s a problem. That they’ll be called out on social media, that someone won’t like them, that they’ll hurt someone’s feelings. Perfection isn’t obtainable and, more importantly, no one’s asking for perfection. The pursuit of working on this in good faith is the key here.

At the beginning, I mentioned we defined our Judaism by guess and check. And that will be part of the process here too.

I’m asking you to show up for inclusive Jewish kidlit. I’m asking you to be part of the process as we name ourselves, again. And I think you’re game for it, because you’re here.

I’m asking you to be open-minded and open-hearted. And that, to me, is a Jewish concept. We’ve named ourselves. We wandered through a desert. We scattered across the world. We’ve suffered and survived. And we start again, and again, and again. No matter where the Jewish story takes place, no matter if religion is or isn’t a part of that story, that’s a repeating motif. We start again. We show up. We’re not always perfect at it, but we show up. To show up again and again and again, not knowing what the results will be but knowing that forward is an essential part of a story — we are the people of the Book, after all — requires an open mind and an open heart. A willingness to change. That is our greatest gift, both as a people, and as storytellers.

When I sit down to tell a story, I almost always look for liminal spaces, but I try to think of them as precipices of change. I like spending time in those spaces — it reminds me that ordinary people have a great deal of power, and that we often don’t know in the moment that we’re living in that precipice of change. It’s only through the lens of history that we can identify those moments. Some people will find this idea overwhelming, and I understand that. Sometimes I find it overwhelming. I think it can also be a powerful idea. That how we choose to tell stories changes the story itself. Who we invite to tell stories changes the story itself. And whose stories we lift up to read changes the story itself.

It’s one of the reasons that I like this meditation on Shabbat that my synagogue sometimes reads on Friday nights.

This is an hour of change.

Within it we stand uncertain on the border of light.

Shall we draw back or cross over?

Where shall our hearts turn?

Shall we draw back, my brother, my sister, or cross over?

This is the hour of change, and within it,

We stand quietly

On the border of light

What lies before us?

Shall we draw back, my brother, my sister, or cross over?

I love that change, from this is an hour to this is the hour, and I love the repetition of shall we draw back or cross over. I really love the use of we, that this is something we do as a collective, as a community. We step together, or draw back. There is no option to remain uncertain there. There is only forward, or drawing back. There’s a lot we could break down in this meditation, but I think about this a lot.

I think that kidlit as a whole is in an hour of change. It won’t be our only one. Or, rather, it shouldn’t be our only one. But I also think that Jewish kidlit is in the hour of change for us. We are naming ourselves. I think we have incredible opportunities ahead of us to think with open hearts and minds about the kind of Jewish kidlit we want to be drawing into the world. About the tent we’re building, and who we invite into it, and what that says about our Jewish values. I think that this weekend, we’re standing quietly on the border of light, thinking about what lies before us. I hope we choose to cross over.