Uncategorized
How Yiddish authors made a new world writing for children
An intrepid puppy who marches for labor rights. A 6-year-old girl who sews herself a locomotive to carry her away from her daily chores. A Jewish boy who would be Pope.
These stories, written in Yiddish, are all entertaining and whimsical, and like so much writing for young people, may be seen as less than serious. But they were also composed as part of a larger communal project that was widely regarded as urgent. Beginning in the late 19th century, Jewish thinkers outlined the need for a children’s literature in the vernacular as a way to shape the future.
As Miriam Udel writes in her new book, Modern Jewish Worldmaking Through Yiddish Children’s Literature, these authors sought to “write a better world into being in a distinctively Yiddish key.”
Arriving at a time of competing nationalisms — communism and the socialism of the Jewish Labor Bund on one side, Zionism on the other — Yiddish writing for children began in Eastern Europe. It then spread to New York and, with the migration of Jews, Latin America.
Udel’s book is structured around the evolution of the canon, that, after the Holocaust, reexamined its purpose, pushing for literacy and what she calls the “rhythms of Jewish time.”
The writers responsible for Yiddish literature came from various political stripes. Some were educators and academics and others first made their names with stories for adults. Their work ranged from naturalist accounts of a Bund sanatorium to mythic tales of travelers on the Sabbath. Yet within nearly every story a theme of social justice rings through.
Udel, the compiler and translator of the Yiddish children’s story treasury Honey on the Page and the force behind a hit puppet show based on Chaver Paver’s stories of Labzik the communist puppy, researched nearly 1,000 works for the book.
“The overarching goal is to create literature that is going to make its readers want to joyfully and affirmatively choose Jewish identity,” Udel said of Yiddish children’s literature after the Holocaust. “This is an idea that I see us kind of rediscovering now.”
I spoke with Udel, an associate professor of Yiddish language, literature and culture at Emory University, about how this literature developed and changed to meet the times, and why Sholem Aleichem, for all his talent, had “no game” writing for kids. The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
I think a lot of people might be surprised that the first Yiddish children’s stories can be dated, and that it’s only really back to 1889. Why did it take so long to develop?
Children’s literature is very much a function of changing ideas about what childhood is and what children need. For a really long time, differences in age were much less important than differences in gender. Instead of boys and girls, we really had proto-men and proto-women. It’s really only when we’re starting to get these modern ideas about childhood as a protracted period, as a time for education and leisure [that this emerges]. We had an ideal of education for Jewish boys since time immemorial, but the idea that both boys and girls would have this time available that could be filled with the activity of reading, that was really new, and that was a product of economic changes, as much as cultural and educational developments,
It was also wrapped up in these nationalist movements that were emerging, the secular nationalist movement for Jews that produced the Yiddish school system. What were the cultural changes there and how did they lead to this literature?
By the turn of the 20th century, we have a pretty well-fleshed-out modern idea of what childhood is and what children are. Their job is to become educated, and there is a delay before we expect them to take up the burdens of adulthood, and at the same time, there are a lot of different nation-building projects underway. We can look to Mandatory Palestine as it prepares itself to become the State of Israel, and the way that Hebrew children’s literature is created out of whole cloth for helping to define who would be the citizens of this new Jewish state. We can also look to the Soviet Union. The revolution is going to remake humanity, and so it’s an efficient shortcut to start with the very young who could be imagined as a blank slate onto which you can write the story of your new state and your new citizenry. In the case of Yiddish, there are some of those cultural nationalist impulses, but it’s complicated because it bumps up against the reality that Yiddish really never comes close to being the language of a conventional nation state. And so instead of Yiddish being recruited into a conventional nation-building or state-building project, Yiddish gets recruited into what I call “worldmaking,” which is a project of creating symbolic polities and structures that children are going to be able to inhabit in, and through, their encounter with Yiddish.
The bulk of this genre is coming from mostly secular writers, but you note a lot of the stories seem to involve Shabbat and stories of the cheder. Why did these secular Jewish writers gravitate towards content that was in some way religious?
Everybody, no matter how secular they felt, had to deal with a question of, “What is the significance of the Jewish past?” “What is the significance of the language that has been handed down to us as a mother tongue?” And “How can this shared, collective past in some way shape the future?” Some of them don’t deal with the past — everything is very forward-looking, and that’s where we actually tend to see a lot of girl protagonists. The future is female for Yiddish children’s literature. Whereas we see our cheder stories, our school tales with boy protagonists that orient themselves toward the past, and sometimes we see authors digging into a very deep, rich kind of Jewish past in order to pull up something that they think will be of use now and tomorrow.
That’s what happens with a subgenre that I write about the Sabbatarian tale, that describes somebody observing a very traditional, even Halachically-informed Sabbath under vulnerable circumstances, where maybe it wouldn’t even make sense for them to choose the immobility and all of the ways that the Sabbath grounds you in a negative sense, they are nevertheless choosing to uphold the Sabbath and finding that it grounds them in a positive sense. There’s a convergence point between the very traditional idea of a regular cessation of labor every seven days and the most cutting-edge socialist thinking about the worker being able to reclaim time from the boss and say, “1/7 of my time doesn’t belong to you.”
There are some sort of bold-faced names showing up and trying their hand at this literature. We have Sholem Aleichem trying his best. What do you make of the writers that are maybe more familiar to us and their efforts, and who are some writers that we might not know about who stand out?
Across Jewish literatures, several decades into the 20th century, there’s a sense of almost civic duty to try your hand at writing something for children, and some of them are terrible. One of my favorite Yiddish authors for adults, Yisroel Rabon, writes this super weird novella that I wrote about at length in my first book, Never Better! It’s violent and disturbing and terrible, and I would never put it before children in my life. And then we get someone like Sholem Aleichem, who wrote so brilliantly about childhood and child characters from the perspective of adulthood, but really had no game when it came to addressing living, breathing children. And he was such a bold name that they tried to retrofit his stories to appeal to children. It became canonical because he’s Sholem Aleichem. And then you get someone like Isaac Basevis Singer, who’s really already made quite a name for himself as a novelist and a writer for adults. And [Elizabeth Shub], the daughter of a legendary children’s editor of the Kinder-zhurnal, who becomes an English language children’s book editor as her career, goes and recruits Isaac Bashevis Singer to write for children.
And he didn’t know how to do it. He had to really kind of stumble his way into some kind of address to children. So he started out trying to write rhyming poetry, because he thought that’s how you talk to children, literarily, and it was stilted and it was terrible. And she told him, “Itsik, go back to the drawing board.” He kind of cracked the code and figured out his formula, and he started producing these really heartwarming tales of the old country, and he was able to pour a sense of hopefulness and decency that he only half believed in for adults into these children’s stories.
Then as this enterprise of writing for children in Yiddish and publishing arms gets going, it becomes professionalized, and it becomes the province of both professional educators and also people whose whole career is write for children, or who wrote somewhat for adults, but also somewhat for children. And then we start to get figures like Zina Rabinowitz, who’s one of my favorites. Last year I did this project, 5785 where I published a new Yiddish children’s holiday tale before each one of the holidays that ran in the Forward. And one of my go-to authors was Zina Rabinowitz. She’s writing in the 1950s, but she really understood how to address kids, and it was a very smooth process to translate her, and her psychological intuitions about children and childhood were very much in keeping with our own.
A large part of it for the Americas was how to communicate about the Holocaust. Part of the approach was stories of resistance or metaphors — the life of a tear shed by a boy who was deported. Can you talk about how they tackled that?
One of the really important figures in thinking about this and kind of theorizing what to do was Yudel Mark. He’s publishing articles in 1941 and 1943 and 1947 reflecting on what they did and how they did. And he says “We may have sinned against child psychology.” So there’s an awareness that there is a field devoted to children’s wellbeing, and that field has made everyone aware of children’s vulnerability, and that it was worth overriding that concern in order to let Yiddish-speaking Jewish children know what was happening to their cousins and how to go on and live their own Jewish lives in light and in spite of what had happened to European Jewish children.
Something that comes up as a theme — there’s tzedekah for a poor person on Purim, even in the first story — is building empathy for readers.
The single most frequently occurring theme across all the varieties of Yiddish children’s literature, is the persistence of wealth inequality and the need to redress it in some way. The prescriptions for what to do or what to focus on in redressing wealth inequality really vary, particularly by political stripe. This is where we can sort of dig down and see where an author situated themselves on the ideological spectrum. And so we have Kadia Molodosky writing a beautiful story “The Beggar and the Baker,” about the traditional value of giving tzedakah, of charitable giving as a matter of justice and as a matter of pre-paying a debt that you don’t even know exists yet, because that’s what the baker does. He gives challah every week to all the beggars, including one with radiant eyes. And when the bakery burns down and the baker is left destitute, along comes the beggar of all of those years whose fortune has changed, and he’s come precisely to pay back and discharge the debt.
And we have other stories that speak in the language of tzedakah. We have a story of a little boy’s political awakening, realizing that as a kind of well-off, middle-class kid with everything that he needs, there’s a whole economy and political order that’s been created to make sure that he has down feathers in his pillow and wool to be sewn into the suit that he wears, and leather for the shoes that he wears, and that other creatures have suffered and died, and that other human beings are working at hard jobs, like the washer woman, so that he can have nice things. So there’s his coming into political awareness.
And then, going further out on the left, we get a story about the birds of the forest who organized politically to liberate the urban birds who are dwelling in cages. And the story really walks its child reader through the mechanics of labor organization and collective action. And so everyone wants to fix wealth inequality, but people have really different ideas about how to do it and what to emphasize.
The state of this literature now is mainly from the Hasidic world. Do they read any of these, these old secular writers and their Shabbat stories? I know the orthography is different.
It’s not like there’s a kosher version of Kadia Molodowsky or Isaac Bashevis Singer. There is, instead, just alternate content that originates in that community. There might be Yiddish children’s versions of midrashic stories, stories from rabbinic literature, that got an update in the 1910s or the 1920s and those same stories have formed the basis of materials for contemporary Hasidic children. But that would be sort of incidental. One thing that I did see, and actually my favorite of the contemporary Hasidic children’s books that I own, is a graphic novelization of a Rebbe Nakhman story about a wise man and a fool, and the production values are really high. The illustrations are great, and who doesn’t love a graphic novel?
What does the future of the genre look like for non-Hasidic Yiddish readers, a growing cohort having kids now.
One of the ways that I got into this research area is that I was looking for children’s materials that originated in Yiddish, not necessarily something that’s been translated into Yiddish or translated for pedagogical purposes, that would be simple enough that my students could productively read it in the second semester. And I thought, “Is there any children’s literature?” And so now I get emails all the time from people who are using Honey on the Page to locate children’s literature, which they are then using to further their Yiddish education. I think that some of these stories really want to exist in new forms, and as picture books and as graphic novels. I actually just got the go ahead from the peer reviewer on my translation of Labzik, which SUNY is going to publish in August. All 12 Labzik stories. And I think Labzik is desperately eager to become a graphic novel. And I think Labzik wants to be animated. The puppet film was so successful. I think there’s a lot more where that came from.
I do think that it’s a time of renaissance, and that children’s literature is such an exciting frontier, because it’s a way to build interest from and grant access from a very young age. It’s something that multiple generations can share with each other with great pleasure and profit. And then, for the people who do make the leap into studying Yiddish, whether it’s through Duolingo or a class, it gives them a way to progress with their language study, so it can do all of these different things for us that feel like they have a lot of currency right now.
The post How Yiddish authors made a new world writing for children appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Christians are displaying menorahs in their windows post-Bondi Beach attack. Why some Jews object
In the wake of Sunday’s attack on a Hanukkah celebration in Sydney, Australia, some non-Jews are placing menorahs in their windows as a visible show of support for their Jewish neighbors.
“My family is not Jewish. Our house is decorated for Christmas. Tonight we are adding a menorah in the front window,” one Threads user posted and received 17,000 likes. “We stand with our Jewish neighbors. 🕎 #hanukkah”
That was one of several viral posts shared by non-Jews lighting hanukkiot after the Bondi Beach attack, which left 15 people dead, including a Chabad rabbi, a Holocaust survivor, and a 10-year-old girl.
The practice, however, has also exposed a divide between Jews who welcome the gesture as an expression of solidarity and those who view it as a form of appropriation.
“Lighting a menorah is a closed practice and is not meant to be done by someone outside of our community,” one user replied to a non-Jew posting about her Hanukkah candles.
“We love you for this! You’re a mensch,” another commented in support.
An act of solidarity
In November 2023, Adam Kulbersh founded Project Menorah, an initiative that encourages non-Jews to display menorahs in their windows as a way to fight antisemitism. The practice gained traction in the aftermath of Oct. 7, he said, drawing thousands of participants across 16 countries and all 50 U.S. states.
After Sunday’s attack at Bondi Beach, Kulbersh, who is Jewish, said he noticed another surge in social media activity around the idea.
“This happens in a cyclical way, where non-Jews in many cases underestimate the amount of antisemitism that’s out there, and then it spikes, and they go, Oh, right, these are our friends and neighbors, and we can’t close our eyes,” he said in an interview with the Forward.
The idea for Project Menorah grew out of Kulbersh’s personal experience. When his then 6-year-old son, Jack, asked to put up Hanukkah decorations at their Los Angeles home, Kulbersh hesitated, worried that a visibly Jewish display could make them a target.
He mentioned the concern to a non-Jewish neighbor, who responded by offering to place a menorah in her window to show the family they weren’t alone.
Moved by the gesture, Kulbersh went all out with “flashy” Hanukkah decorations that year. Soon after, he launched Project Menorah to encourage other non-Jews to follow his neighbor’s example.
“I thought, This is an answer,” Kulbersh said. “We don’t need to wait for governments to solve all the problems. This is something neighbors can do for neighbors.”
It wasn’t the first time menorah displays had been proposed as a means of fighting hate: In Billings, Montana in 1993, neo-Nazis threw a brick through a 6-year-old Jewish boy’s bedroom window, which was displaying a menorah. In response, thousands of residents taped paper menorahs to their windows in solidarity — and the neo-Nazis retreated from town.
A ‘closed practice’?
The idea of non-Jews displaying menorahs, however, has elicited a different response from some Jews who take offense.
“I understand that the gentiles who are lighting their own menorahs as a show of solidarity mean well but that’s not for y’all to be doing. Judaism is a closed practice,” one user posted. “Get the circumcision first, then we’ll talk.”
The term “closed practice” reflects the fact that Judaism is a non-proselytizing religion and does not encourage people to adopt it casually. Unlike Christianity, which generally welcomes anyone who accepts Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior, Jewish identity is not defined solely by belief. Becoming Jewish requires a formal and demanding conversion process, typically involving extensive study and approval by a rabbinic court.
The backlash may also reflect anxiety about increased adoption of Jewish rituals and symbols by messianic Jews and Christians. These practices tend to put off Jews who believe groups are co-opting Jewish rituals without fully appreciating their history and meanings — from “Jesus mezuzahs,” to Christian Passover seders and shofar blowing, to observing a “Jewish Sabbath,” aka Shabbat.
But for others, it’s possible to distinguish between those who combine Jewish symbols with Christian symbols, and well-meaning non-Jews want to express support.
For its part, Project Menorah offers paper cut-outs of menorahs on its website, not instructions for actually observing the holiday.
“If people want to light an actual menorah and put it in their window, great, and if they want to say a prayer that works with their religious beliefs, great,” he said. “But I’m not encouraging anyone who’s not Jewish to participate in the Jewish ritual, the Jewish prayers.”
He added that when he started the initiative, he consulted rabbis about the practice. As is often the case when asking a group of Jews about anything, he said, opinions varied.
But the majority, he said, agreed that “when the house is on fire, we don’t question the people who want to help put the fire out.”
The post Christians are displaying menorahs in their windows post-Bondi Beach attack. Why some Jews object appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
My religion was ‘None of the above,’ until Oct. 7 and now Bondi
Judaism is on fire — or really, being Jewish is on fire. The mass murder of Jews on Bondi Beach during a Hanukah celebration was only the most recent example. But the reaction that surprised me the most was how unsurprised I was watching the news reports on Sunday morning. Like too many, I have become anesthetized to mass shootings in general and those targeted toward Jews in particular.
Antisemitism is raging across the world like a global pandemic, except the contagion this time is not a virus, it’s hate — and the fire is burning out of control. It shows up on our news platforms, our social media feeds, even, perhaps especially, in the polite company of dinner parties and faculty lounges. Jewish worshippers shot in a Manchester synagogue, an Israeli tourist viciously beaten on a busy Manhattan street while onlookers casually walked by, two Israeli embassy staff members murdered outside the Capital Jewish Museum in D.C. are just a few recent examples.
Space doesn’t allow a full accounting of all the Jewish hate crimes in the last few years. But this much is true: Jewish hate is old, truly biblical, but it’s become increasingly hot in the aftermath of the war in Gaza that, parenthetically, was initiated by a heinous attack against the Jewish people. Though obvious, sometimes, especially as it relates to this conflict, the obvious needs restating. And now, for reasons that are beyond baffling, who started the war seems beside the point.
Until recently, I could feel removed from this global phenomenon, given the ambiguity of my own religious identity. Despite my last name and appearance, for most of my life, I didn’t identify as Jewish. Instead, I was the confused product of a Baptist mother from Selma, Alabama and a Jewish father who escaped Nazi Germany just in time. Both my parents turned away from their religions, my mother because of the silence of churches in the South in the face of racial injustice and my father as protection against Jewish persecution that didn’t end when World War II did.
Growing up, my religious identity was None of the Above, a designation that made me feel as though I was aimlessly wandering around a non-denominational desert.
As I grew older, the subject of my religious identity made me immediately uncomfortable, whether as a topic of conversation at a dinner party or as a simple question on a form. At times it elicited a visceral response — flushing, a bit of nausea, a bead of sweat on my back — not just because I didn’t have a ready answer, but because it made me feel disconnected from the rest of society. I would have rather been asked anything else: Who did you vote for or How much money do you make?
The question What religion are you? felt like an interrogation, a bright light shone in my face. While most people could respond to the question with a one-word answer, that was never going to be an option for me. And that made me feel like an outsider, a person that could not fit neatly into a religious box, akin to the children in military families who stumble when asked, Where did you grow up?
Everywhere, nowhere.
Because not having a religion to call my own never sat well with me, I went on a decade-long journey, one that went here and there, ending only when I spent the time to, once and for all, put the matter to bed. After thousands of hours of research, discussion, and a significant amount of rumination, I’ve decided to embrace my Judaism, to run into the burning building, as it were, when the convenient choice would have been to run away from it, an easy choice for someone that had spent his whole life undifferentiated when it came to religion.
Which brings me to today, to where I am now, to where we all are now.
Oct. 7 happened to occur in the midst of my grappling with my own religious identity. But even if that was still a bit murky then, I felt rage nonetheless when anti-Israel protests ignited in many Middle Eastern and Western capitals, all before one IDF plane was in the air. As I watched these images from the comfort of my living room, I thought of my father and his family, the knocks on the door in the middle of the night, the trains, and yes, the burning furnaces. As ever, societal opinions that surround Israel and Jewishness today have become conflated, manifesting as antisemitism when it might simply have been disagreement with the Israeli prosecution of the war in Gaza.
This country finds itself in a rare situation where extremists on the Right and the Left have merged into an unholy antisemitic coalition, exemplified by Progressives yelling and screaming about “genocide” without having a clue what that word really means and voting overwhelmingly to elect a New York City Mayor who refuses to walk back his call to “globalize the intifada.”
Meanwhile on the Right, Tucker Carlson, who has a podcast that goes out to 16.7 million followers on X, recently gave Nick Fuentes two hours to spew antisemitic rhetoric, including his comments that with regard to his enemies in the conservative movement, “I see Jewishness as the common denominator,” and that Jews are a “stateless people,” certainly true if Fuentes had his way.
Not to be left out, Carlson helpfully added that the United States gets nothing out of the relationship with Israel. Given that Israel is the only functioning democracy in the Middle East, a part of the world not known for stability, I would argue that support of Israel is not just in the interest of the “Jews” (the monolith that Carlson and his ilk view them/us) but rather in America’s interest. Carlson obviously sees the geopolitics differently, arguing recently that Israel was not “strategically important” to the United States and, in fact, a “strategic liability.” For his part, President Trump defended Carlson, saying, “You can’t tell him who to interview,” without commenting directly on what was actually said in the interview.
For a confused maybe/maybe not a Jew like me, Oct. 7 provided an impetus to reassess my faith. So I did. But after hundreds of hours of research and thousands of miles of travel, I realized my Judaism didn’t start on Oct. 8, 2023 — it began in 1320 when the progenitor of my family, Juda Weill, was born. Juda was then followed by generations of Jewish family members, mostly rabbis and including the famous composer Kurt Weill, until the German Weills were either murdered by the Nazis, or for the lucky ones, dispersed all over the world. My grandfather, fresh off the horrors of Buchenwald, made it to America with my father, grandmother, and uncle.
Then — at nearly age 60! — I learned that my mother converted to Judaism, and the path toward my own Judaism was set, when all that was left was to walk along it and pick up the breadcrumbs along the way.
What did I find at the end of that road?
A burning building. And what did I do as I looked at that place on fire, whether in Australia, Europe, or on the streets of American cities?
I ran in, because that’s what we all must do, Jews, Christians, Muslims, and everyone else of any religious identity.
If any of us wonder what we would have done, Jews or Gentiles, during the early days of the Nazi regime, we are doing it now.
The post My religion was ‘None of the above,’ until Oct. 7 and now Bondi appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
France 24, Mother Jones Receive UN Award for Work Built on Word of Discredited Ex-Contractor Who Lied About Israel
Anthony Aguilar, a former contractor for the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) who previously served as a US Army Green Beret. Photo: Screenshot
The UN press corps on Friday gave an award to news outlets France 24 and Mother Jones for their reporting based on the testimony of Anthony Aguilar, a US Army veteran and former contractor for the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) who has made discredited claims against Israel.
France 24 and Mother Jones were awarded the Bronze medal in the Ricardo Ortega Memorial Prize category at the UN Correspondents Gala Awards, an event hosted by the UN Correspondents Association at the global body’s headquarters in New York City. The award is for broadcast coverage of the UN, its agencies, and field operations.
According to France 24, its journalists were the first to interview Aguilar on camera on the morning of July 23, 2025. Aguilar claimed he witnessed human rights abuses perpetrated by the Israeli military and others at sites run by the GHF, which until the Gaza ceasefire went into place was an Israel- and US-backed program that delivered aid directly to Palestinians, with the goal of blocking Hamas from diverting supplies for terrorist activities and selling the remainder at inflated prices.
France 24 and Mother Jones both published a story based on Aguilar’s testimony.
However, it was revealed last year that Aguilar’s most explosive claim, about the death of a Gazan boy, was false and that he was fired by the GHF for his conduct and pushing misinformation.
Aguilar claimed he witnessed the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) shoot a child — Abdul Rahim Muhammad Hamdene, known as Abboud — as the GHF was distributing humanitarian aid on May 28.
After Aguilar made his claim, he rapidly rose to prominence, presenting himself as a whistleblower exposing supposed Israeli war crimes. His story gained traction internationally, going viral on social media. He subsequently embarked on an extensive media tour, in which he accused Israel of indiscriminately killing Palestinian civilians as part of an attempt to “annihilate” and “disappear” the civilian population in Gaza.
However, Aguilar, who erroneously labeled the boy in question as “Amir,” gave inconsistent accounts of the alleged incident in separate interviews to different media outlets, calling into question the veracity of his narrative.
The GHF launched its own investigation at the end of July, ultimately locating Abboud alive with his mother at an aid distribution site on Aug. 23. The organization confirmed his identity using facial recognition software and biometric testing.
Abboud was escorted in disguise to an undisclosed safe location by the GHF team for his safety, according to The Daily Wire, which noted that the spreading of Aguilar’s false tale put the boy’s life in danger, as his alleged death was a powerful piece of propaganda for Hamas.
Fox News Digital reported that Abboud and his mother were safely extracted from the Gaza Strip in September.
In footage obtained by both news outlets, the boy can be seen playfully interacting with a GHF representative and appearing excited ahead of their planned extraction.
During the summer, as Aguilar’s claims were receiving widespread media attention, the GHF released a chain of text messages showing that Aguilar was terminated for his conduct. It also held a press conference to present evidence showing that Aguilar “falsified documents” and “presented misleading videos to push his false narrative.”
There was no apparent mention of the revelations about Aguilar’s narrative when the award was given out on Friday.