Up for Discussion- Judging Judaica

Since 1968, The Association of Jewish Libraries (AJL) has awarded its annual Sydney Taylor Book Award to outstanding children's books of Jewish content. The first award was given to Esther Hautzig's The Endless Steppe (HarperTrophy, 1987). The most recent awards were given to Eric A. Kimmel's Gershon's Monster (Scholastic, 2000) for younger readers and to Ida Vos's The Key Is Lost (HarperCollins, 2000) for older readers. An annual list of AJL Notable Books for Children includes from 30 to 35 of each year's best.

Established in memory of the author by her husband, the Sydney Taylor Book Award honors the writer of the "All-of-a-Kind Family" series (the first published by Follett, 1951 and the last by Dutton in 1978), all stories about a Jewish immigrant family living in New York at the turn of the 20th century. They portray a warm picture of a large family struggling to become Americans while remaining faithful to their religious and cultural traditions—a challenge to new Americans of all backgrounds then and now.

The "All-of-a-Kind Family" books are important because, through them, modern Judaic children's literature entered the mainstream. You don't have to be Jewish to love these stories; they radiate warmth and goodness. To Jewish children reading the books at a time when there was little available about them and their heritage, the "All-of-a-Kind Family" stories could be an epiphany. The cultural historian Hasia Diner has called the books crucial to the development of a shared sense of the American Jewish experience.

There are currently about 120 children's books on Jewish themes released each year, twice as many as a few years ago. They are published by mainstream, or what I will call here secular, publishers and by Jewish houses, from established ones like the Jewish Publication Society (JPS) to small Orthodox presses like Hachai. Publishers submit books for the six-member Sydney Taylor Book Award committee to evaluate and consider for the awards. In addition to standard criteria regarding literary and artistic merit, there are several elements that the committee looks at when evaluating these books. These are the factors I want to discuss with the hope of providing some insight to all reviewers, whether or not they have a solid knowledge of Judaism.

The committee looks for, and sometimes struggles with the term, "positive Jewish content." Obviously it means more than a book's having a Jewish author, characters with Jewish names, or a bissel (small amount) of Yiddish sprinkled throughout the narrative. The stories of some of the Hasidic rabbis, such as one of Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav's tales retold by Eric A. Kimmel in A Cloak for the Moon (Holiday, 2001), have little or no explicit Jewish content because the original tellers and listeners were all Jewish and Jewish content was taken for granted.

"Positive Jewish content" does not mean that the characters and subject matter must be presented in a favorable light. Sulamith Ish-Kishor wrote a negative portrait of a Jewish father in Our Eddie (Pantheon, 1969) that offended some Jewish readers. Yet Our Eddie won a Sydney Taylor Award. More recently, Anita Lobel's memoir, No Pretty Pictures (Greenwillow, 1998)—a Sydney Taylor Honor Book—expressed the dismay she felt being Jewish in an environment where Jews were hunted, degraded, and reduced—before they were murdered—to filthy, starving, diseased creatures scarcely recognizable as humans. Who could blame a Jewish child suffering through the Holocaust if she felt this way? Yet, this is not a positive portrayal of Jewish existence in the usual sense of the word. So what does "positive" mean?

We have arrived at a broad interpretation that looks at the book in its totality and judges how authentically it portrays the individual characters in their interplay with Jewish belief, history, values, and practice. If Jewish questions underlie or animate the theme and the author seeks to answer them in a Jewish context, then the book has "positive Jewish content and focus." In Our Eddie, which explores psychological as well as Jewish questions, readers are impelled to ask, Why would a melamed, a Jewish teacher, have so much love for Judaism and the students to whom he taught it and so little love for his own son? In No Pretty Pictures, the essential question is at the heart of virtually all writing by Jews about the Holocaust: Why did the God of Israel abandon us?

A book's Jewish content may be central or peripheral, explicit or implied. It may be conveyed through plot, characters, or setting or, in the case of traditional literature, by the original source of the tale. A useful review will point out Jewish content, saying if it is important or incidental to the book's meaning. A local review of Marc Kornblatt's Understanding Buddy (McElderry, 2001) failed to mention that the main character and his family were Jewish and that he sought answers to his questions from Jewish texts and sources. This is a serious lapse for it not only misrepresents the book but can also influence selection decisions and prevent an excellent book from reaching Jewish readers in day school and synagogue libraries, where budgets are notoriously small.

Reviewers should avoid making assumptions about Jewish content, however. For example, it is enough to state that a story is about a family's Sabbath observance and too much to assert that the family is Orthodox because all of the men are wearing kipot (skullcaps). No knowledgeable reviewer would generalize like this, knowing that many non-Orthodox Jews also wear kipot during prayer, holiday, and Sabbath observances, and on other religiously significant occasions. This is not a trivial issue because books of general Jewish interest may not be selected because, on the basis of a reviewer's unwarranted assumption, they appear to be sectarian or particularistic.

Biographies of Jews can often present a challenge to reviewers striving to represent accurately a work's Jewish content. Some of them are about people who happen to be Jewish but whose lives or works have not been informed by a Jewish consciousness. The architect Frank Gehry was born, and may still consider himself to be, Jewish. Yet, his career has no Jewish resonance. Sandra Jordan and Jan Greenberg's fine biography, Frank O. Gehry: Outside In (DK Ink, 2000), reflects this and cannot be said to have Jewish content. On the other hand, Sigmund Freud was an atheist—a Jewish atheist. Yiddishkeit (Jewishness), if not religious belief, influenced much of his work and virtually every aspect of his long, extremely productive life. Catherine Reef's outstanding Sigmund Freud (Clarion, 2001) acknowledges this also, and, like its subject, is thoroughly Jewish in content.

Reviewers of both fiction and nonfiction books of Jewish content should have some basic understanding of Judaism and Jewish history, enough at least to recognize when something doesn't ring true. They also need to distinguish between important errors—those with a negative impact on the overall veracity of the book—and those that are, in context, minor. No printed review that I have located mentioned the egregious factual error in an otherwise good book, On Hanukkah (Atheneum, 1998) by Cathy Goldberg Fishman. Telling the story of the Maccabees, Fishman claims that their enemies were "the Assyrians." They were, in fact, the Greco-Syrians, a people separated by about a thousand years from the Assyrians. Young readers will have no clue that this is inaccurate, a confusion of the name "Assyrian" with "Greco-Syrian," and off chronologically by centuries. It is like telling children that the Pilgrims came to America in 1920.

The fact that reviewers do not detect inaccuracies in these books should be of great concern. Advice given by Debbie Reese in "Authenticity and Sensitivity: Goals for Writing and Reviewing Books with Native American Themes " (SLJ , Nov. 1999) is applicable to Jewish books as well. If a reviewer lacks technical expertise or knowledge relevant to a book's content or theme, Reese advises that "it may be necessary to note in the review that the reviewer has attended to literary elements but cannot comment with authority on a book's factual or cultural authenticity." Moreover, reviewers, especially librarians trained to have information-finding skills, should be expected to consult without hesitation a dictionary, an encyclopedia, a concise history book, a handbook, the Internet, or a local expert whenever their own expertise is limited or the contents of a book suspect.

Sensitivity requires knowing what the concerns are. Jewish reviewers may have less trouble with this than others, but most educated people should be aware that many of our cultural symbols and markers reflect the predominance of Christianity. Jews and other non-Christians, as well, prefer the use of B.C.E. (Before the Common Era) and C.E. (Common Era) to B.C. (Before Christ) and A.D. (The Year of Our Lord). Why? Because the latter abbreviations stand for events that are outside of our tradition. Along with terminology such as "Jesus Christ" and "the Old Testament," this usage indicates a Christocentric point of view and a lack of sensitivity. If any subject is more fraught with conflict and misunderstanding than religion, it is politics—especially the politics surrounding Israel. Whatever one's belief or religion, evaluating books about Israel is, in my opinion, the most difficult reviewing task one can face because there is virtually no fact that is not challenged, no claim that is not denied, no neutral or objective standpoint. Moreover, because the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is reported in the media every day, consumers of the news are constantly confronted by differing analyses and a selection of details that distort as often as they inform. Readers need to read carefully to detect biases in language, in terminology, and in interpretations of events.

Children's books of Jewish content should be evaluated, above all, as literature. Positive Jewish content, accuracy, solid research, reputable scholarship, and sensitivity to Jewish concerns and issues do not compensate for flawed plots, unbelievable characters, poor style, meretricious art, etc. They are criteria that must be added to all others when evaluating books on Jewish themes and this unquestionably puts an added burden on reviewers. But reliable, high-quality reviews make an enormous difference in separating the wheat from the chaff.