Reviews
Review
What Were Our Children Reading? Review of Modern Jewish Worldmaking Through Yiddish Children’s Literature by Miriam Udel
In a word, Yiddish children’s literature, per Udel, has a long history, a series of stormy futures past, and a fraught yet fruitful and ongoing aftermath. Throughout the book, Udel maintains the necessary critical distance without losing sight of the vitality present in printed matter for children, the institutions pursuing this work, to say the least of the debates surrounding this highly contested work which suffused each epoch.
May 31, 2026
Review
Review of Artifacts of Orthodox Jewish Childhoods, edited by Dainy Bernstein
From CDs to detective stories, zines to toys, the objects remembered and analyzed in this volume presents the range of material that filled the childhoods of Ashkenazi Orthodox Jews growing up in the last decades of the twentieth century.
Jun 21, 2023
Review
Surreptitious Desires and Fantasy Worlds: Review of Golan Y. Moskowitz's Wild Visionary: Maurice Sendak in Queer Jewish Context
In Golan Y. Moskowitz’s engrossing Wild Visionary: Maurice Sendak in Queer Jewish Context, he tells of the fantasy worlds that the beloved children’s book writer and illustrator created over his lifetime, initially as a form of self-preservation, a way of surviving a world hostile to overt displays of queerness and Jewishness, and eventually — and rebelliously — as a form of pleasure and self-expression.
Oct 24, 2021
