I get it, believe me. I’d steeled myself to introduce Josie to the notion of the Holocaust when she was in third grade, when I planned to give her Lois Lowry’s Number the Stars. That book, a brilliant Newbery-medal-winning tale of a little girl in Denmark during World War II, introduces historical truths in a manageable way. It’s emotionally resonant, but not so horrifying that kids will wind up rocking, haunted, in a corner.

As I’ve written before, this brilliant plan failed miserably when Josie, in second grade, borrowed a book called The Night Crossing from the school library. It’s about a family fleeing Innsbruck in 1938. By the time I found it in her backpack, she’d already read it. (Baby’s first Holocaust book! And I wasn’t even there!) I asked Josie to tell me about the story. She explained that the Nazis were bad people who wanted to kill Clara and her family, and Clara’s family had to escape by sneaking over the mountains at night. They were worried that their Shabbat candlesticks would clank together and alert the Nazis, but Clara had the idea to hide them inside her dolls. And since the dolls had already made one night crossing, escaping from anti-Jewish violence in Russia years earlier with Clara’s grandmother when she was Clara’s age, the dolls wouldn’t be afraid.

I asked Josie whether she knew that the story was based on history. “I know that Clara isn’t real, but the Nazis were,” she said, pronouncing it “NaZEES.” She also thought Clara’s family was escaping from Australia. Still, she got the gist.

But that was no thanks to me, the mother who waited too long.

So, I ask you: How do we figure out what kids can understand and process, and when to let them try? How do we find the balance between letting them have a childhood and giving them history? How do we get out of our own way, putting aside our own defenses and anxiety to do what’s necessary to let our kids grow up? I’ve heard my friends say that kids should be innocent; they shouldn’t know about genocide at 8, 10, 12; they should be carefree and happy. Really? We are JEWS. Our history hasn’t exactly been all carefree and happy. Wishing it so, even for 12-year-olds, is willfully naïve. And frequently kids understand more than we give them credit for.

Of course kids vary; mileage varies. But if we try to protect them from everything, we turn them into cloistered idiots with messed-up worldviews. So, maybe you’re positive your 10-year-old isn’t ready for Maus. Fine. But if your kid is old enough to be interested, be wary of closing the door to awareness and leaning against it. Our decision to shield them is generally more about our needs than theirs. And as with sex ed, if you wait too long, you aren’t going to be the one doing the educating.

I was lucky that my daughter’s first Holocaust educator was Karen Ackerman. “An excellent fictional introduction to the Holocaust,” School Library Journal said of The Night Crossing. “Ackerman’s brief chapter book … gives younger kids a first look at the essentials of what it was like to be an ordinary child in danger at that terrible time,” wrote Hazel Rochman in Booklist.

But if your kid is interested, or older than 10, I’d encourage you to go for Maus. It’s a terrific book. As Ellen Handler Spitz, a professor of art at the University of Maryland who specializes in aesthetics and children’s literature, pointed out in the New Republic last year, most Holocaust books for kids and teens aren’t. “The Jewish protagonist may seem unrealistically virtuous, or merely a cipher; the plot overly predictable or trite; the tone heavy-handed or saccharine; the truth subtly distorted (as in Carmen Agra Deedy’s touching story, The Yellow Star, which alleges—despite a lack of historical corroboration—that King Christian X of Denmark wore a yellow star to show solidarity with the Jews of his country and asked his countrymen to do the same); or just an overload of data crammed between the covers of a book, so that readers feel bombarded and overwhelmed.”

As human beings we seek uplift. But Holocaust stories that try to be joyful generally ring false. Kids, like adults, deserve truth. Remember Angel Girl by Laurie Friedman, the memoir of Herman Rosenblat, who claimed to have fallen in love in the girl who tossed apples to him every day over the Buchenwald fence? It was a lie, and the book was withdrawn. As the publisher said, Holocaust books mustn’t “sacrifice veracity for emotional impact.”

But they also shouldn’t revel in unlimited brutality. Or, in my opinion, ungapatchka’d writing. (I realize I’m in the minority on this one, but The Book Thief? Hundreds and hundreds of pages of ungapatchka. “When Liesel left that day, she said something with great uneasiness. Two giant words were struggled with, carried on her shoulder, and dropped as a bungling pair at Ilsa Hermann’s feet. They fell off sideways as the girl veered with them and could no longer sustain their weight. Together, they sat on the floor, large and loud and clumsy.” Please. Less, Markus.)

There are books that I think are wonderful, but still wrong for most kids. I was in awe of Morris Gleitzman’s Once, which I put on my list of best Jewish children’s books of 2010, but it’s incredibly dark. The sequel, Then, is just as impressive from a literary standpoint, but it’s even bleaker, bloodier, and more harrowing. I didn’t include it on my 2011 list because I simply can’t imagine encouraging a child to read it. Similarly, Paul Janeczko’s young-adult poetry collection, Requiem: Poems of the Terezin Ghetto, is so grim I’m not sure it works for most teenagers as either an educational tool or a work of art. Here, for instance, is a snippet of a poem narrated by a Nazi officer.

We herded all the Jew swine
close to the gallows
where the old Jew stood on the wagon
noosed.
I ordered my Jews closer.
Close enough to hear
the twig snap of his neck.
Close enough to smell
when he shit himself in death.
Close enough to see his face darken,
his tongue poke from his mouth.

The speaker then forces a different Jew to throw stones at a boy until the boy dies. In another poem, the manager of the camp’s crematorium describes, in graphic detail, what happens to a human body as it burns. These scenes have the ring of truth, and Janeczko, a much-praised poet for young people, clearly did a great deal of research. It’s utterly respectful—but there are very few readers I’d recommend it to.

You’ve probably already gleaned what I’m getting at: Read children’s Holocaust books before you give them to your kid. And yes, you have to. Start thinking about it before you think your kid is ready. (And in our media-saturated world, if your kid is 8, she’s ready.) The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., offers some useful advice: Elementary school can be a good time to begin talking about diversity, bias, and prejudice. Strive for precision of language; steer clear of generalizations and stereotypes (such as “all Germans were evil”). Avoid comparisons of pain (this is not a “who is most oppressed” competition). Don’t romanticize history by overemphasizing heroic tales or the worst aspects of human nature, but don’t make it sound like there were as many heroic gentile rescuers as there were villains, either. Contextualize history, and make responsible methodological choices. (“Graphic material should be used judiciously—Try to select images and texts that do not exploit the students’ emotional vulnerability.”)

The museum offers a (somewhat dry and outdated) reading list; I prefer the one compiled by a former school librarian, Carol Hurst. She died in 2007, but her daughter has maintained the site, and Hurst’s list is both more current and more fiction-heavy than the museum’s. And among recently published books, I recommend the picture book I Will Come Back for You: A Family in Hiding During World War II, by Marisabina Russo (age 6 and up); The Champion of Children: The Story of Janusz Korczak by Tomek Bogacki (age 8 and up); and Terezin: Voices From the Holocaust by Ruth Thomson (age 9 and up).

And Maus? For for graphic-novel-loving tweens, you could do a lot worse.

I had forgotten: I used to be the parent who cooed over the way my kid made an E.

Of course, it’s quite possible that the way children make a scribble or a spiky E is both mundane and miraculous. Our spawn go from little globs of protoplasm to actual people trying to communicate and express themselves through art. It doesn’t mean all their creations are special. Or rather, it sort of does. It does if it’s your kid and you’re watching his world expand exponentially every day.

The art critic Clement Greenberg (from whom I cribbed the title of this essay) once wrote, “Verdicts are the warp and woof of esthetic experience.” It’s natural to judge. Taste happens. But it doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Artists have to strive for what’s new, not rest on past laurels or do what’s easy. Then again, Greenberg was known for contradicting himself. On the one hand, he acknowledged that different people could come to different verdicts, but on the other he insisted that there was one correct answer: “You like it, that’s all, whether it’s a landscape or abstract,” he wrote. “You like it. It hits you. You don’t have to read it. The work of art—sculpture or painting—forces your eye.” But he also said, “We have differences but we’re not made different. If you don’t agree with me, you’re wrong.” Hmm.

Nowadays, we recognize that people come to art from a variety of experiences, perspectives, and identities and that it is human nature to believe that one’s own child’s art is brilliant and other kids’ art blows. But what I find interesting in parental art appreciation is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still be able to function. On some level, most of us know our own kid’s art really isn’t paradigm-shattering, but we also know that it symbolizes a wad of cells becoming a sentient artist. Even as you come to realize that every kid first draws a person by making a circle for a head and two vertical lines for legs, you still find that globule breathtaking when it’s hung up with a deli magnet on your own refrigerator. You love the artist and you love her output, and you know it’s mundane and you know it’s brilliant.

All that said, it is delightful to mock parents who discuss their children’s work in the hushed voices that convey being in the presence of genius. That is why I enjoyed “Is That a Picasso on Your Fridge?” by Dan Consiglio, auteur of the blog What My Kid’s Art Says. Unlike, say, I Am Better Than Your Kids—which makes fun of children’s art by pointing out their lack of fine motor skills—Consiglio’s book makes fun of art criticism more than bad kid pictures. We rave about our children’s artwork, even when we know it’s mediocre. But maybe that’s a good thing?

Critiquing a drawing by Alice, age 8, depicting Barbie shopping at a mall, Consiglio opines that it is a damning critique of consumerism; he compares the artist’s flat, one-dimensional style to Mayan wall painting. (“But there is no sacrifice to be had here,” he observes. “Barbie has bought everything, as evidenced by the multitude of bags surrounding her.”) Consiglio then moves on to the efforts of 5-year-old Sally, who made lines of dots on lined paper with the dot-paint markers found in every nursery-school classroom from here to eternity. Consiglio gushes: “If paradigm-shattering composer Philip Glass could paint, this is the masterpiece he would create. Sally’s gorgeous symmetry conceals blooming buds of chaos in much the same way that Glass’s repetitive notes conspire to create wholly other rhythms. Both artists display an otherworldly grasp of this simple human condition: repetition does not remove opportunity; it creates opportunity.” (True. But you missed the opportunity for a Damien Hirst joke.) And of the installation art created by Ty, age 3, of Rockford, Il.,—a yoga mat covered with toy cars—Consiglio writes: “Ty has managed to coalesce the chaos of the playroom with the serenity of nap time. Trucks, cars, planes—those symbols of male toddler aggression—line a yoga mat with rock garden precision. The result is oddly satisfying, a vision of delicate balance. Seconds after this photo was taken, Ty smashed the entire setup with a toy hockey stick before spilling his juice and soiling himself.”

It’s amusing, but it also makes us ask: Is our kid’s art great or derivative? Is art truly everywhere we look, or is criticism truly absurd? (The answer to all is yes.)

It seems to me that the parenting problem herein comes when we lose, um, perspective. What are the effects of overpraising a child’s artistic gifts, whether to ourselves (hello, ego) or to the child (hello, unrealistic overblown highly fragile self-esteem)? While I don’t agree with everything the educational theorist Alfie Kohn writes, I do like his approach to talking to kids about their work. Instead of praising it to the skies, he suggests, ask about the kid’s process or choices. (This is for when they’re past the miraculous globule-drawing stage, obviously.) Why’d they pick the colors they did? What’s happening in this part of the picture? Kohn would argue that we shouldn’t offer praise at all, but other educators tell us to praise effort, if it’s clear that the kid worked hard. (If it’s just another freaking rainbow fairy, feel free to smile politely as if you’re at a boring cocktail party.)

My kid Josie had the entertaining experience recently of being on a reality TV show about the making of art. (Adult artists were paired with children in the Studio in a School art program; the adults had to make a piece inspired by the child’s artwork.) Josie’s appearance pretty much consisted of her clutching her head and muttering, “We’re doomed.” (That’s my sunny little goth-to-be!) Later, when she saw the episode on TV, she was devastated to hear the artist she’d been paired with, whom she adored, tell the camera she wasn’t inspired by Josie’s work. But Josie got over it. Her takeaway: Reality TV is not real, and real artists should just make the art they want to make because most people won’t get it anyway. Works for me.

For parents, the challenge is nurturing our kids’ explorations in art without needing them to be kitchen-appliance Picassos. Josie loves to draw, paint, and sculpt. Who can say whether she’s “good” or not, and does it really matter? (Sorry, Clement Greenberg.) Art education is worthwhile for all kids, regardless of whether they’re actually gifted (a word you know I hate). An in-depth review of research on the value of art education, conducted by the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities last year, confirmed what arts educators already know: Studying art helps kids feel engaged in school, is associated with improvements in reading and math, improves problem-solving skills, and encourages flexible thinking.

But it does more than that, I believe: One thing many testing-obsessed parents and governments forget is that it’s worthwhile for its own sake, not just because it makes kids do better on tests. (I’d add that the kids who already ace tests become more open-minded and reflective by taking art and by seeing that a classmate who may not kick butt on tests may have other gifts.) The arts are essential because they help kids see the world and themselves in a richer, more reflective way—whether or not they’re the next Helen Frankenthalers and Marc Chagalls.

Picture Books for Very Young Readers

Nosh, Schlep, Shluff, by Laurel Snyder, illustrated by Tiphanie Beeke (Random House Books for Young Readers). This perfect little board book introduces babies to fun-to-say Yiddish words in a nondidactic, entertaining way. It’s got the kind of zingy, rhyming text that makes babies and toddlers chirp “again!” (“If you want to start a ruckus/wave your arms and shake your tuches!”) And the painterly illustrations are sweet but not treacly.

Many Days, One Shabbat, by Fran Manushkin, illustrated by Maria Monescillo (Marshall Cavendish Shofar with PJ Library). This is a minimalist, nondenominational Shabbat book for very young readers (“One challah/many slices/One sky/many stars”), with clean, cartoony illustrations. I appreciate that the book doesn’t dictate any one way to celebrate Shabbat, stressing family togetherness and love over rules and silver-polishing.

The Shabbat Princess, by Amy Meltzer, illustrated by Martha Aviles (Kar-Ben). You know it happens: A little girl turns 3 and becomes a princess-obsessed, tiara-wearing, trilling little loon. Thankfully, the phase generally passes by age 6. But if you’re in the thick of it, my prescription is to buy Peggy Orenstein’s Cinderella Ate My Daughter for yourself and The Shabbat Princess for your wee Sleeping Beauty. The tale of a little girl who wants to welcome the Shabbat Princess instead of the Sabbath Queen, it’s charming, spiritual, nonmaterialistic, and right in the wheelhouse of the princess-crazed. The illustrations are wince-inducingly saccharine for my taste, but I am not the demo. My in-house focus group—aka my 7-year-old daughter, Maxie—loved everything about this book.

Picture Books for 4- to 8-Year-Old Readers

Naamah and the Ark at Night, by Susan Campbell Bartoletti, illustrated by Holly Meade (Candlewick). This book won starred reviews from Kirkus, Booklist, and the Horn Book, and deservedly so. It’s a poetic bedtime story told by Noah’s wife as she sings the frightened, storm-tossed denizens of the ark to sleep. The text has a soothing, rocking rhythm, and the art, by a Caldecott Honor winner, is an intriguing mix of watercolor and collage.

Lipman Pike: America’s First Home Run King, by Richard Michelson, illustrated by Zachary Pullen (Sleeping Bear Press). How had I never heard of Lipman Pike? Thanks to Richard Michelson, I now know that he was the first professional baseball player, signing a contract in 1866 for $20 a week to play third base for the Philadelphia Athletics. (Back then, the game was just called “base.” I didn’t know that either.) Pike, a Jewish hatmaker’s son from Brooklyn, faced tons of anti-Semitism while kicking butt not only in baseball but in foot races—he once beat a horse named Clarence in a 100-yard dash. I don’t think you have to be baseball-obsessed to be drawn into the story, and I loved the hyper-real, slightly trippy illustrations.

Marcel Marceau, Master of Mime, by Gloria Spielman, illustrated by Manon Gauthier (Kar-Ben). I confess I have always been a mime-mocker. Walking against the wind? Trapped in a box? Climbing a ladder? Oh cripes, cut it out and say something! But I’m eating my own words (silently! with invisible cutlery!) after reading this gripping biography. At age 5, Marcel—the son of a kosher butcher in Strasbourg, France—is determined to become a silent actor like Charlie Chaplin. At 16, he joins the French Resistance to fight the Nazis. He alters photos and forges ID cards to make other children look too young to be sent to the camps and secretly leads groups of Jewish children across the Swiss border to safety. After the war, he becomes the artist he always wanted to be. The luminous pencil and watercolor illustrations complement the text beautifully.

Chanukah Lights, by Michael J. Rosen and Robert Sabuda (Candlewick). Words fail. This pop-up book is so stunning, so gorgeous, you will be terrified to allow your child to touch it. Sabuda’s all-white pop-ups against brightly colored backgrounds depict the celebration of Hanukkah throughout history and throughout the world.

The Story of Esther, by Eric A. Kimmel, illustrated by Jill Weber (Holiday House). There were a bunch of cute Purim books out this year, but Maxie and I both liked this one best. It’s a sophisticated but still kid-friendly retelling, dramatic and immersive. It is brilliantly colored and folk-arty, with Moorish flair. I love watching Maxie study the painting contrasting Esther’s simple ponytail and outfit with the ungapatchka looks of the painted ladies of the royal court.

I Will Come Back for You, by Marisabina Russo (Schwartz & Wade). “There is sadness and death in this book,” Maxie warned me. “You might not want to give this to someone below second grade.” Maybe not, but I do think it’s a delicately handled, well-done way to introduce obliquely the topic of the Holocaust to very young readers. The plot: Safe in America, Nonna decides it’s finally time to tell her granddaughter the story behind each charm on her bracelet. We learn how Nonna’s family in Italy escaped the Nazis—the bicycle charm represents the brothers who smuggled Nonna’s mama into the countryside; the pig charm represents the squirming piglets in a basket under which kind Signore Brunelli hid Nonna and her brother. Russo’s paintings are bright and warm.

Chapter Books for Middle-Grade Readers

The Cats in the Doll Shop, by Yona Zeldis McDonough, illustrated by Heather Maione (Viking Juvenile). A follow-up to The Doll Shop Downstairs, The Cats in the Doll Shop is a perfect chapter book for kids who have moved beyond easy readers but are not quite ready for longer, more complex narratives. Fans of Clementine and Gooney Bird Greene will love the sweet, low-stress, old-fashioned tale of a Lower East Side tenement family coping with stray neighborhood kitties, a mean old neighbor and a frightened, newly arrived cousin from the old country. McDonough’s book has that warm, timeless All-of-a-Kind-Family/Penderwicks/Saturdays thing going on, and it’s all to the good.

When Life Gives You OJ by Erica Perl (Knopf). Yay! A kid-friendly, contemporary, funny middle-grade novel with Jewish protagonists and day-to-day lives that modern-day, acculturated readers will find familiar. It’s about a girl, her zayde, and a quest for a pet dog. No shtetls, just kids on bikes in the burbs, with heart and humor and a bissel Yiddish.

OyMG by Amy Fellner Dominy (Walker Books for Young Readers). Another contemporary tale, this one for slightly older readers. An assertive, funny, articulate girl who wants to be a debate star hides her Jewish identity to try to get a scholarship to a ritzy Christian prep school with a great debate team. The book deals with serious social and ethical issues, but it isn’t heavy-handed The fact that there’s a cute boy involved will appeal to reluctant readers. (Also: Another crazy zayde.) The author is a playwright, and it shows. She’s got a terrific knack for dialog.

Music Was It: Young Leonard Bernstein by Susan Goldman Rubin (Charlesbridge). I opened this with a sigh, expecting the usual dense, hyper-sincere, spinach-y, plodding Jewish biography. I was wrong. This book reads like a juicy novel, and Rubin’s copious research is seamlessly integrated into the story. Kids with singular passions will relate to young Lenny’s love of music and determination to make it his career despite his unsupportive father’s constant demands that he go into the family perm-equipment business. The book follows Lenny from childhood through his triumphant conducting debut at Carnegie Hall. It’s an effortless read, and even I, who cares not a whit about classical music, was swept up.

Chapter Books for Young Adult Readers

Deadly by Julie Chibbaro (Atheneum). This medical thriller is so exciting it’s like an episode of CSI with pages. It’s 1906, and a poor 16-year-old girl from the Lower East Side gets a typing job at the Department of Health and Sanitation. Her boss—on whom she develops a raging crush—is working on a new theory of disease transmission, and soon Prudence joins him in hot pursuit of Typhoid Mary. Like the Newbery Honor-winning Evolution of Calpurnia Tate, this is really the story of a girl’s intellectual awakening. It’s not about marrying the cute doctor; it’s about realizing you could be a doctor. I admit it: I cried.

Flesh and Blood So Cheap by Albert Marrin (Knopf). Yes, I am obsessed with the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, one of the most gripping and distressing chapters in American labor history. But can we argue that my obsession makes me a more critical reader of books about it? Trust me, this is the single best book for young people about what happened on that fateful day in 1911. But hey, don’t take my word for it: Flesh and Blood So Cheap has gotten spectacular reviews and was a National Book Award finalist. And for good reason; Marrin’s storytelling is fluid and fast-paced; the book’s jam-packed with eye-catching photos (some gruesome); and Marrin offers a nuanced explanation of the fire and its legacy, both national and global, in a well-designed, oversized volume. Essential.

The Berlin Boxing Club by Robert Sharenow (HarperTeen). This is an exciting, unpredictable read for both boys and girls. Karl is a skinny, blond, non-Jewish-looking 14-year-old growing up in an artsy family in Germany just as the Nazis are coming to power. After getting beaten up at school, he winds up getting trained in boxing by the legendary (real-life, non-Jewish) boxer Max Schmeling, an old friend of his dad’s. As Karl’s fighting skills improve, life in Germany gets more and more dangerous for his family. The book is based on the germ of a true story about Schmeling rescuing two Jewish boys during Kristallnacht. A pulpy page-turner, it’s at once a historical novel and a sports book. Despite the book’s obsession with toughness, it isn’t homophobic; one sympathetic character is a cross-dressing nightlife impresario (or would it be impresaria?) named The Countess.

Happy reading, and happy Hanukkah.

Gratitude isn’t just a civilizing influence that prevents us all from being overgrown babies; it also makes us happier. Psychologist Robert Emmons, at the University of California, Davis, who studies gratitude, has shown that it improves health, resilience, and emotional well-being. But it doesn’t grow in a vacuum. It’s our job as parents to make sure our kids develop social awareness and menschlikheit. But like many parents, I think I could be doing a lot better. So, on the eve of Thanksgiving, I’m pondering ways to step up my thankfulness training. Learn from my screw-ups:

I’m not religious about modeling the behavior I want to see.

I’m pretty good at saying “thank you” to the guy at the pharmacy. I’m not so good at expressing appreciation closer to home. A few years ago, I read an article about how spouses should say thank you regularly for the everyday tasks of family life. If your partner makes a delicious dinner, works late to bring home the fakon, or takes the kids to the asthma specialist, you’re supposed to say, “Thank you for supporting our family.” The cheesiness of this phrase made Jonathan, my husband, and me giggle, but for a few months we did it, and you know what? Hearing it feels really good, especially when paired with Meaningful Eye Contact. Kids should see their parents expressing appreciation. My own kids are good at the automatic “please” and “thank you,” but because I don’t often enough consider the big-picture “do I appreciate all I’ve got?” they don’t either.

Jeffrey Froh, a professor of psychology at Hofstra University, did a study in which he asked a group of middle-schoolers to keep “gratitude journals” for two weeks. The kids wrote down a few things they were grateful for every day. A second group of kids wrote down the day’s petty annoyances, and a third group did neither. The students who were made to think about what they had to be grateful for experienced a surge in optimism and a decrease in negative feelings.

Maybe I could suggest we talk about What I Have to Be Grateful for Today at the dinner table instead of playing Two Truths and a Lie (which I must ungratefully admit I’m utterly bored with) every time the conversation lulls.

I’m not being consistent with chores and allowances.

The kids are supposed to get their allowance and tzedakah money on Friday afternoons before Shabbat. I usually forget. This means that every time the kids want something—a giant gumball, a Webkinz—they start wheedling and calculating how many weeks allowance I owe them. Their pleading little voices make me want to stab myself with a fork. Josie is supposed to feed the cats in the morning, and Maxie is supposed to feed the fish in the afternoon, but they often forget, and I’m perpetually noodging them until my own voice makes me want to stab myself again with that fork. We need a simple, regularly implemented system: This is what you do as a member of this family. If I have to remind you, or if you don’t do it, your allowance gets docked. If you want something, you use your own money from your piggy bank, save up, or wait to see if you still want it when your birthday rolls around. I want to increase their list of tasks, too—we should have family dinner more often for all the usual reasons but also because I want the girls regularly setting and clearing the table. It’s not rocket science: Having to work for stuff makes you more grateful for the stuff you have.

I place too much emphasis on getting, not enough on giving.

It would be simply divine if Jews and Christians alike didn’t make December a month of gifting. Christmas is about Jesus’ birth; turning it into a celebration of nebulous merriment and wrapping paper is irksome. Hannukah is a minor holiday about the rededication of the holy temple and the tension between traditional and acculturated Jews. In my own tradition of hoping technology will solve all my parenting problems, I have allowed the girls to maintain their own Amazon wishlists, which they endlessly groom like My Little Ponies. They understand that putting things on a wishlist doesn’t mean they’re going to get anything on that list; it’s fantasy shopping, like fantasy baseball. I am draconian about the need for thank-you notes, but I need to work harder on getting the kids involved in gift purchasing for others. They also could be more involved in choosing how and where we donate money in honor of other people.

I fail to seek out gratitude and tolerance stories.

The book Molly’s Pilgrim is about a little girl who has recently emigrated from an Eastern European shtetl to the American Midwest, where her classmates mock her clothing and accent. As a Thanksgiving homework project, Molly’s teacher assigns her the task of making a pilgrim doll. When Molly explains to her baffled mother that a pilgrim is someone who leaves his or her old country in search of freedom and tolerance, her mother surprises her with a gorgeously made doll that looks like mama herself, not like a black-dress-and-buckle-shoe-wearing Puritan. At first the kids sneer, but Molly’s teacher sets them straight. Leaving aside a moral lesson today’s hyper-meddly parents should not be learning—when your child fails to do her homework, do it for her!—Molly’s Pilgrim is a great way to talk about how the values of Judaism and Thanksgiving intersect, and how lucky we are to live in a time when the people who are nastiest to American Jews are usually other Jews. I should make reading Molly’s Pilgrim—honestly, one of the best Jewish children’s books of all time—an annual tradition, like making hand turkeys and nutter-butter gobbler cupcakes. Thanksgiving is the perfect time to discuss the Jewish value of hakarat ha’tov, recognizing the good in our lives, and drawing parallels between books and news stories and our own privileged lives is something we should do far more often.

There’s never enough shehechiyanu.

Yes, we say the prayer for new and wonderful experiences on big occasions. But we could say it all the time. There are so many things to be thrilled by and grateful for. Last weekend my beautiful cousin Misha got married, and my Uncle Michael’s toast was a simple distillation of the prayer: “Dear Lord: Thank you for the gift of being here now.” It was the perfect blend of ancient Jewish values and hippie zen. But Uncle Michael’s words made me realize: Why wait for weddings? Why wait for the first night of Hannukah? Because remember, to quote the great Jewish sage Buckaroo Banzai, no matter where you go, there you are. Opportunities for gratitude are all around us. I want my kids to see them.

Maybe it was the kids at Nathan Bishop, the nearby public school, who showed us how much we were missing. (That is, when they weren’t throwing pennies at us.) Maybe we were seduced by the commercial that cheerfully sang, “Do you know exactly how to eat an Oreo?” The jingle became a handclapping game—like Miss Mary Mack—that rocketed around Jewish summer camps. An Oreo was a forbidden fruit, even more enticing than the one that got Adam and Eve kicked out of the Garden.

Ah, temptation. When I was 8 or so, questions about free will, crime, and punishment started dogging me. Our color war theme at Day School was ahava (love) vs. yirah (fear). According to Maimonides, we needed to experience both states to have a meaningful relationship with God. I was on Team Ahava. Team Yirah won.

I was very attuned to yirah, having devoured the stories of God’s omnipotence and cruelty. In school, we spent a lot of time on the book of Genesis, source of the juiciest Bible stories. It’s rife with examples of God’s scariness—the expulsion from paradise, the great flood, the Tower of Babel, Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac. Yet we were told God loved us and had chosen us; we were supposed to obey out of love as well as out of fear. Figuring out the balance of love and fear is essential to the creation of selfhood in child-development theory, too; we begin to internalize and believe in our own moral code, acting as we do because we believe in right and wrong, not because we’re afraid of punishment or want to win a pat on the head. As I got older, I wanted to explore what I believed. I just wasn’t sure what that was. Did I want to keep kosher? What would happen if I flouted God’s law?

One afternoon, I walked to the corner store, psyching myself up with each step. I bought a packet of Oreos. I didn’t have a purse, so I hid it in my sock, as if I were a young Rosa Klebb and it was a poison-tipped knife.

I knew I was about to do something momentous and terrible. I couldn’t bring those cookies of death into my home. I seriously worried God would strike the house with lightning and take out my family.

So, I took the Oreos to the gardening shed in our yard and ducked inside. That way, if it got hit by lightning, I’d be the only one to fry. I unwrapped the package—they really did look exactly like Hydrox!—took a deep breath, and nibbled the edge of a cookie. Nothing happened. The skies stayed un-rent. The seas did not boil up. I ate half. I remember it as having a slightly smokier, deeper taste than Hydrox; the lardy center was grainier and less greasy. And I was not dead.

Three decades later, when I read The Foreskin’s Lament, by Shalom Auslander, I was gobsmacked that someone else had had the exact same experience. Auslander’s Oreo was a Slim Jim. (“Imagine that,” he writes. “A stick of meat!”) He too worried that eating trayf would trigger God’s vengeance upon him and his family. (“He’d find a way to drown me,” he thinks as he stands at the Snack Shack. “Then He’d drown my mother. She might even be dead already.”)

I didn’t turn on God completely, though. I bobbed and weaved, still unsure about how observant I wanted to be. I left the day school after 8th grade, along with almost all the other non-Orthodox kids, and went to public high school. There I was a vegetarian (it was easy to blend in with the hyper-sincere animal-rights activists) except when it came to kosher meat cooked by Mom. When I went to college I ate no meat at all, which was probably a good thing given the state of the cafeteria. And when I moved to Manhattan after graduation, I kept a veggie kitchen. But I kept only one set of dishes, and I began to eat chicken outside the home.

Meanwhile the world changed. Oreos became kosher. Joe Regenstein, professor of food science and director of the Cornell Kosher and Halal Food Initiative, told students in a 2008 lecture how it all went down. “It was probably the most expensive conversion of a company from non-kosher to kosher,” Regenstein said. The process took more than three years and millions of dollars, and concluded in 1997. It involved rabbis climbing into the company’s ovens (I know!), each one about 300 feet long. To meet the strictures of the Orthodox Union, the 100 or so ovens had to be manually blow-torched inside on the highest heat.

Ironically, Nabisco, which makes Oreos, replaced the lard with trans fats, which are today considered demonic obesity-engendering child-killers but in the ’90s were considered healthy, at least compared to animal fats. Eliminating the lard was a way to woo new cookie fans, both Jewish and non.

Oreos remain the canonical sandwich cookie; Kraft (which now owns Nabisco) claims that worldwide, 7.5 billion Oreos are eaten every year. The Oreo line is ever-expanding, much like the universe itself. In a flurry of inexplicable spelling and internal capitalization, Nabisco has created DoubleStuf Oreos, Fudgees, Oreo WaferStix, Big Stuf, White-Fudged-Covered Oreos, Oreo Cakesters, and the Triple Double (a layer of vanilla creme and a layer of chocolate creme pancaked between three chocolate wafers). “Our fans’ passion and enthusiasm has challenged us to raise our game,” Jessica Robinson, associate director of consumer engagement, said in an unironic statement. There are also Oreo Sippers, chocolate straws lined with creme so you can actually drink your milk through an Oreo, but they’re sold only in Canada.

While Oreo’s embrace of kashrut contributed to its juggernaut status, poor underdog Hydrox fizzled out. In 1996, Sunshine, Hydrox’s manufacturer, was bought out by Keebler. In 1999, Keebler renamed Hydrox Droxies, which sounds like a band of drunk leprechauns, and continued producing them until 2003. For Hydrox’s 100th anniversary in 2008, Kellogg’s (which had bought out Keebler in 2001—are you keeping up?) brought back Hydrox in a flurry of nostalgic ads. But by the end of the year, Hydrox had quietly disappeared from grocery shelves again.

My relationship with kashrut is still ambivalent. I married a man from Wisconsin, who would no sooner be a vegetarian than a Minnesota Vikings fan. Oreos continued to play a role in my life. In 1999, I took a job at a new TV network located at the just-gentrifying western edge of Manhattan, in an industrial building that once housed the National Biscuit Company. Yes, I worked in the original Oreo factory. In a referential bit of hipster architecture, the iron base of one of the original ovens remained embedded in the floor 10 feet from my desk.

Today my husband and I still have only one set of dishes, but I insist on buying only kosher meat. I follow my own inconsistent, semi-random rules. When Josie was not quite 3, she attended a wedding in Utica where she tasted her first pork breakfast sausage in the hotel restaurant. Over two days she ate 13 of them. I felt strangely sad but didn’t try to stop her. Maxine, on the other hand, has my palate; she doesn’t like meat at all and is essentially a vegetarian. We all love Oreos.

Which are under fire again. They’re a symbol of everything that’s wrong with the current American food system. The company’s marketing of 100-calorie packs (each containing a small handful of communion-wafer-like “thin crisps”) isn’t fooling anybody. Today’s upper-middle-class Jewish kids, if they get cookies at all, get Late July brand organic vanilla bean cookies (“sustainably harvested from a beautiful orchid”) or Newman-O’s (made with “organic cacao that comes from small farmers in the Talamanca region”). How’s a Jewish mother to decide? Newman-O’s uses certified “slavery-free” cooperatives, but Late July makes a version with “white chocolate between Endangered Animal Vanilla Cookies,” which makes it sound like they’re made of actual Sumatran rhinos. Orthorexia is the new kashrut. The attention our people once lavished on fins and scales, vein-removal, and proper bloodletting is now dedicated to finding boxes that say “antioxidant” on them. Today’s trayf is anything stuffed full of chemicals and polyunsaturated fats.

Apparently Jewish Oreo ambivalence comes in stages. First there’s the ambivalence about being denied the cookie. Then there’s the ambivalence of being allowed to eat the cookie. (As Rabbi Joshua Hammerman pointed out on his blog, assimilation is a double-edged sword. “I know that in some perverse manner my Oreo envy kept me safely at the outer edges of middle America, shielding me from total absorption into the vanilla masses. … Oreo denial was, for me, a direct extension of Egyptian slavery—it made me uncomfortable enough to feel different and different enough to feel proud.”) Now there’s the ambivalence of not wanting to buy into the trend of demonizing foodstuffs, thus feeling ambivalent about feeling ambivalent about the cookie. Sometimes you yearn for the taste of your childhood; sometimes you don’t.

My father loved Mahler’s emotionalism and range. He loved Mahler’s passion for atypical instruments: harmonium, glockenspiel, mandolin. He loved the way the symphonies incorporate snippets of bird sounds, unpretentious folk music, and Jewish ritual melodies. He loved the humor and intensity he found in Mahler’s work. Mahler’s music messes with people’s heads—the guy was a terribly polarizing figure, much like my father. Dad was a psychiatrist and enfant terrible who ran a community mental health center; he loved working with the mentally ill and loved teasing people who expected him to be a formal, cerebral figure. It delighted him that Mahler had visited Sigmund Freud, who wrote that he admired “the capability for psychological understanding of this man of genius.”

In Mahler Remembered, Norman Lebrecht quotes the 19th-century German conductor Oskar Fried on the composer:

He was a God-seeker. With incredible fanaticism, with unparalleled dedication and with unshakable love he persued a constant search for the divine, both in the individual and in man as a whole. He saw himself bearing a sacred trust; it suffused his whole being. His nature was religious thorough and through in a mystical, not a dogmatic, sense.

Mahler felt a strong connection to the Jewish faith of his childhood, yet converted to Catholicism to qualify for a job at the Vienna Court Opera. (He told a friend that the decision had “cost me a great deal.”) My father, too, felt powerfully drawn to Judaism but not to dogma; he had little interest in rules of any kind. He could chant Torah and daven like nobody’s business, but he delighted in what he called “glatt trayf.”

More than anything else, what I think drew my father to Mahler was the composer’s obsession with death. My dad had nearly died of polio at 9. At 15, he watched his own father have a heart attack in a living room chair and die in front of him. My father had his own heart attack at 39, and he barely recovered from experimental heart surgery at 56, in 1996. Mahler had a weak heart too. Both men were both convinced they would die young. Both were right. Mahler died in 1911, at 51; my dad in 2004, at 64.

The subject of the shadow of death brings me to the Rosh Hashanah connection. My father was famous in our shul for his Torah reading on the second day of the holiday—the binding of Isaac. When I was a teenager, dad’s rendition was a symphony of mortification for me. He’d do dramatically different voices for Abraham (tentative, confused), Isaac (weak, small) and God (really freaking loud). When he got to the moment of truth in the text, he’d slowly raise the Torah pointer in the air as if to plunge it into the scroll, or into Isaac’s bound body. I wanted to die. Today I find this awesome and Mahlerian. I would give anything to be able to hear it again.

The High Holidays are a good time to ponder not just how we’d choose to be different in the coming year, but also the impact of loss and the need to reach out to people on earth while we still can. As a teenager and a twentysomething, I was frequently embarrassed by my dad’s flamboyance and sappiness. The man had no filter. Because he was aware that he could die at any time, he was quick to tell my brother and me how proud he was of us and how much he loved us. (Every time he turned sentimental and beatific, I called him “The Moonie.” He just laughed.) My dad was also inappropriate a lot—he once gave a non-Jewish guest at our Passover Seder a “Crucifixion Barbie” he’d made, complete with stigmata (red nail polish) and a Popsicle-stick cross. He was no angel.

At this time of year, when we ponder the kind of person we want to be in the future, I admire my dad’s authenticity, precisely the quality that embarrassed me about him when I was young. Now I want to emulate it. I spend a lot of time being anxious about what people will think of me. I worry about the embarrassment of failing. But my dad didn’t care.

I also think about conveying my passions to my kids. I remember my dad’s delight when I emailed him from California in 1997, telling him I was thinking about going to a San Francisco Symphony performance of Mahler’s Second. I still have his emailed response:

This is the piece I joined the Boston Pro Musica to sing last year. This is the piece that has haunted me since I was 10. This is the ‘Resurrection.’ When I sang this piece in May, 1996, The Malachamovess was floating on his scrawny horse in front of the second balcony, and I looked him in his eye socket and said, ‘Listen to me, you motherfucker, listen to what I can sing!’ And he rode off in defeat. When you hear this piece, it will change your view of classical music.

My father especially loved the Second’s finale:

Aufersteh’n, ja aufershteh’n
Mein herz, Mein herz in einem nu,
Sterben werd ich um zu leben!
Sterben werd ich um zu leben!

In English, that’s:

Rise again, yes, rise again,
Will you, my heart, in an instant!
Die shall I in order to live.

Is it too much to think of the parallels between this piece and the Torah reading for the second day of Rosh Hashanah? Isaac and Abraham didn’t experience a literal resurrection, but they did leave that hillside with new lives. They’d faced death and loss. They’d seen the power and terror and confusing mercy of God. And it’s only with the awareness of loss that we’re able to rise above our own petty anxieties and take risks, express our true feelings, and live our lives the way they should be lived.

“The symphony must be like the world,” Mahler once told the composer Sibelius. “It must embrace everything!” And so must we—the spiritual, the hilarious, the embarrassing—if we’re to lead our best, richest lives.

For my dad’s unveiling in 2005, we brought a boom-box to the cemetery and blasted the Second Symphony. On the grave, we placed rocks that my cousin Daniella had taken from the garden next to the Metropolitan Opera at Lincoln Center. My husband wore my dad’s old Siegfried and Roy T-shirt. The CD’s chorus sang, “That for which you suffered, to God will it lead you.” My dad (who’d left instructions when he was in the Navy in the 1970s that if he were killed in action he wanted a full military funeral—but including Mahler) would have adored it all.

I miss him every day. When he died, my daughter Josie was not quite 3; I was eight months pregnant with her sister, Maxie. I do see him every day, in a way, in Josie’s musicality and Maxie’s goofy humor. Which isn’t enough, of course. But to be human is to experience loss; Yom Kippur’s Yizkor service makes that abundantly clear. It’s some small consolation, though, that the High Holidays are an opportunity for us all to ponder how to turn our suffering into music. Shanah Tova.

The response in the Bay Area was quick, loud, and horrified. Bloggers decried the museum’s cowardice. (“Disgusting and horrifying,” raged Philip Weiss at Mondo Weiss.) The show’s organizer, the Middle East Children’s Alliance, issued a statement: “Our basic constitutional freedom of speech loses. The children in Gaza lose. The only winners here are those who spend millions of dollars censoring any criticism of Israel and silencing the voices of children who live every day under military siege and occupation.” Author Alice Walker wrote on her blog that the incident showed Americans’ refusal “to accept that we’ve had a hand in making a small child armless, legless, eyeless.” She drew a parallel with American slavery: “We will eventually, on this issue of freeing the Palestinians, find a Lincoln.”

Yikes.

I object to Walker’s parallel of Palestinians and African-American slaves—but, as they say, I’d defend to the death her right to make it. I’m a hardliner on censorship; I’ve written about my dismay with Jewish organizations in Canada attempting to get a pro-Palestinian book removed from a voluntary reading list and about my objection to a new version of Huckleberry Finn that replaces the word “nigger” with the word “slave.” But in this case, I think there’s more nuance.

I am disgusted with the museum’s justification for its board’s abrupt about-face on a show that had been in the works for months. The board chairman, Hilmon Sorey, wrote that the board decided that images of violence and bloodshed were “not appropriate for an open gallery accessible by all children.” “This wasn’t something we felt as a board that the organization could responsibly exhibit,” he told the San Jose Mercury News. But I don’t buy that. Did the museum really not see the art before committing to the show? It had already been displayed at a library in Maine, and much of it is featured on the Middle East Children’s Alliance’s web site. The larger problem with Sorey’s explanation is that the museum has shown children’s portrayals of war before. In 2004, after the United States began fighting in Iraq, it exhibited art by Iraqi children. In 2007, it displayed children’s art from World War II, including images of Hitler, sinking ships, terrified Jews.

To me, at least, it seems clear that the museum bowed to pressure from Jewish groups. “Great news! The ‘Child’s View from Gaza’ exhibit at MOCHA has been canceled thanks to some great East Bay Jewish community organizing,” the Jewish Federation of the East Bay tweeted after the museum’s cancellation announcement. It added: “Thx to @SFJCRC [the San Francisco Jewish Community Relations Council] & the many others who worked to make sure this extreme anti-Israel propaganda was stopped.” To attribute the cancellation to the works’ “graphically violent and sensitive” nature, as Sorey did, rather than to the lobbying of Jewish organizations strikes me as cowardly.

That said, I think the museum was idiotic to agree to host the show in the first place. The Middle East Children’s Alliance is not an unbiased organization. It is a manifestly anti-Israel group. Barbara Lubin, who founded the Berkeley-based organization in 1988, has referred to the 1948 war for Israel’s independence as “ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian population.” “The concept of ‘Jewish morality’ is truly dead,” she has written. MECA does not acknowledge that there are two sides to the Israel-Palestinian conflict: To the group, Israel is evil and Palestinians are good. And the art it planned to display in Oakland reflects that perspective: An Israeli soldier shoots an unarmed man in the head. Babies bleed while Israeli soldiers watch. A combat boot bearing a Jewish star stomps on the Palestinian flag.

There’s no sense here that Israeli Jews suffer in this conflict as well. There’s no sense that this is a land in which everyone lives with the threat of violence. There is no sense of historicity, of the fact that both peoples have legitimate claims to this land, or that the Hamas charter calls for the obliteration of Israel. There is no mention of the thousands of Palestinian rocket and mortar attacks on the city of Sderot, of the Ma’alot massacre that killed 22 Jewish children, the Dolphinarium dance club suicide bombing that killed 21 Jewish teenagers, the shooting at the Mercaz HaRav yeshiva that killed seven kids, or last month’s shooting on a public bus in Eilat that killed five.

Children don’t have to be fair. They owe us nothing; they are entitled to share the version of the world they see and know. But it is the job of adults to provide context. And the Museum of Children’s Art exhibit—relying on the curatorial efforts of a political organization with a strong bias and mission—failed miserably to do that.

I wish that the museum had realized from the start that they were showing only one side of a complex political struggle and chosen to work with an organization like Seeds of Peace or Hand in Hand that would have given a broader picture of this conflict. I wish that Jewish organizations, instead of snuffing out the show, had helped the museum to find children’s art showing that Israeli Jews suffer too. And most of all, I wish the museum had chosen to mount an exhibit that showed that there are groups and individuals on both sides of this bloody conflict who are working for peace and who present a non-cartoonish view of The Other. Slamming the door on dialogue serves no one.

MECA’s Barbara Lubin doesn’t understand this. She’s correct in calling this incident an “insistence to silence the voices of Palestinian children.” What she doesn’t get is that free speech is an all-or-nothing proposition. Over a decade ago, Lubin was one of the organizers of an attempt to stifle a point of view she didn’t agree with. In December 2000, she led a group of 200 demonstrators in storming the Berkeley Community Theatre before a speech by Benjamin Netanyahu. “He has a right to free speech, but we have a right to try and stop him,” she told the San Francisco Chronicle at the time. If Lubin believes she has the right to silence others, how can she object when others try to silence her? Free speech doesn’t work that way.

Lubin’s group is now planning a guerrilla event at the museum on September 24, the day the show had been scheduled to open. Presumably the press will be there in full force. Maybe there will be Jewish counter-demonstrators. It’s all so ugly. How ironic that MECA’s web site features a quote from Mahatma Gandhi: “If we are to teach real peace in this world, and if we are to carry on a real war against war, we shall have to begin with the children.”

But others got that it was a joke. (If the girl’s dachshund were really named “Miuccia,” wouldn’t she be able to pronounce it?) “Fashion Week High Holidays Bat Mitzvah Speech Practice By Hannah” is not a real Bat Mitzvah speech. It’s a comic piece by writer Bob Morris, a style writer, frequent contributor to The New York Times and author of Assisted Loving, a memoir about double-dating with his elderly father. Hannah is played by his tennis partner’s daughter. Miuccia is played by his dog, Zoloft.

“My intent was more about satirizing fashion culture than religion,” he tells me. What was the genesis of the piece? “Last year, the first day of Fashion Week was on the first day of Rosh Hashanah, and I was doing a column at the New York Observer at the time. I had to dress carefully because I was going from a fashion show to services. And when you’re standing around with a bunch of Jews two minutes from the Garment District, you’re gonna check out each other’s outfits!”

Morris comes from a Conservative Jewish background. “My oldest memories of long days of High Holiday services on Long Island always were mixed with memories of women dressing for each other,” he says. “We had style, judgment, and atonement all under one roof.” Writing the script for the video took him several days and multiple rewrites. To prepare, he watched dozens of b’nai mitzvot speeches on YouTube.

“They all follow the same template,” he says. “Welcome the congregation, talk about becoming a man or a woman, discuss their portion, throw in a pitch for their community services, thank everyone.” Even though Morris’s primary intention was to parody fashion culture, the speeches were a target, too. “You have parents throwing their kids into religious training that has no fallout whatsoever when it’s over,” he points out. “It warrants social commentary.”

I think the video is hilarious, but I also think it could be a great opportunity for families and religious leaders to talk about what a bar or bat mitzvah speech is supposed to be. Isn’t Hannah’s speech, fake as it is, a better model than the typical “Myyyyy poooortion … ,” full of stale, shallow insights that came from the rabbi or mom rather than the kid? Shouldn’t the d’var Torah reflect a kid’s actual interests, attempting to relate the kid’s daily life to the coming-of-age ceremony?

Besides, Hannah isn’t way off base about the transformative power of beauty in our culture. (The Jewish one, not the one in the tents.) “Hiddur mitzvah” is the principle of enhancing a mitzvah through aesthetics, so Hannah is right about the beauty of the jewel-toned synagogue windows and the “white Victorian lace dollies” (to which her “father” barks “DOILIES!”) on lady’s heads. Her love of fashion could be an awfully good jumping-off point for a discussion of why we often judge people by the cut of their Carolina Herrera rather than the content of their character. One could even encourage a discussion of heavenly judgment.

There’s a notion … and not the kind you buy at M&J Trimming on Sixth Avenue.

“Fashion Week High Holidays Bat Mitzvah Speech Practice By Hannah”

Ezra Jack Keats was born Jacob Ezra Katz in 1916. The author-illustrator of 22 books and the illustrator of more than 80, Keats created his lush scenes of beauty through his use of collage and color. His pioneering The Snowy Day is a quiet, gorgeous jewel of a book that lovingly chronicles a young African-American child’s solitary adventure during a big snowfall in the city.

When Josie was born, I received The Snowy Day as a gift. I opened it and was immediately rocketed back to my own childhood. I had loved the book’s evocation of the silence of a new snowfall, of the thrill of dragging a stick through untouched snow, the hilarity of a wad of snow falling—plop—on someone’s head. I’d loved the pattern on the protagonist Peter’s pajamas and the fact that his family seemed to have a pink bathtub. The Snowy Day was my first experience of loving art.

I’d surely noticed that Peter was black. But I easily projected myself into his experience, into the red snowsuit, into the tenement world so different from my own. When the book was published during the civil rights movement that matter-of-fact depiction of Peter as African-American was nothing short of revolutionary. It’s thought to be the first non-caricatured black hero in mainstream American children’s literature.

Sherman Alexie, the National Book Award-winning author of The Absolutely True Adventures of a Part-Time Indian, wrote of his vivid recollection of reading The Snowy Day as a child: “It was the first time I looked at a book and saw a brown, black, beige character—a character who resembled me physically and spiritually, in all his gorgeous loneliness and splendid isolation.”

“Gorgeous loneliness and splendid isolation” describe Keats’ work perfectly. Sadly, they also described his own experiences.

The artist’s parents were poor Polish immigrants who struggled to make ends meet in the hardscrabble Brooklyn neighborhood of East New York. They had little energy left for their children; Keats wrote of “walking around like a shadow,” feeling invisible.

His art became his ticket out. He received a number of scholarships, and during the Depression he found work as a muralist for the WPA. For a time he was employed as a background artist on Captain Marvel comics, and, after a stint in the Air Force, he studied painting in Paris under the GI Bill.

Keats’ work is full of African-American, Latino, and Asian characters, but he generally shied away from addressing Judaism. At first, I thought this fact made Keats an unlikely candidate for a Jewish Museum retrospective. But curator Claudia Nahson does a fine job of showing how Keats’ upbringing affected his work and his interest in social justice. Still, what I find more interesting than what’s in the show is what isn’t. Reading the exhibit’s catalog I got a fuller portrait of a man who seemed to wrestle with his ambivalence about being Jewish, projecting his experiences of poverty and discrimination onto children of other races.

He experienced a great deal of anti-Semitism—from a teacher in school, a girlfriend in Paris, and perhaps would-be employers. In the late 1940s, when he sought work as a commercial illustrator, he changed his name. His brother posited that he renamed himself because he was a fan of the poet John Keats, but his friend Esther Hautzig, author of The Endless Steppe, is quoted in the exhibit offering another explanation: “At Readers’ Digest he was advised that Keats would look better on the credits.” As to what motivated Keats, we don’t know; he never addressed his name change publicly.

Keats was friendly with Isaac Bashevis Singer, and this show includes a 1971 letter to the famed author. Keats reworded and re-edited it obsessively, marking it up with pencil, illustrating just how much he sweated over this relationship, striving to hit a relaxed but slightly obsequious tone. The letter invites Singer to consider Keats’ then-most autobiographical book, Apt. 3, a tale of brothers in a dingy, dark tenement whose world comes alive with color when they hear the music of a blind man. “It’s important to me,” Keats wrote plaintively to Singer of the book. Years later, he created illustrations for Singer’s short story “The Slave,” which focuses on Tobias, a poor Torah scribe, and his wife, Peninah. But the final result was never published, for reasons unknown. Eventually fantasy author Lloyd Alexander saw and loved Keats’ paintings and wrote a new, completely non-Jewish story for them, The King’s Fountain.

When Keats did write about religion, he sought universality rather than Jewish specificity. In 1966 he illustrated a book called God Is in the Mountain, for which he created paintings to accompany a wide array of religious quotations from the Bhagavad-Gita and the Quran to Lao-tzu to Rabbi Hillel. “I am in every religion as a thread through a string of pearls,” was one of his Hindu selections.

Universality characterizes most of Keats’ work, a development some critics found problematic, most notably in his depiction of Peter, who became a recurring character for Keats. These critics felt that Peter had little African-American identity beyond the color of his skin. Keats’ response in 1965 in a letter to the editor of the Saturday Review addressing one critic: “Might I suggest armbands?”

Keats’ books flirted with autobiography more often as he got older. His other recurring protagonist was a white boy named Louie. An artistic, socially awkward, and lonely child, Louie yearns to hold a puppet that Keats called Gussie, giving her the same name as his own emotionally distant mother, whom he recalled never giving him a hug.

Keats went to Israel in 1982, shortly before his death. In his diary, included in the exhibit, he wrote about how moved he was to place a note in the Western Wall. “I felt a strange state coming over me. … This is the city where God came to life. I felt I stood before a strange eternity.”

When Keats died in 1983, he was working on a story called “Where is God?” in which two children look everywhere for a higher being. According to the exhibit, the unpublished book concluded with one child saying, “I guess He’s everywhere.” The other child replies, “What makes you so sure God’s a He?”

And I loathe myself for worrying. I have a kid who doesn’t want to be less than perfect. I see it as my job to get her to chill. I don’t want her to pick up on my anxiety. But I am plenty anxious.

I am also a hypocrite. I was so freaking self-congratulatory about her admission to a lovely, warm, diverse, progressive, mixed-age-classroom-having elementary school in our neighborhood. Admission was by lottery, and her admission was by no means assured. So, I’d had her do giftedness testing, in case we needed more options. She spent a year in a middling public pre-K program, where she was punched in the face by a 5-year-old and where an inexperienced classroom teacher had a temper tantrum so severe I watched her kick a door, repeatedly, as hard as she could. When I talked to the school’s parent coordinator about the chaos in the classroom, she blamed other kids in the class. By name.

In any case, Josie was admitted to the lovely little progressive school, so I had the delicious luxury of not having to send her back to the unimpressive school and getting to turn down the gifted program. I used to joke about being the only Jewish mother who didn’t want her kid in a G&T program. “No G&T unless it includes Bombay Sapphire!” I’d joke. Reading some of my early columns, I want to travel back in time to punch myself in the face.

Because if Josie hadn’t gotten in to this school, which I know is an unusual, special place, she’d be in a gifted program.

You see, I had two choices: the gifted program, or a lovely progressive school in another district that she could have attended if I’d lied about where we lived. Tons of New Yorkers do that. An administrator at that school encouraged me to get a friend in that neighborhood to put my name on her ConEd bill to “prove” I lived there. “We’ll never check,” the administrator assured me. “We want families like yours! If we didn’t admit kids from Brooklyn and the East Village we’d have no economic diversity at all!” I decided I wasn’t up for the moral lesson of telling a 5-year-old that rules are for other people, or the reminders that she shouldn’t tell her classmates where she lived lest someone else’s mommy rat us out to the Department of Education. Such manipulation and deception don’t seem very Jewish. So, if Jo hadn’t been admitted, by sheer luck, to her wonderful school, well, I most likely would have sent her to the gifted program. So, I can shut up with mystical fake-chill I don’t-care-about-test-scores self. And believe me, other parents, I really do have sympathy for the hard decisions you have to make as well.

Is it not clear that this system is broken? Test scores are a moronic way to dictate the future of 4-year-olds. I remember a friend’s child, a very bright, very cat-obsessed little girl, who bombed her Stanford-Binet test—the standard intelligence test for children—for Hunter College Elementary because the psychologist administering the test had a home office with a cat closed in the bedroom. The cat yowled to be let out during the entire test, and instead of thinking about triangles and cause-and-effect, the child could only think KITTYKITTYKITTYKITTYKITTYKITTYKITTY. Tests for four-year olds privilege savvy, well-connected parents with plenty of books and plenty of disposable income. Some very smart little kids simply can’t sit still for a two-hour test, or have separation anxiety or shyness around strange adults. One study found that only 45 percent of the kids who scored 130 or higher on the Stanford-Binet would do so again if tested on another day. That is not surprising.

But here’s the thing: Josie isn’t 4 anymore. We have to decide what happens next. There is a progressive public middle school in my district that doesn’t require a minimum test score, but it’s so popular there is no guarantee she’ll be admitted. So the question returns: Do we also apply for gifted programs? I am embarrassed of how quickly I looked at her standardized test scores when they were available online, and how quickly I looked to see if her scores were high enough for the possibility. I don’t want to be this person.

As I’ve discussed elsewhere, people who think standardized tests are a necessary evil, and that they measure what they’re supposed to measure, are not looking at the actual standardized tests our kids are taking. They are crap. On the English sections there are questions that are semi-coherent. There are huge problems with scoring and with tests being used for purposes for which they weren’t devised. If you read Todd Farley’s Making the Grade: Adventures in the Standardized Testing Industry, written by a guy who both constructed and graded tests (sometimes while massively hung over), it will curl your hair. Then we have the issue of schools being financially rewarded or punished for higher test scores, leading teachers and principals to change the kids scores—to cheat. And most distressingly of all, schools are teaching to the tests, sacrificing deep, wide-ranging, multidisciplinary, multifaceted education to train kids how to fill in little bubbles.

And you know whose responsibility it is to fix this? The Jews. We’re the ones who are better-educated than most Americans; we’re the ones whose parents and grandparents and great-grandparents came to this country and relied on public education to learn the language and climb the ladder toward the American Dream. Using our privilege to gain a place in a decent program within a broken system doesn’t let us off the hook. (And now that you’ve asked, yes, I do ponder my decision not to send the kids to Jewish Day School—all the time. But that’s another column.) All our school systems should emphasize good citizenship, multilevel instructional approaches, appreciation of diversity in all its forms, empathy, collaboration, individualized education, and professional development to help teachers teach to different levels in one classroom and handle discipline and classroom management. Because that could help all students.

But my kid is really good at filling in the little bubbles. And that’s what I’m angsting about as school starts this year.

It’s also troubling. The legend of the Golem of Prague involves the 16th-century Maharal, also known as Judah Loew, a powerful rabbi who created a golem (the word derives from the Hebrew for unshaped form) to defend the ghetto from pogroms. In the tale’s many versions—a 19th-century German novel, short books by Elie Wiesel and Francine Prose, golem-themed episodes of The X-Files and The Simpsons—the golem often winds up attacking its maker, becoming more vicious than intended, or devastated by its own clay heart.

Given the folkloric, timeless nature of the tale, it’s no wonder it has inspired so many children’s books. This year’s entry, The Golem’s Latkes by Eric Kimmel, illustrated by Aaron Jasinski, is a cartoony, not-very-scary version of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, in which a lazy maid delegates the potato-pancake-making to a golem, leading to a giant interfaith party to which the emperor brings applesauce. It’ll be out in a couple of months and would, of course, make a delightful holiday gift. However, I’m drawn to the darker versions of the tale. David Wisniewski’s Golem, which won the Caldecott Medal for the best illustrated children’s book of 1997, is really, really scary. (Any book that explains blood libel is not for the youngest kids.) The layered, paper-cut illustrations are amazing, and the story emphasizes the golem’s nascent humanity. The creature cannot control its anger, but also loves sunrises and flowers. After an explosion of rage, it begs the man it thinks of as its father: “Please! Please let me live! I did all that you asked of me! Life is so … precious … to me!” Rabbi Judah returns him to clay anyway, with the (comforting?) observation that the golem won’t remember anything about being alive.

For middle-grade readers, there is 2009’s Clay Man: The Golem of Prague by Irene N. Watts, illustrated by Kathryn E. Shoemaker. This one draws a pretty explicit Holocaust parallel (the Jews have to wear yellow circles on their clothing), and the soft pencil illustrations have a gentle, mournful quality. Other excellent middle-grade versions are Barbara Rogasky’s 1996 The Golem, with ominous, deep-toned illustrations by the late, great, four-time-Caldecott winner Trina Schart Hyman (it’s out of print but still readily available online), and I.B. Singer’s The Golem, in which the pathetic golem falls in love, featuring soft watercolors by another Caldecott rock star, the brilliant Uri Shulevitz.

But it’s in the young-adult category that I think the golem story achieves the most nuance. Teens love horror: Conventional wisdom has it that monsters represent the untamed id of adolescence, the inability to control one’s own urges. Vampires, a staple in young-adult lit, are all about longing and sometimes sublimated sexuality; werewolves are pure animalistic brutality; fallen angels reflect fears about the consequences of not being perfect; zombies represent brainless conformity.

The golem fits in perfectly. Clay, the 2007 novel by the acclaimed British writer David Almond, is perhaps the most literary of young-adult golem books. In it, an altar boy in a faded coal-mining town meets a mysterious newcomer who may have the power to create life from earth. Almond’s perspective is Catholic, but his biblical and moral themes are very familiar to Jews, and the book is clearly based on the golem story. Davie, the protagonist, wrestles with notions of good and evil, the desire to create and the power to destroy, and the way attraction and repulsion can be mixed. There are themes about the end of innocence, the expulsion from paradise, forgiveness and redemption, and the responsibilities of the artist. The Northern English dialect can be challenging, but this is a powerful, very creepy, and haunting book.

On the other end of the literary spectrum is Swoon, a 2010 novel by Nina Malkin. This is your classic girl-meets-boy-who-inhabits-a-golem-that-girl-has-created story. It is sexy, sexy cheese. The book’s heroine is Dice (short for Candice) and the hot, nasty golem is Sin (no, really–short for Sinclair). Do not confuse Dice or Sin with the other Gossip Girl-esque characters, Pen, Marsh, Gel, Crane, Doll, Con, Duck, and Boz, though everybody does tons of drugs and has tons of sex. Turns out, as things so often do, that Sin has been seeking a body to inhabit so he can return to the Connecticut town where he was murdered a couple hundred years earlier and take revenge on the descendants of his torturers. Sin is horrid to Dice, but she loves him anyway, because he’s a hot golem. Malkin keeps using the word “golem” (along with “dust-boy” and “dirt devil”), but Swoon differs from the classic golem tale in that Sin exists independently of a body; Dice has only provided a receptacle for his angry soul. In that way, it’s really more of a dybbuk story. A sexy, cheesy dybbuk story.

I loved the heartbreaking golem in Storm Thief by Chris Wooding (2006), and I think teenage fans of post-apocalyptic and dystopian fantasy will, too. After being caught in a “probability storm,” a kind of violent ripple of atmosphere that unpredictably changes things in its wake, the golem has been separated from his maker. He has only flashes of memory of being made, and he desperately wants to know who he is and what his purpose is. The golem is prone to flashes of rage, but he also wants to love and help. (He’s a cross between Frankenstein’s monster and Wolverine.) Unlike Swoon, which is a story of selfishness, this book is all about sacrifice. The golem is a secondary character, but he’s the one who stuck with me. Maybe because I’m a parent; we understand sacrifice.

The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making (2011), by Catherynne M. Valente, is pretty florid; I wanted to yank out half the adjectives and stomp on them like ants. But among all the over-the-top fairies, marids, gnomes, changelings, witches, selkies, hippogriffs, and djinn, there’s a female golem made of soap. I loved her. “Her face was a deep olive-y green castile, her hair a rich and oily Marseille, streaked with lime peels. Her body was patchwork: here strawberry soap with bits of red fruit showing through, there saffron and sandalwood, orange and brown. … Her eyes were two piercing, faceted slivers of soapstone. On her brow someone had written TRUTH in the kind of handwriting teachers always have: clear and curling and lovely.”

This golem, too, longs for her absent maker. Despite her grief, she lives to serve. She cleanses the book’s heroine of the dust of her journey, breaking off her own fingers with a snap to throw into different baths—baths that give courage, renew wishes, foster luck. This rare female golem wants to nurture, not destroy. Unlike most golems, she can speak (when she does, soap bubbles escape her lips). She’s powerless, but not voiceless: Many young girls, pouring out their hearts in diaries and to friends, can understand that duality. She’s all yearning; again, girls can understand that feeling all too well. She’s also the only completely kind female figure in a fairyland full of men and boys and mean girls. And like the tree in The Giving Tree, she disappears as she helps and helps and helps.

A golem is a sturdy creature on which to hang a young-adult story. It works as a repository for every theme that speaks to teenagers: Who am I in the world? What powers do I have? Who can I trust? How do I create a separate existence from my parents’? How do I control my anger and manage my baser instincts? In many stories, the golem is an overgrown child, an identity teenagers fight against and relate to simultaneously. In When Toys Come Alive, Lois Rostow Kuznets, a professor emeritus of children’s literature at San Diego State, discusses how toys can represent our concerns about technology. Kids today have even more understanding of the dangers of technology than their predecessors—they grew up seeing the way gossip and bullying can spread through social media in the blink of a non-soapstone eye. Stuffed animals, unlike Facebook and Twitter, wait patiently for loving humans to come back. Perhaps the golem, made of earth and clay, represents a longing for a simpler, less networked, more easily turned-off past.

Phineas and Ferb, as I will endeavor to explain to those of you without a 6-to-12-year-old kid or an adult hipster in your home, is a cartoon about two young stepbrothers who spend their summer vacation coming up with insanely creative activities. They design a backyard roller coaster, create a circus, build a model of Angkor Wat out of playing cards, organize a public-awareness campaign for the shoelace aglet, take cows to the moon in a homemade rocket to discover whether low gravity produces better-tasting ice cream, help the 1980s hair band Love Händel reunite, and miniaturize a submarine for a Fantastic Voyage-esque journey into a Chihuahua. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to the boys, Phineas’ pet platypus, Perry, who seems to be a typically passive, malodorous mammal, is actually a brilliant secret agent for O.W.C.A., the Organization Without a Cool Acronym. Agent P’s assignment: to thwart the evil schemes of Dr. Doofenshmirtz, who is perpetually plotting to rule the entire tri-state area.

Every episode has at least one lyrically complex musical number referencing any of a myriad musical styles: Bollywood musical, 16th-century madrigal, Yiddish folk song, ABBA, Broadway, lounge, funk, dancehall, doo-wop, ska, sea shanty, girl-group pop-punk, rap (as in one unforgettable bit titled “S.I.M.P. Squirrels in My Pants”), and Japanese pop.

If it all sounds a bit frenetic, well, it is. It’s also very brainy. The show’s creators, Dan Povenmire and Jeff “Swampy” Marsh (who play Doofenshmirtz and Perry’s boss, Major Monogram, respectively), claim to be influenced by both Tex Avery and Woody Allen, and it shows. When my 6-year-old, Maxine, roams around the house singing about shark anatomy (“though technically vertebrates, they’re cartilaginous!”), I know she’s been watching Phineas and Ferb.

“We want to celebrate being smart,” Povenmire told me in a recent telephone interview. “A lot of media and society for kids is more interested in being cool than in anything else.”

“To us, being knowledgeable is being cool,” Marsh chimed in (the two interrupted each other and finished each other’s sentences throughout the interview). Perhaps the show’s complexity—there are multiple plot threads per episode, as in a show made for adults—and atypical sensibility explain why it took Povenmire and Marsh 16 years of steady pitching to sell the idea.

Phineas and Ferb celebrates creativity, but it also gets a kick out of pure, crystalline nerdiness, as embodied by the boys’ friend Baljeet. When Baljeet accidentally enrolls in a summertime rock camp, thinking it’s about geology, he is distressed to learn that he’s expected to shred. Though the brothers try to help him channel his inner headbanger, he’s terrified he’ll flunk. It’s not until he learns he’s not getting graded at all that he can really cut loose, screaming in fury about not being graded:

I have been burned by vague lesson plans and a free-floating curriculum!
I like my rules, baby, etched in stone, ‘cause you know I am going to stick to them!
Can I get a syllabus? A little discipline?
Judge me on a scale from A to F!
You wasted all my time learning how to rhyme, then left me hangin’ from a treble clef!

Somebody give me a grade!
I need the man keeping me down!
Somebody give me a grade!
Is there a red pen in this town?
Somebody give me a grade!
I already said it! I need that extra credit today!
And make it an A!

Oh, I am so upset!
I am stone cold honor roll!
I won’t be told how to vent!
I won’t cry or sigh; I’m here to testify,
Up with the establishment!

Phineas and Ferb never mock Baljeet. They just try to help him chill. It occurs to me that Phineas and Ferb are just the sort of kids that parents like me—Jewish, educated, progressive, upper-middle-class, anxious—dream of having. They’re curious, self-motivated, polite, kind, resourceful, productive. They’re menschy. They want to help others. They are not snide.

They also have a great deal of freedom. Unlike our over-programmed kids, they’re not spending their summer in a high-priced sleep-away camp or a Mandarin-immersion robotics program. Yet they’re never bored; every day they come up with some astonishing project. (One of the show’s taglines is “Ferb! I know what we’re gonna do today!”) While we want our kids to be sweet self-starters like these boys, we’re also freaked out by the notion of allowing them unstructured time. We live in a morass of Tiger Mom talk, “dangerized” perceptions of childhood, and anxiety about letting kids be free-range. Heart-rending stories about abducted children don’t seem the tragic aberrations they are but rather like part and parcel of growing up. The national crime rate is actually significantly lower than it was in the 1970s, 1980s, or 1990s, when we grew up, but our level of anxiety seems about a million times greater than that of our own parents.

And we sort of want our kids to heed Ms. Frizzle, the teacher in the Magic School Bus books who cries, “Take chances! Make mistakes! Get messy!” But we also sort of don’t. Messiness is messy. Mistakes and chances sound OK in theory, but not if they don’t work out. What if, God forbid, you get hurt or look stupid or torpedo your chances of getting into a good college? Phineas and Ferb are the antidote to that overthink-y angst. As Marsh said, “Phineas is my parenting role model: relax, be creative.”

I asked Marsh and Povenmire about the show’s lack of snippy snark—the tone is so different from most tween TV. “It’s easier to write comedy when you go to the mean place,” Povenmire said. “But it’s more rewarding when you keep it nice. I have a good friend who said he wouldn’t let his daughter watch anything on the Disney channel. She was too young to get the positive messages at the end; she was just aping the way the characters talked. I thought OK, how do I write a show my friend would let his daughter watch?”

Marsh, who met Povenmire when both were working as layout artists on The Simpsons, continued: “We had to bring in a team of writers and storyboard artists and retrain them, because they’d been writing mean-based comedy for so long. Not making fun of people just means using different comedic tools.”

Typical of the show’s humor is a song called “The Mexican-Jewish Cultural Festival“:

There is kreplach on tostadas
A pupik on our pinata
We kibbitz when we lambada
How are things in Ensenada?
We put bottles on cabezas
We do mitzvahs up on mesas
And we’re coming to your places
With big smiles upon our faces!
Oy-lé!

Oy-lé! 
Maxine’s idol, the character Isabella Garcia-Shapiro, is Jewish, but her creators aren’t. Still, the show’s super-verbal yet super-schtick-y Borscht Belt sensibility feels Jewish. Povenmire says that’s because unlike most cartoons, which create scripts first and then do storyboards, he and Marsh do both simultaneously. “That way there are more visual gags going on, but we can also go over the words really carefully.” Suddenly remembering he’s talking to a Jewish journalist, he exclaimed: “We futz over the words until we’re shpritzing!”

An indication of the show’s—and its creators—love of words: Dr. Doofenshmirtz’s name was originally Mittelshmerz, the abdominal pain women experience when an egg is released from the ovaries. Disney put the kibosh on that. Provenmire recalled: “I said, ‘It’s not a dirty word!’ But they said, ‘If it has to do with procreation, you stay away from it.’ ”

Another thing I love about the show is its casual, warm treatment of blended families—Phineas and Ferb are stepbrothers. “I am really passionate about this subject,” Marsh said. “All my brothers are half- or stepbrothers, and growing up, I always felt that being in a state of divorce or a blended family was never spoken about or had to come with a big elaborate explanation—it wasn’t just treated as the state of things. But 50 percent of American kids are growing up in blended families; they should see their experience represented.” Povenmire added: “I’m told we were the first people on the Disney Channel to say the words ‘divorce’ or ‘alimony.’ ” Marsh summed up: “I told Disney that hearing the word ‘divorce’ will make kids feel more normal; it won’t make them start crying. And to their credit, they said OK.” Povenmire added: “It just took five meetings.”

Not everyone loves the show. Common Sense Media, a family-oriented watchdog, loathes the boys’ sister, Candace, calling her “a screechy, whiny stereotype of a girl.” This is sort of true. But Maxie’s beloved Isabella Garcia-Shapiro is a fine counterpoint to Candace. She leads her own troop of Fireside Girls and is as creative and self-motivated as Phineas and Ferb. (Povenmire and Marsh both have daughters.)

For those who do love the show, next week is a big one: Friday, August 5 marks the premiere of “Phineas and Ferb, The Movie: Across the 2nd Dimension,” a film-length super-episode. The Disney Channel is promoting this milestone with a customized 27-foot Airstream trailer called “Perry the Platy-bus,” designed to look like the boys’ pet. It’s currently traveling cross-country, making stops to do song-and-dance performances at landmark sites. (Much like Sarah Palin, only mammalian.)

In the movie, the alternate-dimension Doofenshmirtz succeeds in his evil plots. I hope new viewers will familiarize themselves with the usual nebbishy Doofenshmirtz first. His more typical attempts at evil: plotting to release termites to eat all the wood in the area so he can launch an aluminum-siding business; hovering over his girlfriend’s house with a huge magnet so he can erase embarrassing messages he’s left on her voicemail; inventing a device to make people’s voices higher so his own voice will sound more manly; trying to rid the area of mimes; and planning to shrink national monuments to use with his model train set.

Doofenshmirtz’s hilariously schlemiel-esque approach to wrongdoing is just one more element that makes this show great. A program the whole family can laugh at, one that applauds inventiveness and resourcefulness and offers up clever music and lyrics? Only a doof would resist.

Now get this: I’m sending my kid to a Zionist summer camp. For the second summer in a row.

How did I get from point A to point B? (And at a time when Zionist camps are—shall we say—less than popular in certain parts of the Internet, no less!)

It started with a lot of research—I wasn’t going to send my precious Jewish snowflake to just any overnight camp. First, the camp had to be Jewish. That was non-negotiable. Research shows that Jewish camps are a superb way to cultivate a kid’s positive feelings about his or her Jewishness. According to the Foundation for Jewish Camp, 66 percent of Jews who attended Jewish camps considered their Jewish identity “very important,” as opposed to 29 percent of those who never attended a Jewish camp, and Jewish camp alumni are 90 percent more likely to join a JCC than their non-Jewish-camping compatriots. Sure, we might make a methodological argument that the kind of kids who are sent to Jewish camps are predisposed to feel better about Jewishness than those who aren’t, but let’s just go with this: Camp is way more delicious than shul or school. I stole a first kiss behind the chadar ochel (mess hall), performed in Hebrew plays, sang my heart out in Hebrew during zimriya (songfest), competed fiercely in that terrifying nighttime game where were issued passports of actual Holocaust-era Jews and had to flee our Nazi counselors to freedom on the tennis courts. (Trivializing of tragedy? Perhaps. Indelible? Certainly.) I have camp friendships that are hugely meaningful to me nearly 30 years later. Camp Ramah in New England filled me with far more warm feelings and sense of Jewish community than anything else I experienced in childhood.

But I wanted my own young children to go to camp close to New York City, where I live. (I am a Jewish mother; I live to fulfill the stereotype of being neurotic and smothering.) But when I started looking for Jewish sleepaway camps in a two-and-a-half-hour radius from the city, I found a terrifying amount of princessery, camps filled with unnervingly sophisticated, spoiled kids with Shabbat dresses more expensive than my entire family’s wardrobe. I found parents who ignored cell-phone bans and sent contraband candy to camp elaborately hidden in tennis-ball canisters. When I asked for other spoiled-campers stories online, my Facebook page lit up. I heard about camps with “no bottled water” policies, because parents were sending so many cases, some camps ran out of storage space. I heard about girls so obsessed with straightening their Jewish hair and worrying about how they looked in a bikini that they flatly refused to swim. I heard about pale pink Shabbat shoes with spike heels (to be worn in the grass and mud!). I heard about kids packing enough technology (iPods, iPads, handheld gaming systems) to rival the contents of J&R and enough jewelry to rival Tiffany. My friend Dan reported overhearing the following exchange:

Camper 1: “My dad works for the largest blah blah blah in the country.”
Camper 2: “Your dad works for somebody?”

Perhaps worst of all, in poking around campers’ online message boards, I found kids saying approvingly that their camps were beloved by cool kids like themselves, but weren’t enjoyed by geeks.

Do you know where these vile youths don’t go? They don’t go to Zionist camps. Zionist camps like the one at which we’ll be dropping my daughter this week, Zionist camps that embrace geekery. Her camp makes kids do chores. It does not have spiffy bunks or a lake. The kids dress like shlumps. They are unspoiled and lovely. The camp has a super-strict anti-bullying policy. It is haimish. It felt like family immediately.

When I got married, I had a very DIY wedding in the woods. We counted on friends and family pitching in. Do you know who the most helpful and spirited were, by far? My cousins who went to Habonim Dror Moshava, a socialist Zionist camp that stresses the values of kibbutz: shared labor, cooperation, social justice, and a cultural love of Judaism. Some of my family members failed to do the weensy minor tasks I asked of them, but my cousins were whirling dervishes of chopping, grilling, serving, clearing, singing Birkat Hamazon. When I grabbed my cousin Abe, mayim-stepping by with a plate of veggies, to say thanks, he grinned, “No worries, cuz. Socialist Jew camp. It’s what we do.”

Now, would I be uncomfortable if Josie’s (and soon to be Maxie’s) camp was advocating dehumanizing Palestinians and supporting tikkun olam only if it applied to Jews? You bet. Camp has a privileged place of kid-centric-ness, away from parental eyes, so I cannot say for sure that my child was not subjected to Clockwork Orange-like brainwashing sessions about the evils of intermarriage. But given that the camp’s own literature discusses the values of diversity and pluralism, and that it is not affiliated with any particular branch of Judaism, I’m guessing no. There are attractive Israeli counselors there, yes, but I’m guessing their perspectives on Palestinian statehood vary from hard left to hard right, just like actual Israelis do. At Josie’s camp, social action is a huge part of the curriculum: The kids research different charities—not all Jewish—and decide which ones to support. They do volunteer work. Josie came home singing “Ani v’ata n’shaneh et haolam”—you and I will change the world—and she meant it. I am a world-class mocker of things, and I don’t think that childhood sentiment is mock-worthy.

The upshot: If American Jewish identity is to be something more than silver-and-blue wrapping paper instead of red-and-green wrapping paper in December, Zionist summer camp can be a parent’s best ally.

Last year, Josie returned from camp as joyful as I have ever seen her. She belted out the songs I’d sung at my own camp. Her Hebrew had improved by leaps and bounds. She made us Israeli salad, refusing all offers of assistance, dicing tomatoes and cucumbers into tiny pieces. It took her 45 minutes. (We learned to plan ahead when Josie was making Israeli salad.)

The Zionist camp Josie attends fosters what I think is a particularly American sort of Zionism, one that says that Jews are a people defined by both religion and ethnicity. It isn’t boosterish. It allows for nuance. Even an 8-year-old can understand nuance. And even an 8-year-old can understand Jewishness is more than demanding an Elsa Peretti Star of David necklace for your bat mitzvah, because everyone at camp has one.

What other predictive foodstuffs might we offer anxious, expecting Jewish parents?

Cut it open, and inside is an inscrutable medical insurance statement telling you what kind of internist your son will be.

ILLUSTRATIONS BY DAVID GOLDIN

And I cast myself as Rizzo. I knew I couldn’t be the ingénue. I was two heads taller than the other girls in my class. I had no idea how to be cute and flirty. I didn’t have gorgeous, long-lashed blue eyes like Laura Page. I was bossy—hence my forcing the entire neighborhood to fulfill my artistic vision. I wasn’t leading lady material, and I knew it even then.

Part of me was sorry. But most of me embraced being Rizzo. The tough and sarcastic leader of the Pink Ladies, played by Stockard Channing in the film, Rizzo was blustery but vulnerable, someone who knew she wasn’t the prettiest girl in school but found power and agency anyway. Rizzo didn’t have nearly as many songs as Sandy, but she got to sing the excellent, snarky “Look at Me, I’m Sandra Dee.” I had no idea what “lousy with virginity” meant, but it was obviously something to roll one’s eyes about. And Rizzo had a wounded heart under all that cheap pink satin. Another of her songs, “There Are Worse Things I Could Do,” was about being perceived as a slut when she really wasn’t and refusing to give anyone the satisfaction of knowing they’ve hurt her with name-calling. The sexual references went right over my head, but I completely understood the emotions fueling the song. Rizzo was a much more nuanced character than Sandy, the star.

I kept doing plays (and eventually became the lead drama counselor at two Jewish camps), but I played exactly two leading roles in my entire theatrical life: a chain-smoking, mentally ill, Russian would-be assassin in a pretentious Harvard black-box production, and Wilbur in Charlotte’s Web in fifth grade.

But I learned so much playing small parts. I learned to create a character and be a team player, and I swear I became less bossy as I got older. I learned to see myself as part of an ensemble. My dad once sent a letter to the director of Camp Ramah in New England asking why I always seemed to play whores, but I liked playing whores. (My dad said he just wondered whether the camp was trying to tell him anything.) I learned that small parts can be memorable parts. Ado Annie gets more laughs in Oklahoma! than Laurey.

But I worry that our culture now tells kids they shouldn’t accept anything less than top billing. Nowadays, after all, almost every tween TV show is about kids becoming stars. We adulate celebrities even if they don’t do anything. The Real Housewives are famous for screaming at each other. Kim Kardashian became famous for making a sex tape, then morphed into being polymorphously famous for being famous. Now she has her own shoe collection, her own fitness DVD, and her own perfume. (“It probably smells like Taco Bell and Valtrex,” says a friend of a friend.)

I’m not going to join in the mocking of Rebecca Black, the 13-year-old girl who made a vanity video called “Friday” (her mom paid $4,000 to a production company that specializes in such things) that went viral on YouTube and has been derided as “the worst song ever.” Granted, the song—about a Friday in the life of a teenager—is moronic: “Gotta go downstairs/gotta have my bowl/gotta have cereal,” go the lyrics, and “Partyin’, partyin’/partyin’, partyin’/fun fun fun fun/lookin’ forward to the weekend.” But it’s not fair to make fun of a 13-year-old, talented or not, for wanting to be a star. We live in a world in which that’s the message that fuels every medium. And in fact, it’s sort of fascinating to watch a video of a song that glorifies what every kid does every day in every suburb across our fair land: Eat a bowl of cereal, wait for the bus, try to decide where to sit—these things become deserving of fame because the person doing them has been packaged by a company that packages pretend-fame to anyone with $4,000. The head, it spins.

Commenting is disabled on the video; people said nasty things, as people do on the Internet. But here’s the thing: Black has become an actual star; the TV show Glee recently covered “Friday.” She does have a relationship with fame; it doesn’t matter whether it’s a love-hate relationship. It doesn’t matter that she’s a placeholder around whom a cheesy production swirls. It’s what she wanted. Now she can star in bigger productions in which she’s an object.

As a moral lesson, this is cruddy. The educator Alfie Kohn wrote a book called Punished by Rewards in which he argued that kids should be intrinsically motivated to succeed. Some of Kohn’s ideas are too radical for me, but not this. Stardom is not in itself a worthy goal. Yet too many kids are told that every painting they make is a Picasso, that they should be in the starting lineup, even if it is only their first year on the team, that the only reason they didn’t get an A is that the teacher is lame.

The message here is that stardom is every child’s God-given right, and being less than No. 1 is unacceptable. But you learn from being on the JV team, playing the second banana, not getting an A. Kids should enjoy performing, playing sports, reading, or playing chess for their own sake, not as tools to get something else.

Last year, when my daughter Josie was cast as the third orphan from the left in Oliver!, she was disappointed. She’d wanted “a part with a name.” But there was a teachable moment there. And guess what: Josie loved being in the chorus. This year, she’s Grandma Tzeitl in Fiddler on the Roof—a larger role, but still a supporting one. Maybe next year she’ll have a bigger part, maybe not. Part of me hopes not. Because the female leads in most mass-market entertainments are mostly objects, more looked at and acted upon than creators of their own destiny. As my girls get older, I’d rather have them play character roles that don’t define them by their looks or desirability.

I say “girls” because Maxie, at 6, loves theater too. She recently wrote at school that she wants to be “an actris.” I asked her, “Maxie, didn’t you say that you wanted to be a writer?” She quickly answered, “I want to be both. I’ll be a playwright and write parts for myself.” I hope those parts will be more fully dimensional than most parts for women now. And if they’re small parts, that’s just fine.

“I do think cutting’s becoming more prevalent,” said therapist Jean Kunhardt, director of the Soho Parenting Center (and granddaughter of Dorothy Kunhardt, author of Pat the Bunny). “It’s a little faddish, almost a norm, like trying a cigarette or a drink. Most kids don’t keep doing it, but for some, it becomes ritualized behavior. It’s usually a kid who feels desperate, depressed, angry, and without an outlet for that anger—cutting can be a way to numb bad feelings socially, academically, or at home.” Cutting helps girls who feel agitated or deadened feel a rush. “And it creates a wound they can tend, as opposed to a psychic wound they don’t know how to deal with,” says Kunhardt. “And then there’s the fall. And they need to do it again.”

Lovato told People that she was influenced by the media. “I saw it only on TV, and I wondered what it would feel like,” she said. “Later, for me, it was a way of relieving pressure when I was stressed and had anxiety. When someone sees it, it’s terrifying, so I started doing it in areas where no one can see.”

Cutters aren’t drama queens making lame suicide attempts. They’re generally not suicidal at all, but still, they’re in genuine pain. Self-harm (the psychiatric term for this behavior) usually involves cutting—mostly stabbing or slicing the skin with a sharp object—but can also include self-burning and hair-pulling. It’s listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders as a symptom of borderline personality disorder, but it’s also associated with anorexia and bulimia—some sources say that 35 to 80 percent of all cutters also have eating disorders—as well as depression and anxiety. It’s most common in adolescence, but it can also plague adults. (Animals kept in zoos and cages sometimes self-injure as well.) In the United States, according to one study, up to 15 percent of teenagers and 4 percent of adults chronically self-harm.

“In my experience, cutters are 85 percent girls,” says Steven Levenkron, an New York psychotherapist and author of Cutting: Understanding and Overcoming Self-Mutilation (as well as of The Best Little Girl in the World, which became a TV movie about anorexia starring Jennifer Jason Leigh that was the a touchstone for anyone who came of age in the early ’80s). “Most are delicate cutters—they don’t need stitches. Gross cutters, who go down to an artery, tend to be males. Girls tend to make 3-inch cuts, first in the forearms, then the stomach and breasts and thighs, where it doesn’t show. It’s a ritual.” Why? Because it immediately makes the cutter feel better. “It gets rid of anxiety and depression for two, two and a half hours,” Levenkron says. “Sometimes they make what I call a ‘whoops cut’ and wind up in the hospital having cut a tendon, but usually when they’re finished they put peroxide on it and bandage it up.”

And yes, this is a problem in the Jewish community. There’s little empirical data on Jews and cutting, but anecdotally, therapists in Jewish communities tell me they see many Jewish teenagers who engage in the practice. “If I were looking for Jewish traits among cutters, I’d say that shame is one of them,” says Levenkon. “How can they tell their parents they do bad things to themselves when they’re supposed to strive to marry the accountant or the lawyer and he won’t think they’re pretty if they have scars all over their skin?” Perfectionism, endemic to high-achieving acculturated Jews and ultra-Orthodox Jews alike, can also trigger cutting.

In Prozac Nation, our foremost first-person chronicler of Jewish female mental illness, Elizabeth Wurtzel wrote about cutting herself while a student at the Modern Orthodox Ramaz Day School:

I took my keys out of my knapsack. On the chain was a sharp nail clipper, which had a nail file attached to it. I rolled down my knee socks (we were required to wear skirts to school) and looked at my bare white legs. I hadn’t really started shaving yet, only from time to time because my mother considered me too young, and I looked at the delicate peach fuzz, still soft and untainted. A perfect, clean canvas. So I took the nail file, found its sharp edge, and ran it across my lower leg, watching a red line of blood appear across my skin. … I did not, you see, want to kill myself. Not at that time, anyway. But I wanted to know that if need be, if the desperation got so terribly bad, I could inflict harm on my body. And I could. Knowing this gave me a sense of peace and power, so I started cutting up my legs all the time. Hiding the scars from my mother became a sport of its own. I collected razor blades, I bought a Swiss Army knife, I became fascinated with different kinds of sharp edges and the different cutting sensations they produced. I tried out different shapes—squares, triangles, pentagons, even an awkwardly carved heart, with a stab wound at its center, wanting to see if it hurt the way a real broken heart could hurt. I was amazed and pleased to find that it didn’t.

Wurtzel cut herself to soothe herself. It sounds paradoxical, but that’s true for most cutters. It’s hard growing up in a culture so focused on the body and the taming thereof. As Jews, we’re surrounded by food in all our ritual celebrations, but we’re supposed to be slender and gorgeous. Our texts talk about the soul, but our here-and-now world talks constantly about the body. Girls feel a huge amount of pressure to be all things, to please others, to get into a good college. And when they can’t express all that roiling emotion and anxiety, some let it out (in the words of one classic on self-harm), a bright red scream.

Unlike eating disorders, cutting is wrongly considered goyish because it’s so violent. (It’s mentioned in Leviticus in reference to the priests of Baal “cutting themselves with blades until blood flowed.”) Our prohibition against tattoos also covers scarification: “You shall not make any cuts on your body for the dead or tattoo yourselves: I am the Lord.” To cut oneself is the ultimate transgression of the commandment of shmirat haguf (guarding the body). If your body is a gift from God, and you’re made in the divine image, how dare you slice it up? It doesn’t belong to you!

That, of course, is the problem. Girls feel alienated from their own bodies. Yet anti-depressants and cognitive behavioral therapy have been shown to be very effective, if only the girl is willing to seek help (or someone close to her gently leads her to it). “Anorexia is very hard to cure, but with self-mutilation, I can generally get girls to quit in a year,” says Levenkon. “What I do is teach them a language for reflection, so that they learn to recognize ‘anxious,’ ‘depressed,’ ‘lonely,’ and can start to substitute language for cutting.”

No one should have to hurt herself in order to feel.

What does testing-induced gut-hork have to do with Jewish parenting, you may ask? Well, I think putting kids through this kind of torture for exceedingly pointless reasons is antithetical to our values.

Here’s why. Standardized tests are no longer being used for the purposes for which they were designed. They aren’t being used to give an overall picture of a school, to trigger teacher development and training, or to help principals concretely support struggling classes. A single test can now determine the fate of a student and can trigger huge sanctions against a school or financial rewards for individual teachers and principals whose students do well. And all this can induce people to cheat—a most un-Jewish value.

Messing with the tests to improve kids’ scores artificially seems to be a very real problem. Last week, the Washington Post reported that nearly 4,000 schoolteachers and parents have signed a petition urging federal officials to investigate possible cheating on standardized tests during the reign of Michelle A. Rhee, the former D.C. schools chancellor. In March, a USA Today investigation found that from 2008 through 2010, there were unusually high rates of answer changes—penciled-in bubbles being erased and re-filled-in differently—at 103 D.C. schools. At one school, more than 80 percent of the classrooms had tests flagged by McGraw-Hill, the testmaker, for unusual answer-changing tendencies.

Let’s look at the Crosby S. Noyes Education Campus, which Rhee frequently pointed to as proof of the success of her sweeping reforms (which basically amounted to an ever-increasing emphasis on testing and huge rates of firing teachers and principals in large part because of their test scores). Rhee called Noyes one of the “shining stars” of D.C.’s educational system. In 2006, only 10 percent of the school’s students scored “proficient” or “advanced” in math; two years later, 58 percent were at that level. Awesome! The reading test gains were similar. Rhee made sure the staff was rewarded for their fabulosity: In 2008 and again in 2010, each teacher received an $8,000 bonus, and the principal received $10,000.

Yet according to USA Today, Noyes’ scoring irregularities were legion. On the 2009 reading test, for instance, seventh-graders in one classroom had almost 13 wrong-to-right erasures on their answer sheets; the average in D.C. was less than one. “The odds are better for winning the Powerball grand prize than having that many erasures by chance, according to statisticians,” the paper reported. A former D.C. principal told the paper that Rhee informed her and her colleagues that they were expected to increase scores by at least 10 percentage points every year.

As educational historian (and recent Daily Show guest) Diane Ravitch points out in her brilliant (and easy-to-read, non-jargon-y, and deeply depressing) book The Death and Life of the Great American School System, we should always be suspicious of humungous differences in data from year to year. Real, meaningful change doesn’t happen by leaps and bounds; it happens incrementally.

Ravitch’s perspective is fascinating, because she is someone who has truly had a turnaround—done teshuvah, in fact—on her earlier views on testing. Her book is a very public mea culpa. She’s a former United States assistant secretary of Education who was appointed by George H.W. Bush and was formerly aligned with conservative thinkers on accountability and school choice. “First she angered the Marxist historians, and later the fans of progressive education and the multiculturalists,” Jeffrey E. Mirel, a professor of education at the University of Michigan, told the New York Times last year. “But she’s always defended public schools and a robust traditional curriculum, because she believes they’ve been a ladder of social mobility.”

Indeed, that’s the role public schools have always served for American Jews. Ravitch tells a story in her book about how she didn’t get into a private school in her Texas hometown because, according to her parents, the headmistress didn’t like Jews. After that, her parents were big supporters of public education. Ravitch writes that she initially applauded No Child Left Behind and other testing-driven initiatives, but when she looked at the results and at the actual outcomes (high test scores don’t actually indicate knowledge and learning; the new accountability policies don’t involve helping teachers teach better and principals administer better) she changed her mind.

“Accountability, now a shibboleth that everyone applauds, had become mechanistic and even antithetical to good education,” Ravitch writes. “Testing, I realized with dismay, had become a central preoccupation in the schools and was not just a measure but an end in itself. I came to believe that accountability, as written into federal law, was not raising standards but dumbing down the schools as states and districts strived to meet unrealistic targets.”

Ravitch says she’s too essentially conservative to embrace an agenda driven by speculation and uncertain results. And it was that (very Jewish!) conservatism about values, traditions, and the need to protect communities that made her change her tune and publicly break with her former allies. But Ravitch’s conservativism is the kind that squares with both American and Jewish values, struggling, as it does, with the notion of the individual versus the community and the question of whether America truly is a meritocracy.

As Jews, we dig community. Al tifrosh min hatzibur, we’re told: Do not separate yourself from the community. Our prayers are written overwhelmingly in the first person plural. But standardized testing is the furthest thing from communitarian. Wealthy families buy tutoring. Upper-middle-class kids come into school with the huge advantage of being read to more often at home. Testing enforces existing divisions and even increases them. And being Jewish means you shouldn’t just worry about your kids; you should be concerned about everyone’s kids. That means working to improve all schools—yes, even if your kid goes to Jewish Day School—in meaningful ways, because that’s part of the responsibility of living in a democracy.

And no one’s kids should be barfing from anxiety at the age of 8.

Look, I am not one of those parents who sniff and say, “Oh, we don’t have a television.” We love our television. Our television is the size of a barn. My girls watch Project Runway and Top Chef with us. We TiVo the cartoons Phineas & Ferb and WordGirl. They watch Pee-wee’s Playhouse on DVD and Beakman’s World as streaming content on Netflix. Josie and I watch Glee together, though I am ambivalent about the show. I’ll frequently hit pause to explain sexual references, explicate what I find offensive, and excavate the show’s hidden judgments and values I may or may not agree with.

Yes, I have issues with Glee, but I’m OK with my kid watching it. I applaud the normative portrayal of gay kids, the musical numbers, and the hilariousness of Jane Lynch. For me, those things outweigh the inconsistent characterization, incoherent plots, and sexual shenanigans. Plenty of parents disagree with me about Glee, which is why I have no intention of being the Hat Police about television. (The Hat Police being those people who criticize strangers’ parenting by barking things like “That baby needs a hat!”)

That said, I’ll tell you why live-action tween TV shows are banned in my house, and not just during the Omer. What these shows have in common is a snotty attitude. Kids address each other and adults with a sassy, casually hurtful tone peppered by laugh-track laughs. Many of these shows posit celebrity as the ultimate value. The protagonists are pop stars (Hannah Montana), TV comedy stars (Sonny With a Chance), dancers (Shake It Up), hottie boy bands (Big Time Rush), or students at a top Hollywood performing arts school (Victorious). The message: The greatest thing you can be is famous. Shows that aren’t about becoming a music or TV star are about the perks of wealth and power: The Suite Life of Zack & Cody is about kids living on a luxury cruise ship, and True Jackson, VP is about a teen whose stylishness nabs her a senior-level job at a multimillion-dollar fashion company.

A huge number of the shows’ plots focus on being attractive to the opposite sex. Kids who are bookish, have unusual passions like ventriloquism (Victorious), have asthma (Good Luck Charlie), are chubby (Suite Life), or wear glasses (Victorious) are subject to ridicule by the heroes. (It can’t be bullying if the heroes are doing it!) Parents, if they exist, are generally portrayed as dimwitted. When kids mock them to their faces, the parents react with helpless frustration or goofy, rueful acceptance.

Girls on these shows, whatever their ethnicity, have long, straight, glossy hair. Frizzy hair, on both boys and girls, is a sign of stupidity or grossness. Boys’ hair is frequently swept forward and to the side, Bieberishly. The leads are almost all white, but even the nonwhite kids have no signifiers of ethnic or cultural identity, except, perhaps, for a fondness for hip-hop, which white kids happen to like, too. Clothing has a certain mall-safe sameness. Dressing “Goth” means you’re a bad girl; not dressing fashionably means you’re a joke.

And these shows are dumb. The writing isn’t witty. The plots are predictable. The characters are pancake-flat. Why put up with stupid TV writing when good TV writing is out there? A single musical number on Phineas & Ferb, for example, recently featured the words infernal, invective, abhor, ambivalence, subjective, atrocious, and apathy. Do not tell me all cartoons rot children’s brains.

Parents often say to me, “Well, iCarly isn’t that bad.” iCarly is almost always held out as the embodiment of not-bad. Well, I disagree. iCarly is that bad.

I used to think iCarly wasn’t that bad. I’d seen a couple of episodes and thought it was unfunny but innocuous. Then we watched “iMake Sam Girly” while unpacking in a hotel room. In this episode, Carly’s best friend Sam, a tomboy, decides she has to be “girlier” to attract the boy she has a crush on. Carly is thrilled and gives her a makeover, amping up her makeup and putting her in a pink blouse and miniskirt instead of her customary jeans. (Carly also orders her to wear panties instead of boxers.) Sam is ill at ease, but the boy notices her, so she puts up with her discomfort. She desperately wants a burger, but that wouldn’t be feminine, so she orders salad. A bully shows up—a very tall, muscular black girl, the only person of color in the episode—and shoves French fries down Sam’s blouse. Carly urges Sam not to retaliate because that would be unfeminine. When the bully throws Sam’s schoolbooks on the ground, Sam struggles for a moment, then responds, “I like your shoes!” The bully then pushes a little kid and a nerdy man. Sam wants to intervene, but Carly gives her warning looks. When the bully shoves Carly, though, Carly barks to Sam, “Rip her head off!” (Big laugh from the laugh track.) Only then does Sam dispense with the bully. Oh no! Her crush has been watching the entire time! She’s sure she’s lost him, but he tells her he likes her just the way she is. The studio audience says, “Awww.” No one mentions that the boy didn’t notice her at all until she changed the way she looked.

This is the show that’s not so bad.

Look, if your kids watch these shows, I am in no position to judge you. And believe me, I understand taking the path of least resistance, especially during school vacations. Nevertheless, I encourage you to watch TV with your kid and talk about the unspoken messages the tween shows convey.

And seriously, look into Phineas & Ferb. After the Omer.

After she went to bed, I opened the package. I’d seen her friend Rachel’s plate at pickup, so I knew what she was supposed to be making. But instead of a plate, Maxie’s foil package held a jumble of gluey interlaced sticks. It looked like a teepee that had been hit by a tornado.

Maxie is generally the most resilient, least perfectionist member of our family. She’s inherently sunny, a people-pleaser, a kid who compensates for her physical difficulties with tons of goofy humor and sweetness. She loves going to occupational therapy, and she’s eager to keep trying when she has challenges. But this time she was stymied. There was a right answer, one proper way to do the project. She saw herself as a failure. And she was inconsolable.

I couldn’t help seeing a parallel. Passover turns a lot of us into tightly wound loons. There are so many rules, and you can wind up becoming a Jewish Alice, tumbling down a rabbit hole of increasingly twisted and exacting standards. Is the house really as clean as it could be? Is that cheddar cheese really kosher for Passover, or does it have a different designation from last year? Do we do peanuts, which, as Leah Koenig points out, are not actually kitniyot (a category of foodstuffs which Ashkenazi Jews are forbidden from eating on Passover) because they’re a New World food our ancients wouldn’t have known about, but no one will actually certify them kosher for Passover because of tradition? Can we (gasp) buy the freakin’ quinoa? And do I have to unscrew the telephone receiver and clean inside it? Shampoo the furniture? Cover up the artwork in the kitchen with a picture of bread in it? How arcane can we get? As a commenter on Leah’s piece said, “We need a frumkeit Olympics.”

I’m not Queen Machmir (a strict constructionist), but I do get very worked up about the Seder. Since my dad’s death, I’ve led it, and I try to add new songs, poems, and activities every year. I try to incorporate wisdom from my mom, a professor of Jewish education, about making it interactive and engaging for kids. I try to anticipate the children’s questions, even the ones they don’t know to ask. I try to prepare for guests of varying levels of Jewish ritual cluefulness, so everyone will feel welcome. And every Passover at some point I freak out and growl at everybody like Dick Cheney.

So, I was very taken with rabbi Joanna Samuels’ essay in the Forward a few days ago, sharing her own shpilkes. “I am sure there are two or three families out there who spend hours having rich discussions,” she writes ruefully, “who strike their own right balance of ritual and spontaneity, where there is not a bit of family tension about who is serving and clearing, and where the evening ends with singing all of the songs. That would constitute the Seder shel ma’alah–the heavenly Seder. But what most of us attend is the Seder shel matah—the (decidedly) earthly Seder. Among the features of this Seder are eye-rolling teenagers, exhausted children up way past their bedtimes, relatives whose religious observance or lack of religious observance is a source of tension to other family members.”

She confesses that even though every year she wants to focus less on cooking and cleaning and more on “undertaking projects that result in real freedom for real people,” every year she falls short of that mark. Been there, thought that. The Seder shel ma’alah is the Platonic ideal of a Seder: No child throws an afikomen-related tantrum, everyone engages in the host’s carefully thought-out freedom-and-slavery-related discussions, no one spills Cabernet on the Marimekko tablecloth. Since humans can never actually achieve a Platonic ideal, we have to live with imperfection all the time. And, as Neil Farber at the Medical College of Wisconsin points out, this can be hard. When we compare the real to the ideal we wind up unhappy, because, Farber says,“One, we are being mindless; not focusing or being actively aware of or appreciating the present. Two, We are never going to be as happy with what we have when we compare it to some mental idea of what is perfect.”

Chasing perfection—as Tal Ben-Shahar of the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya writes in The Pursuit of Perfect—only leads to unhappiness. Ben-Shahar makes a distinction between what he calls perfectionists and optimalists. Both have high standards, but perfectionists think the perfect is reasonable, and immediately seek someone to blame when (surprise!) it remains elusive. Optimalists, on the other hand, live in the real world. They appreciate that limited success is still success. And when things don’t work out, well, they can sit with their own discomfort rather than immediately trying to assess blame. To an optimalist, failure is part of a learning process; the journey is as valuable as the destination.

It’s a similar idea to Samuels’ reflections on the chasm between shel ma’alah and shel matah, the ideal and the real. “My apartment,” Samuels writes, “will be a work in progress; our Seder there will be a blessing by virtue of everyone being around the table. I will breathe. I will take it all in. And hopefully, I can use some of the energy getting more serious about freedom—to try to see myself, in some limited way, as an agent of change in the world, casting my awareness and my resources on those whose needs for freedom remain unmet.” Amen.

Last night I had Maxie make the cover for our haggadah supplement. I worried she wouldn’t want to after her unsuccessful ritual art experience, so I told her to draw whatever she wanted. She made “a girl in a headband with a rose on it standing next to the Red Sea praying.” Very cute. Then I asked her to write “Our Seder, 2011” on it. Perhaps anxious about her unsteady writing messing up her picture, she refused. I let it go. Drawing the picture was enough—dayenu. We know what year it is and whose Seder it is. That’s optimal.

Corwin and Jacobs are hardly alone in seeking new resonance for ancient ritual. Synagogues and college Hillel chapters host Chocolate Seders; online communities like Challah Crumbs and Kveller share Passover craft ideas; activists for domestic workers’ rights attend Labor Seders. Indeed, my kiddie Seder plate idea last year was a tongue-in-cheek way to rope in the previously alienated, clueless, fidgety, or unable to ask.

Corwin and Jacobs are not big shul-goers. That’s true of most American Jews. “Passover to us means matzoh brei and matzoh pizza and matzoh lasagna,” Corwin said. “It means going to a Passover-inspired dinner at one of the few restaurants in San Francisco, where we live, that does that sort of thing. Most of the Seders we’ve been to have been attended mostly by gentiles.”

They came up with the idea for the cocktail Seder on a trip to Beijing, where they discovered a Manuka-honey-flavored vodka from New Zealand. At home, they experimented with adding sweet vermouth, and Jacobs had an instantaneous sense memory of charoset.

The two men come from different Jewish backgrounds—Jacobs grew up in an observant Jewish family; Corwin’s parents are intermarried. Most of their friends are “vaguely non-practicing,” Corwin says. “But everyone pricks up their ears when we talk about cocktails.”

Their site seems to have struck a chord. “We’ve been surprised to find that people who visit tend to spend six to 30 minutes there,” Corwin says. “People look at more pages than we have, which means they’re revisiting pages. I hope it means we’ve attracted some people to learn about Passover who wouldn’t otherwise know anything. We just wanted to make people smile. That would be enough. But if helps people connect to their heritage, that would be wonderful.” Dayenu.

Soon after the site launched, a woman in Alaska—married to a non-Jew, living in a community with few Jews and no shul, who still wants her children to have a Jewish identity—posted a comment on the site. She wrote that she held Passover cocktail and food pairings every year, featuring offers like a Hillel sandwich with a Junípero martini, and a Bloody Mary with savory smoked-salmon matzoh brei. She signed her comment “Frozen Chosen.”

Corwin and Jacobs also used ingredients they felt had resonance, inspired by a Seder they attended at the restaurant Perbacco a few years ago. The menu was co-created by Joyce Goldstein, author of Cucina Ebraica: Flavors of the Italian Jewish Kitchen, and many of the dishes included artichokes, a staple among Italian Jews. Corwin and Jacobs and their friends talked about how the prickly veggie could represent the Jewish experience throughout history. They wound up using the artichoke liqueur Cynar in their Chazeret cocktail. The Beitzah cocktail incorporates egg whites and Galliano (but not in a “foofy Harvey Wallbanger” way, Corwin promises). “Our first attempts lacked finesse,” Corwin says, “but now it has a more sophisticated flavor profile, and I think it looks like a roasted brown egg, especially in the tulip-shaped stemware we used.”

The most shocking-looking drink is the z’roa, which, in this innovative iteration, represents not just the lamb’s shank bone but its blood.

Z’ROA

2 oz. Basil Hayden’s Bourbon
2 oz. ruby port
1 teaspoon gum syrup
¼ oz. lemon juice
¼ teaspoon Maraschino liqueur

Combine all ingredients in a mixing glass. Shake well with ice. Strain through a fine mesh strainer into a chilled cocktail glass.

“I recently had blood drawn,” exclaimed Corwin, “and I couldn’t believe how much we got right. The bubbles are thick around the edges of the glass from the gum syrup, and the viscosity is just right. It kind of creeped me out. The phlebotomist thought I was insane.”

Worried that the site might be seen as mocking the Passover ritual, Jacobs asked his cousin Irwin Keller to take a look. Keller, known as Reb Irwin, is the spiritual leader of a Reconstructionist congregation in Sonoma County. He also has a law degree from the University of Chicago, wrote Chicago’s gay rights ordinance, is the former director of the AIDS Legal Referral Panel in San Francisco, and plays Winnie in the Kinsey Sicks, “America’s favorite dragapella beauty shop quartet.” According to Tablet contributor Esther Schor, when the group is on the road, Keller gives bar mitzvah lessons via Skype in his dressing room. He talked to me on the phone about the Sipping Seder as he made borscht.

“I think it’s important for us to be open to new ways for our ritual tradition to speak to people,” Keller said. “A lot of people have had ritual experiences they’ve felt to be empty. The commandment is to tell the story as if you yourself had left Egypt; the commandment isn’t to do it with gefilte fish, without the jelly please. I think it’s better to have the content in fewer forms than all the forms with less meaning.”

Indeed, Keller says, sitting around having cocktails with friends is a recipe for connection and introspection. He suggests participants consider incorporating a ritual like the Four-Question Seder, developed by Amichai Lau Lavie, the founding director of Storahtelling:

• What was the oppression that you fled?
• In what ways are you still stuck in a narrow place, and what do you need to be free?
• What are you grateful for right now?
• What can you do (once you sober up) to stir up some more freedom in the world?

“The idea of posing starter questions out of our Pesach story makes sense,” Keller said. “No one is required to read Aramaic or know the songs or have complex, ambivalent feelings about their Jewish education or lack thereof—it’s democratic.” Furthermore, he added, “There’s great elegance to the idea, and I think people are attracted to beauty. It’s hiddur mitzvah [the principle of enhancing a mitzvah through esthetics].”

Zachary Sharaga, owner of the Alphabet City speakeasy Louis 649, understands. “I went to an Orthodox yeshiva in Pelham Parkway—tzitzit and all—until second grade,” he told me. “Then I attended a Modern Orthodox school until the end of eighth grade. I’m a first-generation American, and I was raised following the Orthodox traditions, but my immediate family was pretty secular. I’ve battled with several degrees of piety and observance throughout my life, becoming fairly observant in my mid-late teens. Currently, I’m secular but very proud of Judaism.” He’s hosted several Seders, always with “crappy Kosher for Passover wine.” But he was inspired by the Sipping Seder to create a recipe for the second Seder this year, which he’ll be hosting. “I’m going to do a pitcher of Negronis,” he said. “But I’ll adapt it to be more bitter, and I’ll make a pitcher because it’s hard enough to get the food on the table for all those people. If you’re hosting, you don’t have time to be shaking individual cocktails. But you could do individual servings for a party.”

MAH NISHTANAH

1 oz. Plymouth Gin
1 oz. Campari
1 oz. Cynar

Pour ingredients over ice into a large Old Fashioned glass or wine goblet. Garnish with sprigs of dill and parsley and an orange twist.

“The fact that the garnish is a long twist of orange is a perfect reference to the orange on the Seder plate,” Sharaga reflects. “And it’s red, which feels very Passover.” He thought a potato-vodka-based drink incorporating myriad flavors of the holiday would be great too.

PASCHAL PUNCH

1.5 oz. potato vodka
1 oz. Lairds apple brandy 100
1/2 oz. pomegranate juice
1/2 oz. lemon juice
3/4 oz. honey (or to taste—I prefer less sweet)
1 tablespoon red khreyn (horseradish with beets) or 1 tablespoon fresh grated ginger

Shake and strain through a fine mesh strainer, over ice, into a large Old Fashioned glass or wine goblet. Garnish with wedges of apple and/or pickled beet (I love Rick’s Picks Phat Beets).

As if all this were not enough, Charles Steadman, bartender at Echo Palm Beach, provided a final recipe.

DAYENU

1 1/2 oz. Karlsson’s Gold (a potato vodka)
1/4 oz. Averna liqueur
1/2 oz. fresh lemon juice
3 oz. sparkling apple cider (chilled)
1 dash Regan’s Orange Bitters No. 6
Garnish: Watermelon radish sliced in half

Combine Karlsson’s, Averna, lemon juice, and bitters in mixing glass with ice. Stir for 30 seconds to dilute. Strain into a martini glass and top with chilled sparkling cider.  Garnish with radish.

Is all this a decadent fin de siècle indication that our religion has lost its moorings or a hopeful hint that our heritage lives on despite intermarriage, the failings of Jewish education, and the American drive toward acculturation? You tell me.

Special thanks to Francine Cohen, Editor-in-Chief, INSIDE F&B.

Susan Woodland, Hadassah’s archivist, pulled out four fat file boxes for me. The Naomi Cook Book, published by Hadassah’s Toronto chapter in 1928, had notes scribbled in Yiddish on its frontispiece and yellowing pages. “Here in this book are the Old and the New,” the introduction promised. “Here are Strudle [sic] and, in the same breath, ice box cakes. Here, the homely dishes that Sarah must have prepared for angels, and here, too, the things that angels upon earth may prepare for modern and critical husbands.”

That definition of “modern” was different from today’s. (Critical husbands, on the other hand, never change.) There are recipes for stewed lung, potted steak, steamed suet pudding, and sago pudding (which Google tells me is like tapioca but made from palm stems instead of cassava root). Then there’s the recipe for kosher soap, which mixes lamb fat and lye or potash, with a warning: “Dissolve in front of open window. This mixture is strong and hard on the eyes.” Cooking times and temperatures are rarely spelled out (“bake in a moderate oven until done”). But there are familiar offerings like “cheese creplach” and pickles, and the book’s aim was similar to that of many cookbooks today. It promised to be “practical in the last degree”—which, it points out, is as it should be, as “funds raised by the sale of this book will be employed in the immensely practical work of Hadassah in Palestine.”

Some cookbooks reveal the effort that went into kosher cooking. The Waterbury, Conn., chapter’s 1946 cookbook’s “Rules for Kashering” section discusses the removal of hooves and claws, the positioning of the salting board, and how to remove veins from milt (spleen), and porge the hindquarters—cutting away the forbidden caul, veins, and sinew. There are instructions for yanking branched veins out of poultry and using eggs found inside chickens, with and without shells. But there are also culinary shortcuts, like “mock cheese blintzes,” which involve spreading saltines with cream cheese, dipping them into beaten egg and frying them in butter. There’s the familiar “Luxen Coogle,” plus New England staples like Grapenut pudding, which was one of my favorites when I was growing up in nearby Rhode Island several decades later.

It’s fun to see how the books mix contemporary culinary trends with Jewish culture. The Ess Gezunterhayt cookbook produced by the Greenwich, Conn., chapter (undated, but an inscription that says “Many of these recipes are as old as our Jewish tradition, and many are as new as the State of Israel” hints that it’s from the late 1940s or early 1950s) offers “cocktail franks” (frankfurters cut up and simmered in a mixture of currant jelly and mustard) and “mock gefilte fish” made with canned tuna. The book’s glossary combines then-trendy cooking terms like “au gratin” and “baba” with Ashkenazi ones like “farfel,” “fleishig” and “holishkes” (stuffed cabbage). On the last page, there is an ad: “A Friend of Hadassah, long and true, as your Tupperware dealer she’ll always serve you!”

Some of the Southern cookbooks are notable for being glatt trayf. Tastefully Yours: The Cook’s Book, from Roanoake, Va., published in 1969, offers recipes for crab and lobster bisque, oysters casino, and shrimp casserole. Recipes like herring cacciatore are an unholy mix of Jewish and goyish. There’s no mention of the word “Hadassah” or “Jewish” on the cover. Tastefully Yours proudly presents recipes from then-fancy restaurants like Sardi’s and Romeo Salta in New York, the Greenbrier in West Virginia, and the Gourmet at Crossroads Mall—“the superlative restaurant in Roanoke.” In a true Southern touch, there’s even a Robert E. Lee poundcake. A multipage insert by Virginia Stanton, a famous mid-century hostess and “party editor” of House Beautiful magazine, explains in detail how to cook veggies using techniques that were, at the time, ground-breaking, such as steaming or sautéing. “The Orientals,” Stanton informs her readers, “all cook their vegetables very lightly and their thin slices and crunchiness are a delight.”

In the books, brand names that are now lost to the mists of time reappear over and over. What were Chef Howald’s seasoning, Mei Yen powder, Purity flour? Sour cream, pimentos, cream cheese, and French onion soup mix gradually give way to lighter dishes and multicultural offerings. For examples, for decades “Hawaiian” and “Polynesian” were as exotic as it got and meant dumping a can of pineapple chunks on top of the dish. From mid-century on, gelatin salads bloomed like rainbow-colored mushrooms after a rain.

Reading From Noodles to Strudels: Cherished Recipes Contributed by Women Who Care, a 1972 book from Beverly Hills, Calif., one sees feminism coming into the authors’ lives. “While other women are demonstrating, Hadassah women are doing,” the book says pointedly. There’s “Carrot Tsimmes (like Daddy used to make)” and “No-Bake Fruitcake (for the liberated woman),” although the combination of evaporated milk, marshmallows, oil, graham crackers, cloves, mixed candied fruit, and candied orange peel makes liberation sound about as appetizing as the patriarchy. There are lots of potato-chip-and-casserole recipes, along with doctored cake mixes, an acknowledgment that sometimes one wants to get out of the kitchen. But sometimes one wants to wow guests, too, and for that there is “Epicurean Melange,” a kosher gourmet wedding appetizer involving brains, sweetbreads, and non-dairy creamer.

Volume 2 of From Noodles to Studels arrived eight years later, in 1980 and in a world changing faster than ever. “Most Beverly Hills Hadassah kitchens have food processors,” the editors noted. “Chores that were too time consuming for busy volunteers can now be done in seconds by a machine. We have added the wok to our arsenal to fight skyrocketing prices of food. We’ve discovered how far a chicken and a little beef will stretch, blended with the exotic spices of the East. We have become health conscious, cutting down on sugars, salt and eggs and reading labels carefully.” But one thing stays the same: “Though we have borrowed something from cuisines of many lands, our favorites are our Jewish recipes. These treasures are a link in the chain of our own heritage from mother to daughter and will always identify a Jewish table and the Baleboosteh who manages a Jewish home.” (The editors do feel obliged to define baleboosteh as an excellent and praiseworthy homemaker. They could no longer assume that readers understand Yiddish.) The Beverly Hills books offer intriguing dishes like Moroccan b’stilla (the editors patiently explain what cilantro is), Hungarian lamb chardash, sikbaj stew from North Africa, and a selection of harosets from different countries.

It’s fun to see cookbooks that have obviously been used, with stains and margin notes and editorializing by each book’s owner. A recipe in the second Beverly Hills book has been vigorously crossed out, with “NO, UGH” written in huge letters next to it in perfect Parker penmanship. (Given that the recipe includes frozen carrots, dried apricots, brown sugar and a giant can of apricot nectar, it’s no wonder. Hello, diabetic coma.) Who were these women? What role did Judaism and Hadassah play in their lives? Did they love to cook? Did they feel trapped in the kitchen? A little bit of both?

And what does a Hadassah cookbook look like today? Leah Koenig, the current book’s author, strove to create a home-cook-friendly book that would work for a wide variety of lives. “It’s called The Hadassah Everyday Cookbook, but there isn’t one ‘everyday’,” she said. “For a new mom, it can mean ‘l barely have the energy to open a package of fishsticks.’ For the empty nester, there may be more time to go to market and try more elaborate recipes. There’s the college kid. There are men who love to grill. I wanted the book to have something for everyone, to be more representative of who we are as a larger community. Some of the recipes you can make in 30 minutes, and there’s a polenta dish that literally comes together in 10.”

Koenig wants cooking to be joyful. “There’s this attitude that you’re not supposed to enjoy everyday cooking,” she said. “You’re just supposed to grimly get things on the table, and I hate that. That goes against Jewish cooking, the notion of cooking for love and for family. I think the book has a good balance between getting it done and making it fun.”

A food columnist for the Forward and a writer for many food magazines, Koenig didn’t want to duplicate The Hadassah Jewish Holiday Cookbook, the 2002 publication that was the national organization’s first foray into the field. “I didn’t include any recipes for brisket or kugel, because to me those are holiday recipes, not everyday recipes,” she said. “Instead, I tried to think about ingredients that felt Jewish—tahini paste and Middle Eastern stuff, biblical stuff like dates and pomegranates, Ashkenazi things like pickles and rye bread. The granola, for instance, is fantastic; it’s from Not Derby Pie blogger Rivka Friedman. It has tahini and maple syrup as the binder, and, trust me, it’s amazing. I also took traditional Jewish recipes and tweaked them to fit our palate. I have a recipe for grilled tsimmes—I love traditional tsimmes, but I know a lot of people find it too cloying and sweet. So, I grilled sweet potatoes, carrots, fresh apricots and pears and drizzled them with a brown sugar vinaigrette. Plus a lot of the recipes are straight-up Sephardic, because Sephardic food relies on olive oil and fresh veggies; it fits more with healthy contemporary food today.”

The book doesn’t presume a lot of culinary knowledge, the way the early “cook on medium fire until thick” books do. “There isn’t so much learning at your mother’s knee nowadays,” Koenig says. “Now I guess we learn at the knee of the Food Network.” Still, Koenig wants to honor the legacy of Hadassah regional cookbooks. “Every cookbook is kind of a snapshot in time, and I want my cookbook to do that for today,” she says. “I want to be part of this chain while bringing in a newer, broader audience.”

From Naomi Cook Book (1928), Toronto chapter:

Sago Cream Pudding

2 tablespoons sago
1 pint milk
A pinch of salt
2 eggs
½ teaspoon vanilla
¼ cup sugar

1. Wash sago. Scald milk.

2. Add sago and let cook on slow fire until sago is soft and forms a thick mixture.

3. Cream yolks and sugar well, and add slowly to sago. Cook a few minutes longer, add vanilla and remove from stove.

4. Fold sago gradually into stiffly beaten egg whites. Serve cold.

Graham Wafer and Apple Pudding

1 ½ lbs graham wafers
½ peck apples (approximately 5 lbs)
½ pound butter
The juice of 1 lemon
Sugar to taste

1. Roll wafers into fine crumbs. Melt butter and rub into crumbs.

2. Spread half of mixture into baking pan. Boil apples for applesauce, using very little water. Add lemon juice.

3. Spread applesauce on crumb mixture, then cover with balance of crumbs.

4. Bake in moderate oven until brown, about 20 minutes.

From Ess Gezunterhayt (late ‘40s or early ‘50s), Greenwich Connecticut chapter:
Mrs. L Coles’ Norway Spread from Mrs. David Resnick

1 can boneless sardines
1 teaspoon lemon juice
1/3 cup sour cream
2 tablespoons prepared mustard
½ cup mayonnaise or salad dressing
¼ cup chopped celery.

1. Drain sardines and chop fine. Mix with remaining ingredients. Serve with crackers, Melba toast or potato chips.

From Hadassah Gives a Party (1974), Portland, Ore., chapter:
Portland Mist

1 pint bourbon
1 quart black coffee (double strength)
1 pint bulk ice cream or sherbert
1 quart brick vanilla ice cream or sherbet

1. Chill coffee and add bourbon. Mix well.

2. Pour carefully over quart brick ice cream placed in punch bowl.

3. Scoop ice cream pint or sherbet into balls and place around top of bowl.

Serves 30

From The Hadassah Everyday Cookbook (2011):

Leah Koenig singled this out as one of her favorite recipes in the book.

Shakshuka

Serves 2-3

2 tablespoons olive oil
1 small onion, chopped
1 red pepper, seeded and chopped
1 28-ounce can whole, peeled plum tomatoes
5 cloves garlic, diced
2 teaspoons salt
1 teaspoon paprika
1/8 teaspoon cayenne powder
2 heaping teaspoons tomato paste
¼ cup vegetable oil
4-6 large eggs
Red pepper flakes and za’atar for garnish (optional)

1. Heat oil in a 12-inch sauté pan or cast-iron skillet. Add onions and pepper and sauté until softened, about 6 minutes.

2. Pour tomatoes and juice into a bowl and squeeze gently with your hands to break them up. Add crushed tomatoes (with juice) to the pan along with garlic, salt, paprika, cayenne powder, tomato paste and vegetable oil; cover. Bring to a simmer, uncovered and stir occasionally until mixture thickens slightly, 25-30 minutes.

3. Break desired number of eggs directly into pan, over the tomatoes. Cover and continue to cook until eggs are set, 5-6 minutes, carefully basting the eggs once or twice with sauce. Serve hot, sprinkled with red pepper flakes and za’atar, if desired.

My younger daughter’s name is also Max Steuer. (It’s short for Maxine, but we usually call her Max or Maxie.) The older Max Steuer looked unnervingly like my husband—same hooded almond-shaped eyes, heavy brows, strong nose, prominent chin. This was not a familial connection I wanted.

But now I think different. I think Steuer, Harris, and Blanck have been mistreated by history.

How, you may ask, can a feminist obsessed with workers’ rights and immigration history, someone who participates in Triangle memorial events every year and bores her coworkers with endless rambling about the fire, say such a thing? Because while black-and-white depictions of heroes and mustache-twirling villains may make for better storytelling, they hinder our understanding of what really happened on March 25, 1911. And more important, they prevent us from seeing essential parallels to the world we live in now.

Susan Harris, 62, knows this well. She is the granddaughter of Max Blanck. “When I found out about the fire I was probably 15,” she told me. “I found Leon Stein’s book in my parents’ library and saw my grandfather’s name, and thought this couldn’t be my grandfather. But it was.”

The book’s portrayal of her grandfather shook Harris. Though he’d died before she was born, she knew how much money he’d given to charity. She knew from her parents and cousins how loving he’d been. Blanck, in short, didn’t seem like the monster popular history suggested he’d been; researcher Michael Hirsch, Harris soon learned, supported her theory that her grandfather and his fellow owner were scapegoats.

“They were scapegoats of a system that didn’t want to pay attention to the mechanisms of the time,” said Hirsch, a co-producer of the HBO documentary Triangle. “Blaming Harris and Blanck took people’s attention away from corruption in City Hall, Tammany Hall, and the buildings department.” Vilifying Harris and Blanck, Hirsch added, was a way to avoid “killing the golden goose” and changing a system that worked for the powerful.

The Blancks, Hirsch pointed out, lost more family members in the fire than anyone else. “Their relatives worked in every corner of the factory,” he said. “They had greenhorn relatives, wealthy relatives, old patriarchs of the clan working at machines. Max Blanck’s wife, Bertha, lost her own brother. Blanck and Harris brought many relatives to America, saving them from the Kishinev pogrom, giving them jobs.” But no one wanted to humanize the owners. Which means we missed a teachable moment.

“The real story is more fascinating and more timely, especially right now when we’re talking about rolling back all our social safety nets,” Hirsch said. “I don’t think Harris and Blanck are blameless, but it was never proven in the court case that the doors were locked, and we will never know for sure.”

Turning the fire narrative into a simplistic fable means forfeiting the chance to look at the changes the fire wrought and what it didn’t. “What happened 100 years ago this week should be an opportunity to talk about what’s going on today in Wisconsin,” Harris said. Hirsch agreed. “The takeaway should be that we need government to play a role in our lives,” he said. “The reason those people died was because government refused to play a role in regulating anything, in creating any kind of safety net for people. The very day of the fire, newspapers had reported that the high court had struck down New York State’s workman’s comp law, the most sweeping such law in the country. How much has really changed?”

For a long time, Harris struggled with her feelings. She was afraid to reach out to other descendants of Triangle families, worried about being shunned. So, she quietly addressed her family’s legacy in her own way. An artist in Los Angeles, she began working on a project about the fire three years ago. She collected dozens of Edwardian shirtwaists—the same type of garment the factory had once manufactured—and other fabric fragments and began embroidering the names of the victims upon them. Today, the piece is 152 feet long.

Harris collected the fabric on eBay and in antique stores. “In addition to shirtwaists I use handkerchiefs—symbols of sorrow,” she said. “Some are wedding handkerchiefs, because many of the girls were engaged to be married. I use babies’ clothes, because women left their children to go to work and never returned home.”

Eventually, Harris reached out to the families of victims and found that most were welcoming. She began asking them if they wanted to embroider their own relatives’ names on her work. Many took her up on it. “I’d mail them the fabric with a needle and embroidery thread and they’d send it back,” she recalled. All the shirtwaists and handkerchiefs have been strung up on a line so that they resemble Tibetan prayer flags. Starting on March 26, they will hang above the vintage engines in the 1904 firehouse that houses the New York City Fire Museum. The installation runs through April 23.

The fire feels like part of her DNA. “There’s a certain sorrow that’s in your blood, your genes,” she said. “I live with this happy-sad feeling all the time. There’s this wonderful feeling of gratefulness to be alive, but there’s sadness for my grandparents and all the victims’ families. Making the prayer flags has been a healing for me. I want everyone to be healed.”

Just as Susan Harris’ grandfather shouldn’t be remembered as a cartoon bad guy, neither should Max Steuer, said Hirsch. True, he was a virtuoso of the courtroom. I knew that his cross-examination of Kate Alterman, one of the survivors, is still studied in law schools today. Steuer gently had Alterman give her testimony four times, and the jury gradually realized that she was repeating herself almost verbatim. Phrases kept recurring: “The trail of her dress and the ends of her hair began to burn,” “a big smoke came” “a red curtain of fire,” a young man jumping “like a wildcat” at the window. Steuer cast suspicion on the prosecution for coaching the witness. But Hirsch added that Steuer actually may have known the testimony was wrong. “I’ve found a detailed floor plan, and I really don’t know how Kate Alterman could have seen what she claimed she saw,” Hirsch said. “It’s hard to imagine racing from the Greene Street door to the Washington Place door and back again, given how fast the fire spread, how narrow the space between tables was and how the tables were bolted to the floor.”

Furthermore, Hirsch added, Steuer was no enemy of workers. He worked against child labor throughout his life. Famed labor leader Sidney Hillman was a pallbearer at his funeral. And according to a 1932 book, Max Steuer: Magician of the Law by Richard O. Boyer, he didn’t always serve the powerful. “To the 450,000 depositors who lost their savings in the financial debauch that was the Bank of United States failures, he was a white knight fighting for the rights of the poor against the monied interests,” Boyer wrote. This portrait of Steuer is hard to square with the Machiavellian man cross-examining a hapless fire victim.

Lynn Steuer, 73, is Max Steuer’s granddaughter (and a distant cousin of my husband.) He died when she was 3. “I remember we used to go to my grandparents’ townhouse every Sunday for lunch,” she said. “He would pinch my cheek and it would hurt, and my mother would say, ‘You have to put up with it! He’s your grandfather!’ ” And like Susan Harris, Lynn Steuer learned about the fire on her own. “It’s like a word you see in a book and know what it means even if you don’t know how you know,” she said. Again like Harris, she thought she’d be persona non grata at Triangle events. But she decided to attend one and felt welcome. “The only good thing about the fire,” she said, “was the change in labor laws that came out of it.”

Unfortunately, that change doesn’t always feel lasting or meaningful. Think about the horrid conditions—and child workers—in certain kosher slaughtering houses. Think about the myriad safety violations that predated the Sago Mine disaster. Think about the Deepwater Horizon crisis. Michael Hirsch watched it unfold while he was working on the HBO film. “I watched an interview with a foreman on the oil rig who said that before he was allowed to eat or bathe, he was pressured to sign a statement that there was nothing wrong on the rig. He also said that after the explosion he was trying to decide whether to die by burning or by jumping. When I heard that, I was frozen. It was the same choice people had to make 100 years ago. It was Triangle. It was Triangle all over again.”

That’s ultimately why we need to stop reducing a nuanced story to simplistic tropes and two-dimensional villains. Because it means we’re not focused on how to keep Triangle from repeating itself.

***

The victims of the fire at Triangle Shirtwaist Factory came from Manhattan’s Lower East Side, Greenwich Village, and Harlem, Brooklyn, and Hoboken, New Jersey. Click on each dot to view the name, age, and residential address of every victim.
John Schimmel/Remember the Triangle Fire Coalition

While most little girls see the megillah reading as an opportunity to bust out the Disney Princess garb, there are always a handful who get a kick out of being Haman, the way I did. But on Purim this year, which arrives Saturday night, there are likely to be very few, if any, little boys dressed as Esther.

Why? Because when little girls dress “boyishly,” everyone thinks it’s cute. I adored putting baby Josie and baby Maxie in Osh-Kosh engineer overalls and teensy black Converse high tops. If I’d had sons, would I have put them in pink onesies and glittery parachute pants?

Yet many parents do have what Sarah Hoffman, a Jewish writer who blogs pseudonymously, calls “Pink Boys.” (It’s the title of her forthcoming book). Whether a kid is growing up in Berkeleyest Berkeley, Calif., or in Hasidic Williamsburg, Brooklyn, the urge to be fabulous isn’t something entirely within the parents’ control. “Gender identity isn’t something we just impose on kids and expect them to suck it up, like eating vegetables or going to school,” Hoffman writes. “It’s part of who they are, whether that satisfies us as parents or not.” Sometimes, little boys who love dresses grow up to be gay. Sometimes they’re transgender. And sometimes a pretty dress is just a pretty dress. Parents needn’t jump to any assumptions about what a little boy’s love of tulle means, but they should listen to and respect the individual child’s desires.

“Don’t get ahead of yourself,” said Julie Holland, an assistant professor of psychiatry at the NYU School of Medicine. “The important thing is not to induce shame in your kid. It’s essential that kids feel they are OK, that they are loved and lovable.” She offered advice to parents whose sons want to wear dresses to school. “You can say, ‘In our culture, many people think that only girls should like pink, and that’s kind of silly. They think some toys and outfits are ‘boyish’ and some are ‘girlish.’ How do you think people will respond if you wear the dress to school?”

The trick is balancing your child’s safety with his or her self-expression. You have to find this balance without letting your own gender-issue mishegas get in the way and without making your kid feel judged and wrong. If your child’s teacher is supportive, the school is a nurturing place, and your son’s passion for silk charmeuse is implacable, why not let the kid wear a freakin’ dress? The issue, of course, is if the school environment isn’t supportive. “You don’t want to hurt him, and you don’t want the world to hurt him,” said Holland. “Which means the ultimate solution is to change the world, not your kid.”

That means if your kid really wants to wear dresses, you find allies within the school community to protect your child. If the kid is experiencing regular bullying, it may mean finding another school or homeschooling. “The path isn’t easy,” Holland added. “But your job as a parent is to, as much as you can, create a safe space for your kid.”

There has conveniently been a boomlet in children’s books about boys in dresses. I can think of four books published in the last year alone that address this issue. 10,000 Dresses, by Marcus Ewert, gorgeously illustrated by Rex Ray, is the story of a child named Bailey who looks like a boy but knows she is a girl inside. She dreams of wearing brilliant dresses made of crystals, rainbows, flowers, and windows, but her family refuses to acknowledge her true self. Ultimately she does find a supportive friend. Unfortunately, I think this book would baffle most little kids: Its use of pronouns is very confusing for kids who view the world in binary ways—the omniscient narrator assumes that the reader understands that Bailey is a she, despite looking like a he, but most kids won’t make that leap. The pictures are gorgeous, though, and I can see older children who are already familiar with transgender issues really loving the book. (Also fun: the blurb by fashion-designing Jew Isaac Mizrahi: “I love this book! If I had read it growing up, I might have felt better about my dress-wearing habit!”)

Then there’s Be Who You Are by Jennifer Carr, illustrated by Ben Rumback, a picture book based on the author’s own parenting experience raising a transgender child. And My Princess Boy by Cheryl Kilodavis, illustrated by Suzanne DeSimone, the story of a little boy named Dyson who likes to wear a tiara sometimes and jeans sometimes. Kids may be turned off by the illustrations, depicting people without faces (each character has a blank oval where the face should be, perhaps so everyone can project herself into the tale, but I think it just looks creepy). The book, by a mom who had a harder time than Carr in coming to terms with her child’s identity, pleads:

If you see a Princess Boy…
Will you laugh at him?
Will you call him a name?
Will you play with him?
Will you like him for who he is?

The one middle-grade novel in the bunch is The Boy in the Dress by David Walliams, a comedian who I am told is super-famous in England. The sweet, stylish spot illustrations are by Quentin Blake. The main character, 12-year-old Dennis, is a soccer-mad boy who loves to read Vogue and gradually admits to himself that he wants to wear dresses. The most popular, most gorgeous girl in school, on whom Dennis has a crush, befriends him and encourages him. There’s a lot of goofy, broad physical comedy (very British) and an ending that was, for me, too unrealistically rosy. But Josie, my 9-year-old, went crazy for the book, reading it over and over. I realized that for Jo, a child with an acute awareness of injustice, the book was a perfect fairy tale. She loved the ending precisely because it would never happen in the real world. What I saw as weakness she saw as wonderful.

Alternatively, as you consider the issue of dressing up—or cross-dressing-up—this Purim, you could always turn to our sages for advice. Deuteronomy may include a prohibition against a man wearing women’s clothes, but Rashi wrote that this kind of dress is wrong only when it leads to adultery, and Maimonides added that cross-dressing is wrong when it is for the purpose of idol worship. To these wise rabbis, the prohibition is against cross-dressing in order to do harm. If harm’s not the goal, as Rabbi Elliot Kukla and Reuben Zellman point out, quoting the Babylonian Talmud: “v’ein kan toevah”—there is no abomination here.

Will the world become more tolerant of boys in dresses? Holland offered a surprising analogy. “Until recently, peanut allergy wasn’t taken seriously,” she said. “Now every school has a policy, and everyone accommodates it. But parents had to educate people about the special needs of their sensitive kids. I’m not comparing cross-dressing to allergies. I’m just saying with education, change is possible.” And maybe that means one day we’ll see a lot more little boy Esthers.

Fortunately, I did not look to the Torah for advice on raising siblings. Sibling relationships in our tradition are a mess, starting with Cain and Abel (result: dead Abel.) It goes on and on: Isaac and Ishmael, Esau and Jacob, Leah and Rachel, Joseph and his brothers. Good times all around.

But who can blame our ancestors for being such crappy siblings? For generations, no one in their family modeled healthy familial relationships. Science, not just story, backs up the fact that sibling favoritism can have nasty consequences. A 2009 study of moms of adult children, published in the Journal of Marriage and Family, found that perceived favoritism hurts both the “favored” and “unfavored.” It’s obvious why the latter would be irked by “Mom always liked you best!” but the former also showed depressive symptoms, even years later as middle-aged adults. Favorites felt guilt as well as the need to cope with negative, distant, resentful siblings.

Parents do acknowledge that they’re closer to some kids than others. (But is that really favoritism? You tell me.) In the 2009 study, 70 percent of the moms surveyed named one kid they felt closest to, and 73 percent named a kid with whom she had the most arguments and disagreements. Another study, this one from Current Directions in Psychological Science, found that a third to two thirds of American families evidence parental favoritism. Sometimes this is natural—parents inherently give newborns and kids with illness or disabilities more attention. Sometimes it’s surprising: Parents often feel closer to their same-gender children; first-born children get the most privileges and last-born children get the most affection. Jan Brady was right. It’s tough to be stuck in the middle.

However—and this is key—kids seem to feel there’s more parental favoritism than there actually is. In that same study, only 15 percent of children said their moms showed no favoritism at all, but 30 percent of moms said they didn’t have favorites.

Do I love one child best? When my own spawn demand an answer to this question, I reply with the excellent words of writer/therapist Amy Bloom: “Love is not a pie.” Love is not a finite thing to be sectioned up and doled out; it’s infinite. My kids are never satisfied by this answer.

And I mostly don’t believe I have a favorite child. Mostly. But then I think back to a brutally truthful 2006 essay by Ayelet Waldman in the late, lamented Child magazine. Waldman, with her typical coruscating honesty, wrote that she let her youngest child get away with murder because she couldn’t resist her adorability. Her older kids noticed. “What’s killing them is that they are absolutely sure she’s my favorite. And they’re right—she is. Right now.”

Waldman goes on to explain that different kids hold the privileged position of favorite at different times. “You must never favor one child over the other, the rule goes,” she writes. “But the secret, hidden truth is that we often do. Parenting is a passionate enterprise. It’s about love: untempered, unbound love. And anyone who has ever been in love knows that it’s not a judicious, balanced endeavor.”

My truth is that I love my kids differently. I am gobsmacked by Josie’s insights. I love talking about books and social justice with her. As a dork and a nerd, I watch with endless admiration the way she navigates the world socially. But I feel fierce protectiveness toward Maxine. She’s the one who squeezes my heart until it hurts. Her cheerfulness and funniness and resilience just slay me. Does that mean I love Maxie more?

In the recently released book Freud’s Blind Spot, Elisa Albert, a contributor to Tablet Magazine, collects essays about the pleasures and terrors of siblinghood. The book’s title refers to the fact that Freud gave short shrift to sibs. “Some scholars have lately called for a reassessment of [this] vertical model,” Albert writes. “What about the horizontal model, they ask? What about lateral influence?” (The italics are hers.) Indeed, she finds, “Our siblings are central actors in the drama of our lives: they are our earliest and deepest connections, our poles, our friends, our contemporaries, our cohorts, our first loves and resented rivals … we tend to define ourselves in alliance with and/or in opposition to them.” Of the familiar Erev Shabbat blessing, “May you be like Ephraim and Menashe,” Albert writes: “Recently I learned it’s because Ephraim and Menashe are the only two siblings in the Bible who get along.” Oh.

The book is filled with stories of siblings who fight furiously. Sometimes they come to love and understand each other. Sometimes they don’t. Steve Almond writes about how when he was 5, his older brother, Dave, told him their pregnant cat Macacheese (Macacheese!) has just birthed a litter of stillborn kittens because Steve had accidentally dropped her the week before. (Later, knowing that Steve sucks his thumb, Dave secretly rubbed his digits with a raw hot pepper.) Another contributor, Margo Rabb, doesn’t grow close to her sister until after her parents are dead. “We share genes, a history, and the only bits of our parents we have left,” she writes. “And she’s the only person who understands how we can sit beside our parents’ graves on a sunny afternoon, and then go out for sushi and stuff ourselves and still laugh, even now, until we nearly burst.”

Apparently stabbing one’s sibling with a pencil is a thing. T. Cooper spikes one into his brother’s thigh. Alyssa, a 6th-grade character in Caldecott-winning poet Joyce Sidman’s incredible This Is Just to Say: Poems of Apology and Forgiveness, writes to her sister Cassie:

The Black Spot

That black spot on your palm.
It never goes away.
So long ago
I stabbed you with a pencil.
Part of the lead, there,
still inside you.
And inside me, too,
something small and black.
Hidden away.
I don’t know what to call it,
the nugget of darkness,
that made me stab you.
It never goes away.
Both marks, still there.
Small black
reminders.

In a response poem, Cassie says only:

Roses are red
violets are blue,
I’m still really
pissed off at you.

So sisterhood is powerful, in both good and bad ways. I’m not sure what I can do not to play favorites. I try to spend solo time with each of them. I try not to play them off against each other. I keep chanting, “Love is not a pie.”

I can see that the relationship my daughters have is a million times more intense than the one my brother and I had. My brother and I didn’t have much in common. Growing up, we didn’t have much to say to each other. Josie and Maxie, on the other hand, love and hate each other with fierce devotion. They play Legos together for hours. Josie reads to Maxie. Maxie comes home from school with dozens of drawings of Josie. They bring each other goodie bags from parties. And they fight like rabid animals. And they insist I love the other one more.

I can take heart from a recent study showing that people with sisters grow up to be better at coping with setbacks, more highly motivated, more optimistic, and more social than people with only brothers. Researchers theorize that sisters talk a lot (God knows this is true in my house), and open emotional expression is good for one’s mental health. Boys, on the other hand, discourage such verbal sharing.

When it comes to raising our progeny, we parents are bound to screw up sometimes. It’s a given. And it’s scant consolation that we’re bound to do better than our biblical forebears. We just have to make sure our kids understand that after we’re gone, they’ll have each other.

Today, Maxie’s crib is gone. We have bunkbeds. When they arrived, Maxie cried bitterly because Josie got the top bunk. But Josie has never spent a single night in it. After storytime, she climbs down into Maxie’s bed. I often find them intertwined, like puppies, in their sleep.

I used to smile apologetically and hasten to grab Mr. Brown Can Moo, Can You? But then I started wondering what would happen if I waited a moment before reaching for the book. The results of my little experiment were amazing. Sullen-looking teens in baggy jeans, gum-cracking girls with too much lipliner, workbooted men, and young women in hospital scrubs—they’d take the book from Josie’s pudgy little hand and start to read. They’d gain confidence as they went. Often the whole subway car would listen, smiling.

Lest you think I’m one of those mothers who finds her child’s annoying behavior absolutely enchanting, I promise that if the book-recipient showed any hesitation at Josie’s demand, I immediately took the book back and started to read aloud myself. But I was surprised at how much people enjoyed reading to my fierce, focused girl. The act of reading aloud connects the reader and the listener. And New Yorkers, despite our tough reps, seek out and love moments of human connection.

Almost a decade later, Josie still wants to be read to. (Thankfully, she doesn’t hand middle-grade novels to whomever’s sitting next to her on the F train.) I’d assumed she’d be over it by now, and I count among my greatest blessings that she isn’t. Maybe we’ll be like that dad-daughter duo who read aloud for 3,218 nights. Nothing would thrill me more.

These days I have the delicious task of finding bedtime books that appeal to both a 9-year-old and a 6-year-old. For a while, Maxie, my younger daughter, got her own bedtime stories—two picture books of her choosing—but now we’ve consolidated. Chapter books with lots of humor, lots of dialogue, a protagonist with a strong, clear voice, and a story that’s not too scary to chase sleep away work well for us.

As the whole point of reading aloud is sharing the story, we can do so globally on March 9, the second annual World Read Aloud Day, an event created by a literacy educator named Pam Allyn. The author of What to Read When, Allyn now runs a nonprofit called LitWorld. That organization advocates for global literacy, gets publishers to donate books for kids in need, and runs book clubs for girls in the United States, Kenya, Liberia, Ghana, and Iraq and writing groups for children who have experienced trauma. World Read Aloud Day had 40,000 participants in 35 countries last year; this year, the organization is presenting a 24-hour read-aloud marathon in Times Square. (Controversial New York City Schools Chancellor Cathie Black will be among the readers.)

LitWorld connects First World students with Third World students to share ideas about reading and writing. A couple of years ago, seventh graders at Woodlands Community Temple in Westchester County, N.Y., wrote stories for African kids inspired by Hebrew prayers. And a middle-schooler there set up a laptop at her bat mitzvah party on which guests could tell their own stories; her bat mitzvah centerpieces were bundles of crayons, markers, chalk, and other supplies that were donated to schools in Kenya and Liberia.

This isn’t surprising. We Jews are a read-aloud people. At Passover we have an edict to tell the Exodus tale to our children. We’re supposed to make the story so immediate that it should feel as if we, not our ancestors, are fleeing the Egyptians. Good storytelling will do that. And of course, what is a Torah reading if not telling a story every week?

According to Reading Is Fundamenal, the largest children’s literacy nonprofit in America, higher levels of maternal education are correlated with higher percentages of children who are read to, told stories, or sung to every day. Middle-class children own more books, visit the library more often, and attend schools with better-stocked classrooms and libraries than poorer kids. Unshockingly, American Jews tend to fit the non-poor, educated-mom profile.

That’s why when Jews talk about Jewish illiteracy we don’t often mean our community’s inability to read English but rather our cluelessness about Judaism. That’s a much bigger issue for us. And foundations are starting to use Jewish children’s books to combat it. Through kids’ books, Jewish organizations hope to educate parents, associate sweet footie-PJ-clad reading time with Jewish content, and spark a familial interest in Jewish identity. The PJ Library mails 70,000 books to families across North America every month, including works by Jewish kidlit rock stars like Simms Taback, Patricia Polacco, Eric Kimmel, Richard Michelson, Linda Heller, Howard Schwartz, and Yona Zeldis McDonough. The kid gets the thrill of getting a package in the mail every month; the parent gets free Jewish literature. Perhaps a taste will spark an even greater appetite.

So, what are some tips for reading aloud effectively? There’s some great advice in this month’s Parenting magazine: When you read to preschoolers, ask questions about the story (“what do you think will happen next?”) and encourage your child to talk about the pictures. Be agreeable about reading books again and again—repetition is a vital developmental stage. This is why you have to start your kid off with terrific books; you’re going to be hearing them a lot. And have your child pretend to read a beloved, and probably memorized, book to you.

When President Barack Obama read Where the Wild Things Are at the White House Easter Egg Roll—he called the Maurice Sendak classic “one of my favorite books”—he used excellent read-aloud strategies. He drew the kids in by asking if they’d ever seen a wild thing. He did monster voices. He made terrible claws with his fingers. He made the experience interactive by encouraging the kids to stare without blinking, just like Max. And Michelle Obama made sure her husband held the book so that all the kids could see the pictures.

If you can’t get the president to read to your children, the National Education Association suggests having older kids read to younger kids. The older kid feels proud of his or her skills and ability to educate; the younger kid enjoys the attention from a big idol.

And you can never begin reading aloud too soon. My friend KJ Dell’Antonia is the co-author (along with Susan Straub, founder of the literacy program Read to Me) of Reading With Babies, Toddlers and Twos. Not to freak you out, but research shows that the number of different words a baby hears each day is the single most important predictor of school success and social competence.

I recently read and loved The Book Whisperer, a guide to helping kids love books. Written by a sixth-grade language arts teacher, Donalyn Miller, it’s aimed at educators, but it’s super-useful for parents too. Some of her excellent read-aloud points: Let kids choose their own books, at least some of the time. (I give Josie and Maxie choices, but they decide what our bedtime reading will be.) Harness peer pressure; kids take book recommendations from other kids more seriously than they do recommendations from adults. (I know nothing about sci-fi and fantasy, a genre Josie likes, so she gets book suggestions from her friend Nora, and if they’re a bit too complex for her to read independently, I read them to her.) And even 15 minutes of reading a day is better than nothing.

And here are my own suggestions: You can’t go wrong with funny. For younger kids, rhyming books are great; they can guess at each rhyme, so there’s built-in suspense. Don’t restrict yourself to one genre: Try fiction, poetry, books about sports, graphic novels, science books. Respect your kids’ predilections: Josie never liked nonhuman protagonists. Maxine never liked picture books with pretty pastel art; she prefers bolder, cartoonier illustrations.

Some literacy machers say that up to a third of children lose interest in books in around 4th grade. That’s one reason to keep reading aloud.

Read with emotion. Do accents. Take dramatic pauses. Modulate your voice, raising and lowering it as you read. My kids love when I cry at emotional parts of a story. They like to comfort me. They already know I am a big sap.

If you’re trying to find worthwhile and fun Jewish books, go through the last few years of Sydney Taylor Award winners. Never get a book just because it’s Jewish. Jewish books should not be spinach. Get a book because you think your kid will like it.

One of my favorite bloggers, Monica Edinger, a teacher at the Dalton School in Manhattan, once described how she chooses the book she’ll read aloud on the first day of school. Every year she hopes to find “that magical story that will help connect us all and turn us from a bunch of strangers into a tight and unique learning community.”

That’s what reading aloud can do. It forges bonds. It can bring together a group of subway riders, the Jewish people, or a parent and a child.

But guess what? That line was crossed long ago. Target sells Hello Kitty eyeshadow. Barbie offers a slew of branded cosmetics, including the Fab Fashion 32-piece Makeup Set, which comes in a hot-pink case adorned with black spike heels, and the Lighted Vanity Case, a big mirror surrounded by pink hearts and drawers to hold eyeshadow brushes and spackling tools. If a child requires a Bieber-y soundtrack while putting on her face and prefers a Bratzier color palette, there’s the black and purple Totally Me! Deluxe Cosmetic Case with Light-Up Mirror and MP3 Speakers. “Everything you need to get glammed up while listening to your favorite tunes!” the promo copy gushes. “Nail polishes, lip glosses, body glitter, body glitter gels, lipsticks, eyeshadow powders, cream blushers, blush powders—Totally Me! lets you be totally YOU!” (That is, if “you” are a painted whore of Babylon with an iPod.) Even Crayola, a brand associated with preschoolers, sells fingernail decals.

And this is hardly Walmart’s first time at the tween makeup rodeo. geoGirl takes over the shelf space vacated by mary-kateandashley, a cosmetics line branded by the Olsen twins, who are now focused on designing high-end adult fashions. In addition to geoGirl, Walmart sells beauty products by Disney Princesses, Lip Smackers, Lotta Luv, and FAB. Unlike those lines, though, geoGirl is promoted as full of antioxidants, which fight wrinkles. Which is awesome. Because what 9-year-old isn’t troubled by those troublesome fine lines from smoking? Now we moms can put off our daughters’ Botox for another few months.

In these tough economic times, the only age group that’s increased its beauty spending has been tweens. Their average monthly beauty expenditure rose to $9.20 from $8.50, and marketers say tweens now spend $24 million a year on cosmetics. A study conducted in 2009 found that 55 percent of 6- to 9-year-old girls use lipgloss or lipstick, up from 49 percent in 2003.

At this point, I figure half my readers are raging about little girls turned into Lohans lite by spineless parents with bad values, while the other half are rolling their eyes and saying “Cut the Debbie Downer doominess—makeup can be fun.”

And to both sides I say, you’re right. I see nuance and ambiguity here. My daughter Maxine, 6, has Disney Princess lip balm; my daughter Josie, 9, wore purple lipstick and black eyeliner on Halloween. For us, visiting the corner nail salon is a delicious splurge; both girls go with me for occasional mani-pedis. (Or, as Maxie calls them, “meggie-peggies.”) Adornment and sparkle can be fun.

But when we tell girls that all they are is adornment and sparkle, we have a problem. In her new book, Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches From the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture, Peggy Orenstein details the relentlessness with which princess culture is pimped to America’s youngest consumers. The problem is in the onslaught, and in the tacit messages in toys and media that push prettiness (and makeup) above all else. “Imposing any developmental task on children before they are ready can cause irreparable, long-term harm,” Orenstein writes, summarizing the psychologist Stephen Hinshaw.

So, Orenstein argues that putting kids in sparkly blush and Suri Cruise heels is as problematic as putting them in a high-pressure academic kindergarten. “That inappropriately early pressure seems to destroy the interest and joy in learning that would naturally develop a few years later,” Orenstein writes of those super-accelerated early childhood programs. “And girls pushed to be sexy too soon can’t really understand what they’re doing. They do not—and may never—learn to connect their performance to erotic feelings or intimacy. They learn how to act desirable but not how to desire, undermining rather than promoting healthy sexuality.”

Even if we say no to makeup, we can’t escape the gendered messages of the culture we live in. Orenstein was shocked to see a banner depicting a little girl in a tiara and glittery earrings hanging above the door to her daughter’s synagogue preschool. Everywhere she went, she saw the rigidly gendered nature of most children’s toys. And her daughter Daisy, despite being raised in crunchiest Berkeley, Calif., clamored for princess everything. “When I was growing up,” Orenstein reflects, “the last thing you wanted to be called was a ‘princess’: it conjured up images of a spoiled, self-centered brat with a freshly bobbed nose who runs to ‘Daddy’ at the least provocation. The Jewish American Princess was the repository for my community’s self-hatred, its ambivalence over assimilation—it was Jews turning against their girls as a way to turn against themselves.”

But that was then; this is now. I’ve previously mentioned a 2007 American Psychological Association report on the increasing sexualization of girls. Sexualization, said the APA, is viewing a girl as “a thing for others’ sexual use, rather than a person with the capacity for independent action and decision making.” It’s linked to depression, eating disorders, and low self-esteem. But we feminist parents also don’t want our daughters feeling shame about their curves or their burgeoning sexual desires. We don’t want the kind of tznius, or modesty, that views girls’ bodies only as temptations for men.

The drumbeat emphasis on looks, looks, looks reminds me that we’re approaching Purim, when we tell the story of Queen Esther. Parents may try to shift the narrative’s emphasis to Esther’s bravery, but the takeaway for little girls is always that she won a beauty pageant. (A pageant run by Hegai, the king’s eunuch, who surely would have received his own Bravo TV show if cable had existed in the time of Xerxes I.) Esther wouldn’t have even had the opportunity to be brave if she hadn’t been a babe. Little girls get that. And seeing a shul full of tots painted and styled to emulate Esther can be disturbing, a synagogue full of JonBenéts.

We may tell our girls to be strong, faithful, brave, and smart, but the overarching message they get is that beauty trumps all else. There’s a midrash about Pharaoh’s decree that Hebrew boy babies be thrown into the Nile: Men stopped sleeping with their wives so as not to risk procreation, but Rashi says the women melted their jewelry into mirrors so they could beautify themselves into irresistibility, thus insuring the survival of the Jewish people. See how important it is to be ultra-foxy? Without babeitude, we would not exist today.

So, one geoGirl “SWAK lip treatment” cannot crush a little girl’s soul. The problem is that girls marinate in a stew of imagery ordering them to be pretty and sassy. “It would be disingenuous to claim that Disney Princess diapers or Ty Girlz or Hannah Montana or Twilight or the latest Shakira video or a Facebook account are inherently harmful,” Orenstein writes. “Each is, however, a cog in the 24/7, all-pervasive media machine aimed at our daughters—and at us—from womb to tomb; one that, again and again, presents femininity as performance, sexuality as performance, identity as performance, and each of those traits as available for a price. It tells girls that how you look is more important than how you feel. More than that, it tells them that how you look is how you feel, as well as who you are.”

That’s the problem. Not nail polish.

That, I think, is taking it a bit too far. Portman has her lighter side—I get a kick out of Portman’s demented giggle and adored her gangsta rap on Saturday Night Live. But it’s just that kind of goofiness that I wish Portman displayed more often. In many of her movies she seems blank (Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace, anyone?), stilted (The Closer, in which she gave the grimmest, most awkward performance as an exotic dancer since Demi Moore in Striptease), or unreal (Garden State, in which she strenuously embodies the annoying male-fantasy archetype known as the Manic Pixie Dream Girl). The kind of free-range giddiness she showed at the Golden Globes and on SNL is a rarity for her. (Though then again, I’m not sure anyone could deliver the line, “Hold me, like you did by the lake on Naboo!” in a believable way.)

And this is exactly why she’s the perfect spokeswoman for her generation: Her opaque, inauthentic-feeling performances capture the spirit of the Millenials, that group of entitled, high-maintenance, short-attention-spanned, helicopter-parented, well-rounded-but-depthless weenies. The stereotype is borne out by my friends in academia, who talk about the way their students simply want to parrot back the “right” answers and expect straight A’s as their due. A professor friend tells the story of a student who got a B+ on a paper and insisted she deserved an A “because I’m an A student!”

Parents and schools share responsibility for students like these. When we parents fight our kids’ every battle, insist that their self-esteem is paramount and can’t survive honest criticism, and expect everyone else to see them as the flawless delicate flowers we’ve told them they are, we don’t prepare them for the real world. When schools teach kids only to excel at filling in the ovals on standardized tests and spitting out answers without synthesizing or contextualizing them, they don’t teach kids how to reason. Or how to be moral. Or how to cope with difference and nuance.

And you know what? I think the prescription for Natalie Portman’s career longevity and for our grade-obsessed kids is the same: large doses of fun.

A recent piece by George H. Wood, executive director of the Forum for Education and Democracy, co-author of Many Children Left Behind, and a high-school principal, points out the problems with our lack of fun. “I do think we have lost something in our unending quest of lofty standards, more rigor and higher test scores,” he says. “That something is the joyfulness of play, and the creativeness of curiosity. We have separated our children from the very world that sustains them. They will be poorer intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually for it.”

Most of us have kids who are buried under piles of homework, who have seen their recess time curtailed in favor of more literacy- and math-instruction time, and who have come to expect the stress of regular high-stakes standardized tests starting as early as kindergarten. The playtime kids get is often in the form of video games (designed by adults) and sports teams (run by adults). There’s simply no time for unstructured free play.

But play is essential. A review of research by Yale psychologists concludes that make-believe play improves vocabulary, creates strategies for problem-solving, and develops flexible thinking. Another study found that graduates of “play-based” kindergartens did better long-term in reading, math, social and emotional adjustment, creativity, oral expression, and “industry” than graduates of more academic kindergartens. And the American Academy of Pediatrics says that play helps children develop confidence, resiliency, cooperation, and conflict-resolution. Yet we parents worry, when our kids are playing, that they’re “not being productive” or that they’re wasting time that could be spent getting ahead of the Chinese. (No joke, when Josie was in pre-K I attended a school tour where the principal said ominously, “The kind of education we provide is the only way to prevent people overseas from taking all our jobs.”)

There’s plenty of research showing how “executive brain function”—the ability to self-regulate—is improved by play.

“Children who can control their impulse to be the center of the universe, and—relatedly—who can assume the perspective of another person, are better equipped to learn,” say Erika and Nicholas Christakis, she an early-childhood educator and he a professor of medicine and sociology at Harvard. They draw parallels between a preschooler destroying someone else’s block castle and a 20-year-old rudely monopolizing class discussion. Both lack empathy. Starting grade-schoolers off with a play-based curriculum instead of a “skills-based” curriculum, they argue, could help prevent the castle-toppler from becoming the entitled college junior. The skills-based curriculum emphasizes worksheets and equations; the play-based version is more multi-disciplinary and offers storytelling, problem-solving, cooperation. “The child filling out the worksheet is engaged in a more one-dimensional task,” they say, “but the child in the play-based program interacts meaningfully with peers, materials, and ideas.”

I’m reminded of Josie’s “trout curriculum” from first grade in her progressive, diverse public school. The kids worked together to clean the trout tank and measure and record the pH and ammonia levels in the aquarium. They sketched trout, learned the physiology of fry, read fish-centric fiction and non-fiction, went to see a musical about New York’s intricate waterways. Josie dressed as an alevin, a baby trout still attached to its yolk sac, for Halloween. (She wore a silver dress and silver swim cap and taped a big orange balloon to her stomach.) At the end of the year, the kids sang a song about trout (“I Believe I Can Swim,” to the tune of R. Kelly’s “I Believe I Can Fly”) and let the trout go in an upstate stream. (They had a permit.)

This is the antithesis of the “will this be on the test” school of learning, the kind that turns kids into Portman-esque nimrods. Kids learn not only the scientific method (you make guesses and predictions, and sometimes you’re wrong, and that’s OK) but also how to take turns, problem-solve creatively (why did the pH in the tank keep dropping?), share goals, and cope with disappointment. (Sometimes the trout die, no matter how hard you try. Sometimes you get a B+ on a paper.) And it helps kids connect to each other and to the wider world they live in, instead of making them think only about themselves. And they have fun.

Sorry to dump on Ms. Herschlag. I think she’s probably a mensch. And alas, I think women in particular are set up to be grinds: Our culture (and education system) tends to reward them for being chirping back the teacher’s ideas instead of being creative or paradigm-shattering. Women like Portman (or, hey, Hillary Clinton) are expected to work hard without letting the effort show, lest they be deemed too aggressive or ambitious. Boys can be class clowns, loud, disruptive, stoner-y Rogens, but girls have to be cute and “good.”

I hope Portman’s impending marriage (even if it’s to a goy) and baby will help her see the value of unstructured time, play, and joy. I hope it will help her get more in touch with her giggly and gangsta sides. And I hope more kids get the chance to have fun, and fish.

Taback, who is an author as well as an illustrator, has written more than 40 children’s books, won a Caldecott Medal (the highest honor in children’s book illustration), made The New York Times Best Illustrated Children’s Book list twice, received several Notable Book designations from the American Library Association, and won a handful of Sidney Taylor Awards. But even more important, his work is the rare beast that appeals to actual children as much as it does critics. It’s colorful and antic and silly, and it’s studded with little visual treats and hidden surprises. It blends collage, typography, boldness, and delicious teeny details. His fondness for cumulative rhymes (in books like This is the House that Jack Built and There Was An Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly) makes for books beginning readers can read to themselves and giggle at over and over.

So who is this wonder? Born in 1932, Taback grew up in the Coops, the cooperative housing project in the Bronx that housed many immigrant Jewish garment workers. His father was a housepainter and labor organizer; his mother was a seamstress and proud member of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. Taback was named after Harry Simms, a Jewish labor leader murdered in 1932 while helping the mineworkers in Harlan County, Kentucky, unionize. (The other Simms was memorialized in a ballad popularized by fellow labor sympathizer Pete Seeger.)

Taback attended Camp Kinderland and other socialist Jewish camps, where his artistic talents were applauded and where he was encouraged to apply to the New York City’s High School of Music & Art (now known as LaGuardia). From there he went to Cooper Union, served in the Army during the Korean War, and began working as an art director shortly thereafter. In 1974, doing his power-to-the-workers parents proud, Taback began organizing freelance illustrators, helping to form the Illustrators Guild (which later merged with the Graphic Artists Guild) and serving as its first president.

While designers may appreciate Taback for his contributions to artists’ rights, parents appreciate him for making kids love books. His works are sneaky, because they are simultaneously fun and smart, two great things that don’t always go well together.

“Simms’s work is deceptively childlike,” says Taback’s onetime editor Regina Hayes, now the publisher of Viking Children’s Books. “When you begin to really look you appreciate the sophistication of the design, the color sense, the spatial relations—it’s all incredibly clever.”

And, boy, do his books feel Jewish. His 1999 Caldecott-winning Joseph Had A Little Overcoat is adapted from a Yiddish folk song and set in an idealized shtetl. Joseph’s overcoat gets increasingly worn, so Joseph turns it into a jacket, a vest, a scarf and so on, until it becomes nothing. And then he writes a book about it. The moral: You can always make something out of nothing. (A good lesson for tailors, storytellers, and bored children on rainy Sundays.) Kids can peek through cutouts in the pages at the ever-changing, ever-shrinking coat. Hidden in the illustrations are a collaged Tevye poster, photos of different fabrics, a teeny copy of the Yiddish Forward—so much texture you could plotz.

The book feels airy and effortless, but it clearly isn’t. “Yiddish was my first language,” Taback said at the Caldecott dinner in 2000. “When I started school, I forgot all the Yiddish I knew as a child. So when I started to do the artwork for Joseph, I knew I had research to do. I started at the Workmen’s Circle bookstore on East 33rd Street in Manhattan. I found five or six books on Jewish life in Poland and Russia with many wonderful photos and a video of the Jewish section of Vilna in Poland before World War II. I visited the Jewish Museum to see articles of clothing and other artifacts. … I illustrated the ethnic clothing by using collage fragments from various catalogues. So even as I created the artwork for Joseph, I was making something new from something discarded.”

Kibitzers and Fools: Tales My Zayda Told Me is another explicitly Jewish book. It features old Eastern European jokes, folktales, and Chelm stories interspersed with Taback’s trademark googly-eyed citizenry, jam-packed layouts and excellent chickens. (No one draws a chicken like Taback.) It’s dedicated to Sholom Aleichem, I.L. Peretz, and Mendele Mocher S’forim. Though most of Taback’s books are like Levy’s Jewish Rye—you don’t have to be Jewish to love them, but it wouldn’t hurt—this one might not resonate with your average Episcopalian second-grader. The specific rhythms and shruggy, rueful, “nu” tone are a definite “hamavin yavin” situation.

But even the non-Jewish books give off Jewish vibes. A note at the end of This Is The House That Jack Built suggests that the famous rhyme was probably derived from “an ancient Hebrew chant”—Taback is referring to Chad Gadya. And in his voice, the nursery rhyme does indeed feel like a Passover melody. In I Miss You Every Day, based on Woody Guthrie’s “Mail Myself to You” (Guthrie’s estate wouldn’t give Taback permission to futz with the lyrics, so he wrote his own), Taback finds the sweetly minor-key, melancholy tone of a klezmer violin. A little girl misses an unnamed someone and mails herself across the country to this person. Could that mix of joy and mystery and sorrow feel any more Jewish?

Many of Taback’s works feature flaps and die-cut holes, but his forthcoming book, Postcards from Camp, due in June, takes interactivity to a whole new level. An epistolary novel about a homesick boy at sleepaway camp and his supportive dad, the story is told in postcards, foldouts and inserts. “It’s Griffin and Sabine meets ‘Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah’,” says Taback’s current editor, Nancy Paulsen, president and publisher of G.P. Putnam’s Sons. (See the slideshow for an exclusive peek at the forthcoming book.) The book brought tears to my eyes: My dad wrote wonderful letters when I was an emo little drama queen at Camp Yavneh and Camp Ramah, and I miss him every day.

“When a simple story touches emotional strings, that’s where the best children’s picture books come from,” Taback told the Ventura County Star in 2007. (He moved from New York to California a few years ago to be closer to his children and grandchildren.) “The best ones look simple, but they are not simple to do.”

The illustrator Steve Brodner, who contributes to Tablet Magazine, agrees. “[T]his kind of simple is the hard eloquence we all strive for: nothing out of place or distracting,” he recently wrote in an appreciation of Taback posted on his blog. “The story, the design, the color, the humor all arrive together at one time, in one moment. This is art; the delight of seeing a piece by an artist in full charge of all the elements and delivering to you a wonderful world.” (And check out the comments on Bodner’s piece, from Taback’s childhood pals from camp and the Bronx, testifying to his menschlichkeit.)

Taback is quite ill with pancreatic cancer. He told me he didn’t want to be interviewed for this story because he’s concentrating on enjoying his family and finishing up his work. I hope he rallies. I hope every family is as touched and tickled by Postcards from Camp as I am. And I hope Simms Taback has many more books in him.

CORRECTION, March 10: Simms Tabak was born in 1932, not 1935, as this article initially stated. It has been corrected.

Slideshow image credits: Happy meal: James Glover II/vcstar.com. Book images and author photo: Penguin Young Readers Group.

If you weren’t a Medium watcher, let me fill you in. The show’s heroine, Allison (Patricia Arquette) was a psychic in Arizona who worked for the Phoenix District Attorney’s office, helping to solve crimes. She had to juggle her psychic visions, her relationship with her engineer husband, Joe, and the needs of her three quirky daughters.

It’s ironic that a show about the paranormal was so, well, normal. Allison didn’t look like the cookie-cutter starlets populating the TV universe. She wasn’t a size 2. She never wore spike heels to a crime scene. Her house looked like a real home, with unfortunate blue-and-yellow kitchen tiles I’m certain she hoped to replace as soon as they could afford it. Her girls squabbled at the breakfast table, and not in an adorable smart-assed sitcom-sassy way. I loved the show’s depiction of a loving marriage in which the partners fought and made up and had the same arguments over and over. (“Allison! Maybe that was just a regular dream, not a message from beyond the grave!” Oh, Joe.) Sure, the plot holes were so big you could drive an SUV that belonged to a dead woman now sending Allison messages about her murderer through them. But even though I didn’t always love the show, I always loved the show. It was like a beloved, sometimes maddening friend.

Parents don’t get a lot of televised validation of our lives. TV is escapism (and, indeed, Medium was great at deploying creepy music and creepy visuals to deliciously jumpy unreal effect), but TV can also make us feel pretty crappy about not measuring up to its fabulous artificiality. Not Medium. Medium was sisterly. It applauded us for making our marriages work. It knew how hard it can be to get dinner on the table when both parents work. It spotlighted the special-for-being-not-so-special moments real parents share—when we sit down on the porch or on the couch with a beer and a sigh after the kids have gone to bed, happy to slough off the day and reconnect with each other. Joe and Allison loved each other, entertained each other, and teased each other, but sometimes they went to bed without having sex, because they were tired.

They fought about childrearing. In one of my favorite early episodes, Joe was embarrassed that their oddball middle daughter refused to take off her new red bike helmet, sleeping in it for days and insisting on wearing it for her school picture. Allison reminded him that the school photo was a portrait of who the kid was at that moment, and that right now she was a little girl who loved her bike helmet beyond all reason. That’s familiar to a parent, and so were the fights about money, like when Joe wanted to tap into their daughters’ college savings accounts to fund a new business and Allison said no and Joe worried that Allison didn’t believe in him.

Medium was suffused with the dread of not being able to take care of your children—not being able to keep them safe, not being able to send them to an expensive camp, not being able to keep them from dating bad boys, and not being able to prevent them from being murdered in terrifying ways. Real-world fears and fantasy fears were smooshed all together in a great miasma of parental anxiety.

It’s hard to argue that a show about a family named Dubois was at all Jewish. But I’ll try. As the writer Rebecca Eisenberg posited on Facebook, the DuBois family, like Jews everywhere, share a tradition they inherited from the mother’s side of the family, one that is based largely on faith and is often questioned and misunderstood by others in the community. Remember in the first few seasons how Allison hid her talents? Towards the end of the series, her special qualities were well-known, and she exuded pride in them. That is a nice arc of assimilation to acceptance. And of course, the fact that a show about the afterlife never actually professed to know what happens after death felt very Jewish.

Of course, the main reason for Medium’s success is that the notion of being loved and cared for from beyond the grave is powerful. The day I gave birth to Maxine, shortly after my dad died (Maxie is named after him), my ultra-rational, non-woo-woo mom told me a story. As she entered the subway to come meet the baby for the first time, a Latin musician was playing “Moscow Nights” on the guitar. It was one of my dad’s staples when he was in a folk-acoustic combo in college, a song he played every time he picked up the accordion at home when I was little. “Moscow Nights” is not exactly a fixture in the subway music world. Then when Mom arrived at my apartment and started to clean (moms!), she picked up two plastic magnet letters that had fallen off the fridge. The letters were M.I.—Michael Ingall.

Of course neither mom nor I think my dad was throwing magnets on the floor to remind us of his presence. We felt his presence all the time ever since he died. Or maybe that was his absence. It can be hard to tell those things apart. And that, too was part of the appeal of Medium: the show’s constant reminders that there is no love without loss. How can I not think of the Yehuda Amichai poem, “Near the Wall of a House,” which reads: “Love is not the last room: there are others / after it, the whole length of the corridor / that has no end.”

I hope so. And Medium let me believe it—for an hour a week, anyway—literally as well as figuratively.

Benno and the Night of Broken Glass, by Meg Wiviott, is a picture book about Kristallnacht, seen through the eyes of a cat. School Library Journal loved it, naming it one of the best children’s books of 2010. Publisher’s Weekly gave it a starred review. I found it so distasteful I have trouble forming coherent sentences about it.

But I’ll try. The book tells the story of a cat in Berlin in 1938. He watches the city get scarier and scarier. Men in brown shirts begin throwing books into flames; little girls who once walked to school together no longer speak; Benno’s neighborhood fills with fear. “Then came a night like no other,” Wiviott writes. “The air filled with screams and shouts, sounds of shattering and splintering glass, and the bitter smell of smoke. Benno cowered in a doorway.” The synagogue goes up in flames. “They broke into Professor Goldfarb’s apartment and tore his books and papers from their shelves. ‘I must save the books!’ the professor cried, as he was dragged away.” The next morning, non-Jews’ apartments and stores were left untouched, but “smoldering fires stung Benno’s eyes. His paws were cut and sore from the broken glass that littered the streets.” Benno remains in his apartment building with its non-Jewish residents, but “He never saw Professor Goldfarb or Sophie and her family again.”

Who is the audience for this? Yes, the art, by Canadian illustrator Josée Bisaillon, is gorgeous—a mix of collage, drawings, and digital montage, in which pretty folk-arty illustrations give way to jagged shard-like slashes and darkness. But these wonderful and terrible images are in a young child’s picture book, written in simple, declarative sentences. Picture books can be a tough sell to kids over age 8 or so, because no one wants to look like a baby in front of his chapter-book- and graphic-novel-reading peers. And do kids younger than 8 really need to be slammed with this kind of brutality and horror? Surely Benno suffers, because his eyes sting and his paws are cut, but the book’s flat affect betrays no emotion. The characters are undifferentiated—some are dragged away and some aren’t, and we know nothing about them except their names and whether they give Benno snacks. This is, of course, exactly how actual cats see the world—they care only about who feeds them and who provides a warm lap. But it’s an awfully unnerving way to approach the Holocaust. It’s a book without hope. It’s torture porn for little children.

And yet there’s proof that a book for small children about cats during the Holocaust can work. The Cats in Krasinski Square, by Karen Hesse, manages to get the tone and the scariness level just right. In this 2004 book, Hesse—a recipient of a MacArthur genius grant whose 1997 book Out of the Dust was awarded the Newbery Medal—steers clear of the sense of powerlessness and acted-upon-ness that makes Wiviott’s book so soul-crushing.

In The Cats in Krasinski Square, a little girl helps prisoners of the Warsaw Ghetto. She and her sister are Jews masquerading as Poles, living outside the ghetto, working for the Resistance. Unlike Benno (or anyone in Benno’s story), this girl has agency. Her story is told in the first person rather than the third; she’s in control of the narrative. She actively fights against injustice while hiding in plain sight.

I wear my Polish look
I walk my Polish walk
Polish words float from my lips
And I am almost safe,
Almost invisible,
Moving through Krasinski Square
Past the dizzy girls riding the merry-go-round.

The horror is still there—you can’t write a Holocaust story without horror, no matter how young your readers are. Hesse makes it clear, albeit subtly, that the rest of the girl’s family is missing or dead. The little girl befriends the book’s titular cats because their owners have disappeared. But the language of the book is poetic and beautiful, the love between the sisters is evident, and Wendy Watson’s clean, golden-hued, Lois-Lenski-like illustrations invite the reader in rather than pushing her away. Most important, Hesse offers us a protagonist who tries to help others. Readers can identify in a way they can’t with the blank, passive Benno. They can consider how they’d react in such a terrifying, inhuman situation. Would they, too, have the guts to be a helper, someone who stands up to injustice? The book invites identification instead of alienation.

The little girl, because she spends so much time watching the cats slip in and out of cracks in the ghetto walls, knows how to help smuggle food inside. She has a friend who is still behind those walls; her friend needs bread, and she takes great personal risks to bring it to her. And our little heroine comes up with a plan to use her kitty friends to distract the Gestapo’s dogs. Hesse’s book (which is based on a true story), offers a historical afternote that explains that the ghetto ultimately was destroyed and most of its inhabitants died. But even in the note (which most kids and parents won’t read), Hesse takes care to explain that the Jews of Warsaw fought bravely for a long time and that there were some survivors who lived to bear witness.

I wanted my daughters’ first Holocaust book to be Number the Stars, Lois Lowry’s brilliant Newbery-winning chapter book. It, too, is about Resistance members, this time in Denmark in the early 1940s. It, too, is based on a true story. And it, too, shows a little girl standing up to tyranny to save a friend. But Josie found the Holocaust without me through The Night Crossing by Karen Ackerman, a book she discovered in the school library. This turned out to be a not-too-terrifying novel for beginning chapter-book readers about a brave little girl who helps smuggle her family’s Shabbat candlesticks out of Nazi-occupied Austria. A child stands up to bullies, digs deep to be brave, and helps others. Sense a theme among the good books here?

Still, both The Night Crossing and Number the Stars are chapter books, not picture books. I simply don’t see the hurry to introduce anyone who still wears pull-ups at night to Baby’s First Holocaust. Yes, The Cats in Krasinski Square is a fine book, but must children encounter such horrors at such a young age? “In offering such books to children, it is important to remember that an encounter with the Holocaust hastens the end of innocence,” said Claire Rudin, the former librarian for the Holocaust Resource Center and Archives in Queens. Don’t we already complain that our kids grow up too quickly? Do we really need to introduce this darkness so soon? The greatest despair a 6-year-old should feel should be the realization that she’s left a My Little Pony on the subway. As Rudin added, “The selector of books for children to read will make sure that the full horror of knowing the Holocaust is postponed until greater maturity makes possible acceptance of that reality, and then, perhaps, understanding.”

In short, too much, too deep, too fast is no way to teach our kids. Our desire to educate can’t trump their need to believe in a safe, joyful future. Cats shouldn’t be silent bloody-pawed witnesses to horror. They should be cuddly little snugglepusses seeking someone “to kiss their/velvet heads,” in Hesse’s words. Children can provide those kitty kisses. They may not have much power, but this, this they can do. And being able to kiss, to help others in small ways—that’s the path into Holocaust education. As the greatest Holocaust writer for children of all, Anne Frank, wrote, “I simply can’t build my hopes on a foundation of confusion, misery, and death.”

It’s impossible to overstate what a touchstone Family remains for book-loving American women of all ages, Jewish and not. It is on School Library Journal’s canonical list of 100 best children’s novels of all time, and the Association of Jewish Libraries has named its annual children’s book awards after Taylor. The books are deeply, powerfully loved.

There is another girl-centric ur-text about what it means to be an American: Little House on the Prairie, Laura Ingalls Wilder’s series about growing up in the Midwest in the late 19th century. In some ways Family and Little House are similar, but in other, important ways, not so much.

Both series excel at vivid descriptions of fashion and food. What could be more important to a young girl? The Little House books offer luscious and detailed accounts of calico patterns and corncob dolls; Family gives us ecru lace dresses and buttonhooks. Little House offers a roasted pig’s tail on a stick and snow candy made with maple syrup; Family gave us chocolate babies, pickles, and broken crackers from a giant barrel. I reveled in the description of the warm chickpeas Sarah bought from a street vendor:

First he took a small square of white paper from a little compartment on one side of the oven. He twirled the paper about his fingers to form the shape of a cone and then skillfully twisted the pointed end so that the container would not fall apart. He lifted the wagon cover on one side, revealing a large white enamel pot. The steam from the pot blew its hot breath in the little girls’ faces so they stepped back a bit while the peas were ladled out with a big soup spoon. The wagon cover was dropped back into place and the paper cup handled over to Sarah. The peas were spicy with pepper and salt, and how good they were!

Oh, the immediate sense of place, of things, of taste! As a little girl, I wanted those chickpeas in a cone so desperately that I forgot I hated chickpeas. Such was the descriptive power of Taylor’s writing. I think one reason male critics haven’t sufficiently appreciated AOKF is that they’re writ so small. There’s as much observing as doing. Food, fashion, and bickering—so much emphasis on girl things, girl concerns.

The same themes were evident in the Little House series, but, frankly, I always preferred Family. Sure, Taylor’s books are super Jewish while the Little House books are as goyish as mayonnaise. But it’s more than that. I’d argue that the five sisters are more vivid characters than Wilder’s Laura, Mary, and Carrie, and that the Family books more successfully strike the magical balance of being suspenseful without being too scary.

K’tonton, a book for a younger audience than Family, also manages that singular feat of being just exciting enough. But K’tonton never achieved a non-Jewish audience; Family, on the other hand, is as beloved by non-Jews as it is by Jews. It was the first crossover hit. I’d argue that in the same way the series is just scary enough, it’s also just exotic enough. A commenter responding to Lizzie Skurnick’s hilarious online appreciation of the series on Jezebel.com, titled “All-of-a-Kind Family: Where I Would Put Something Yiddish If I Thought You Goyishe Farshtunkiners Would Farshteyn,” typifies the non-Jewish response to Family: “I don’t think I knew any Jewish people when I was little, so this book meant so much because I discovered a culture that was so different from mine (little black girl living in Kensington, surrounded by my West Indian family) but was still so familiar.”

It’s true; girls of all backgrounds are fascinated by the world Family depicts. We viscerally feel the crowded busy streets, the multiethnic peddlers, and the poverty, but then we get to retreat to the cozy, loving confines of Mama and Papa’s tenement apartment. The outside world can be frightening—as it is for all children, developmentally speaking, no matter how or where they grow up—but inside is a safe space, marked by ritual objects (a fiddle in Little House, the Sabbath candlesticks in Family, in both books beautiful little objets proving a mother’s classiness) that make a house—or a log cabin, or a walkup—a home. What little girl doesn’t respond to that sense of coziness?

Among Jews specifically, though, I think Family has only gained resonance as we’ve gotten more acculturated. “While the books are about being Jewish, they are also about becoming American,” writes Taylor’s biographer June Cummins, associate professor of English at San Diego State University, in a 2003 article, “Becoming All-of-a-Kind American: Sydney Taylor and Strategies of Assimilation,” published in The Lion and the Unicorn, an academic journal dedicated to children’s literature. “As with any other immigrant group, the relationship between two identities, one associated with another country or culture and the other with America, produces a tension not easily, if ever, resolved.”

So many of us struggle with how Jewish to be. I feel it acutely, living as I do in Taylor’s old neighborhood. My girls walk to the library before Shabbat, just as Taylor’s girls do. We spend a lot of time at the Henry Street Settlement, only instead of meeting a nurse who helps poor Guido, we see Nutcracker in the Lower, a hip-hop and flamenco-inflected version of Tchaikovsky’s ballet. I live in a constant state of balance, wanting my public-school-educated children to feel joyfully Jewish but also part of the wider culture.

Taylor would have understood. By the time she wrote the books, Cummins tells me, Taylor no longer kept kosher, observed Shabbat, or celebrated most of the Jewish holidays she wrote about. Neither did the vast majority of American Jews. Yet Taylor wanted her daughter, and other children, to feel connected to their collective American past.

The tension between Jewishness and Americanness that makes the books feel so rich was a product of the intense back-and-forth relationship between Taylor and her editor, Esther Meeks, who consistently pressured Taylor to make the books less Jewish. Cummins quotes a December 28, 1950 letter to Taylor from Meeks: “I do think it important, too, particularly today, that this family show some signs of being American as well as Jewish.” Cummins posits that the “particularly today” refers to the arrest and trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, which happened as the book was being written.

Perhaps because of Taylor’s awareness of Jews’ precarious position in American society, her books address otherness with the kind of care and nuance the Little House books lack. It can be hard to revisit the Little House books as an adult. Much has been written about the anti-Indian racism and sense of white entitlement these books depict. The AOKF books, on the other hand, portray an America in which many people of different backgrounds have to learn to get along and help each other. Where Ma Ingalls detests and scorns the Indians, AOKF’s Mama spares some of the family’s meager funds to help non-Jews. The family constantly praises the efforts of settlement house workers to help everyone. “There are exceptional people in this world whose hearts are big,” Mama tells Ella. “They really care about what happens to others. It’s people like that who started the settlement house.” Yes, the books contain ethnic stereotypes (the peddlers of many nations who schmooze and rest in Papa’s junk shop are about as nuanced as the Racing Sausages entertaining the crowds at Milwaukee Brewers games), but ultimately they’re embracing of difference and hopeful about the notion of diverse urban community.

But there’s the political and there’s the personal. While I loved the fashion and food and Jewishness and historicity and rich detail of the AOKF books, what made them indelible to me was something else. These five girls—sharing a bedroom, whispering late into the night, getting into scrapes and making up—felt like the sisters I never had and wished I did. Sure, the books were exciting, and sure, it’s wonderful to share the stories I loved with my own daughters, who love them just as much as I do. But ultimately, what I love about these books is that they’re about sisterhood. And that’s powerful.

Some fabulous books, to be sure … but as ever, certain literary settings and themes do emerge repeatedly. As Laurel Snyder (a Sydney Taylor Notable Book author!) observed in Tablet Magazine, it can be challenging to get non-didactic, newfangled Jewish books published. (Her much-praised Baxter, the Pig who Wanted to be Kosher was rejected by a Jewish publisher, who didn’t want Baxter to be … a pig.) Snyder wrote that while there are certainly wonderful Jewish children’s books (and while I agree—this year offered a bumper crop; Hereville in particular is about as original a graphic novel as I’ve ever seen), most feature “edutainment that relies on old models. Illustrations that could have been painted for a ketubah. Stories set in shtetls.” She added: “We need more kinds of books for our kids, books that are fresh and funny, that speak our kids’ language, whatever that is, or becomes.” Amen, Laurel. But until we get books that don’t use the same tried and true tropes over and over again, clearly it’s time for a Jewish children’s book drinking game!

Every time you see one of the following, imbibe appropriately. Depending on your level of tolerance (for alcohol or for Jewish children’s books), you may want to limit yourself to one or two volumes per session. Or half of one.

Picture-book pastel bubbe with little round glasses? Do a shot of schnapps.

Learning to live/love again after war/terrorism? Bottoms up.

Old people are awesome? L’chaim.

Arachnid? Do a shot of Sammy (Hagar)’s Cabo Wabo.

Poultry? Do a shot of Wild Turkey.

Holocaust? EXEMPTION. DO NOT DRINK. If you had to drink every time one of these books mentioned the Holocaust, you would be too smashed to read within five minutes.

Hashem rendered as pastel blue gouache sky with puffy clouds? Amen! Do a shot!

Shtetl? Ya ha deedle deedle bubba bubba deedle deedle DRINK!

African-Americans and Jews: Brothers of another color? Alize-Manischevitz cocktail!

2011 Sydney Taylor Book Awards Announced by the Association of Jewish Libraries [The Book of Life]
Related: Where the Wild Things Aren’t [Tablet Magazine]
Children of the Book Part I [Tablet Magazine]
Children of the Book Part II [Tablet Magazine]

These events are unrelated, yet they have much in common. Thinking about the power of words—and the way the same word can feel embracing or abusive, depending on who’s saying it—made me think about when and how to teach kids about the nuances of terms that may or may not be epithets.

Here’s what I mean: gay, queer, nigga, yid, heeb. All can be used as slurs, but they can also be used as badges of in-group identification.

Josie is 9, and she attends a diverse public school in a diverse neighborhood. She’s heard the n-word used as a term of affection and identity between kids of color. She doesn’t listen to much hip-hop (at home we tend to favor show tunes, old-school punk rock, and Parliament-Funkadelic, thus covering most of the 100 Best Jewish Songs of All Time), but, like most urban kids, she’s certainly going to hear more and more of it as she gets older. And that means I’m going to have to teach her and her little sister that however much you hear the n-word, you don’t get to say it.

And yet I don’t think we should be censoring Mark Twain (or hip-hop artists, or Frederick Douglass, or Ishmael Reed). We should talk to our older kids about historical context, about why the word can be shocking and upsetting. Huck Finn has a specific setting; it’s right and proper to read the book in the frame of reference of the 19th-century South. To change the words is to throw up our hands and refuse to wrestle with our problematic historical past. We abdicate a teachable moment.

Words are complicated. I’ve talked to Josie about the fact that we don’t say “that’s so gay.” (There’s an excellent current public service campaign—my favorite ad is with comedian Wanda Sykes—with the same message.) But it will be a long while before my kids and I have the conversation I had a few years ago with my brother and his husband about the phenomenon of young gay people saying, with edgy irony, “That’s so gay.” When you get to be confident enough about your place in the world, do you get to reclaim that kind of use of language? (My brother thinks maybe. My brother-in-law thinks no.) Is using “gay” in the old-school pejorative way the next evolutionary step after reclaiming “queer”? (That reclamation took a bad word and made it a good word, but the gays who say, “That’s so gay” are using “gay” as a bad word! It makes your head spin.)

And then there’s the problem of Jewish words that swing both ways, like Yid and Hebe. In the Ashkenazi Orthodox world, of course, Yid and Yidden mean simply Jews and Jewish people; the words have a homey, positive gloss. (“Yid equals man plus mitzves,” or good deeds, writes Michael Wex in Born to Kvetch.) But reading back through American Jewish history and literature, you’ll see “yid” used repeatedly by non-Jews as a slur. “Hebe” used to be a verbal slap, too, but now, reborn as “Heeb,” it’s a hipster magazine, a fist-bump among the cool kids of the tribe. Jon Stewart, who I credit with popularizing one of my fave could-go-either-way descriptors, “Jewy,” was there early with “Hebe,” too—in 2000, long before Heeb magazine was pondering calling Joe Lieberman a dickhead (though, of course, that was before Joe Lieberman was a dickhead), Stewart titled a segment about Hillary Clinton’s alleged anti-Semitism “Hebe Said, She Said.”

“Language meaning changes,” says Sarah Bunin Benor, associate professor of contemporary Jewish studies at Hebrew Union College. “Pejoration, in which the meaning of a word gets more negative, and amelioration, in which a word’s meaning becomes more favorable, happen constantly. In Mexico City, there’s a Syrian Jewish community known as shajatos, which comes from the Arabic word for slipper and is a derogatory term; the term is now being reclaimed by young Syrian Jews. There are Shajato Pride Facebook groups.”

Even “Jew” is a loaded word. Sure, there’s the verb—to jew someone down—but the noun, too, is laden with years of history and bias, from Shakespeare to Dickens to, oh, practically everybody. “Chaucer’s Prioress’s Tale says that Satan has his wasps’ nest in the hearts of Jews,” Michael Wex told me in an interview. “There’s ‘The Ballad of Little Sir Hugh’ and sundry Latin and English accounts of the supposed ritual murder of Hugh of Lincoln. And let’s not forget The Merchant of Venice and The Jew of Malta. In the latter of case, trust me, ‘Jew’ did not mean ‘fellow citizen of the Mosaic persuasion.’ ”

Historically, Wex says, “ ‘I went to the Jew,’ would have been understood as ‘I went to the pawnbroker/moneylender.’ Likewise, the idea of the ‘Jew store,’ generally a low-priced dry goods or secondhand store, was widespread for a very long time—I can recall it from the sixties.” The word “Jew” connoted “totally unlike us.” Even today, many of us know non-Jews who go out of their way not to say the word Jew; they carefully say “Jewish person.”

“People who avoid the word Jew,” Benor says, “think of it as a negative word because they know it was used in an ugly way in the past.”

Which brings me back to my own little yidden. How do I teach them about the minefield that is the flexibility of language, with all its layers of history and sediment and love and hate?

“It’s all about context,” says Kiki Schaffer, director of the Parenting, Family, and Early Childhood Center at the 14th Street Y in New York City. “It’s not that an individual word has some magic; it’s that we have to consider how that word is going to land. You can explain to kids that words can land with affection in one context and as a putdown in another context. They can say ‘I’m like you’ or ‘I have more power than you.’ ”

Shaffer says that educating kids on the nuances of language can begin as early as age 3 or 4, when theory of mind sets in. That’s when children start to understand that other people have thoughts, feelings, and desires, and those thoughts, feelings, and desires aren’t always in line with theirs. You can explain multiple perspectives to a 4-year-old—calling people a stupidhead can hurt their feelings—and add more complexity as kids get older.

“You can tell a 9-year-old, ‘You have to be scrupulously careful with language,’ ” Shaffer says. “You could tell a Jewish joke because you’re in the in-group; the joke’s about yourself and your people. But if you joke about a group you’re not part of, even if your intentions are good, you could wind up being hurtful. There are trails of memory involved that you don’t share and don’t necessarily understand.”

Parents of kids in Jewish day schools should be particularly clueful about talking about race. Research shows that insisting “children don’t see color” and not discussing difference with them can actually reinforce racism.

Words are complicated. Should we really expect explaining them to kids to be easy? Choosing to say nothing, though, is no answer at all.

You heard me. Rest assured I do have standards in boobtube-itude. I will not, for example, let my kids watch live-action Disney TV. But I enthusiastically encourage them to watch Top Chef and Project Runway, shows that contain a host of moral lessons.

This season, for example, we’re watching Top Chef All-Stars, in which promising but eliminated contestants from past seasons get another shot. The chefs’ very first elimination challenge involved having to once again cook the dish that got them booted during their first appearances. One woman made the exact same dish and defiantly insisted there was nothing wrong with it. But other chefs tweaked and recalibrated, learning from their mistakes. They weren’t combative with the judges but rather accepted what they’d done wrong the first time and showed that they could do better. Isn’t that how we want our kids to learn from criticism?

My favorite character so far this season is Carla Hall. The kids love her, too. She’s a great role model—she’s funny (she calls “hootie-hoo,” like an owl when she loses her husband in a grocery store), self-aware (she ruefully called her undercooked quinoa “un-duntay” instead of “al dente”), and sane in times of crisis. In the last episode, she accidentally cut off half her fingernail in a chopping-knife mishap, but unlike a certain other drama-queeny contestant who ran to the hospital with a lesser injury, she told the medic to bandage her up, then put on a rubber glove and kept cooking. In her first appearance on the show, she kept professing the importance of cooking “with love,” blending classic French technique and culinary education with soulful, joyful unpretentiousness. At first I was suspicious—irksome hippie!—but it turned out she had all the good aspects of hippie-dom without the annoying self-righteousness. When other chefs derided her desire to make an African ground-nut soup for a challenge at the U.S. Open (saying it wasn’t “elevated” enough for a fine-dining experience), Hall politely stuck to her guns, and went on to win. Again: a great lesson for kids.

The last season of the show, as Tablet Magazine’s Marc Tracy noted, was not good for the Jews. But it was very good for Jewish parenting: As we watched Jewish contestants steal, lie, and use cooking sherry in a lunch meant for children, we had many lessons to offer our children on how not to behave.

Then there’s Top Chef Just Desserts, in which a humble, heroic baker held his own, challenge after challenge, against schmancy pastry chefs. Not only did The Baker approach cooking challenges he’d never faced before, surrounded by people with far more pastry experience, he kept making simple, homey, comforting desserts—some the judges loved, some they didn’t. The Baker’s epic journey really resonated with Josie, my 8-year-old, who tends to be afraid to attempt anything she can’t be great at right away; he taught her it’s OK not to win. And there was Morgan, the guy with tons of technique but a sour, domineering attitude. He spewed homophobic insults at another contestant and treated a far more established pastry chef, Claudia Fleming, with sexist condescension. Sadly, he taught my daughters the disparaging use of the word “fairy.” (When you’re 5, fairies tend to be viewed as awesome.) Moral lessons galore!

I’d hoped that Top Chef would help turn my kids into less picky eaters. It didn’t. Still, viewing these shows as a family has been a great way for me to convey my values, and the values of our people. Family therapists often say that talking shoulder-to-shoulder, as opposed to face-to-face, allows conversation to flower in a low-pressure way. What we talk about when we talk about cooking isn’t really about cooking. It’s about treating others well, being able to recover after a setback, holding yourself to a high but not paralyzingly impossible standard.

Do I think every reality series offers such lessons? Of course not. Many are exploitative, stupid, venal. My kids will not soon be watching any Kate Plus 8, Bachelorette, or Real Housewives (sorry, Alana). But Project Runway? Bring it on. We’ve watched every season, ordered in crazed binges from Netflix. We love the show’s most creative, out-there challenges: Design an ensemble for $50 using only things you can buy in a grocery store! Make an outfit using parts of a car! Whip up a functional costume for a female wrestler! Create a garment inspired by a work in the Metropolitan Museum of Art!

There’s opportunity for art education there, of course, as well as the chance to admire creativity and resourcefulness in action. But the interpersonal dramas create teachable moments, too. One contestant was kicked off for having pattern books in his room, which sparked an animated conversation: Was it right for another contestant to tell the producers about the books hidden under the bed? Is that being a tattletale? Should the contestant have been kicked off if, as he claimed, he didn’t actually know the rules?

We loved to loathe Season 5’s villain, the petulant, uptalking Kenley Collins, who was later arrested for throwing a cat at her boyfriend’s face. She was disrespectful to the show’s beloved educator/mentor, Tim Gunn; she laughed openly at other contestants on the runway; she refused to take any criticism or advice from fashion designers or editors; she had a persecution complex as big as Bryant Park. For a while, the catchphrase in our house was “I wasn’t going for elegance, Heidi!,” Kenley’s snotty retort to judge Heidi Klum. From then on, whenever Josie or Maxie kvetched Kenleyishly, the rest of us would snap, “I wasn’t going for elegance, Heidi!” (Josie turned the saying into a welcome sign on our door. It meant take responsibility and don’t whine.)

Reality shows can depict the choices we all face: whether to be collaborative and generous or whether to hide ingredients under the table so no one else can use them. They can encourage us to stand up to bullying and show us the distastefulness of being a mean girl. Reality shows prove that talent comes in all ages, races, religions, body types, and economic backgrounds, and that loving your work is more important than being irresistible to the opposite sex. These are emphatically not lessons one learns from the Disney Channel.

Of course, reality TV isn’t all blessings. We recently passed a newspaper box containing our community paper, a picture of Bill Clinton on the front cover. Maxine ran to the box, yelling, “Tim! Tim Gunn!” Oops. So, I’ll teach morality first, politics later. Reality TV is often more moral than politics anyway.

And yet the secular New Year calls to us. It’s a marker of time passing. Even once we’ve had our youthful spark beaten out of us by childrearing, we’re drawn to the idea of wearing something sparkly, going somewhere festive, and drinking something alcoholic. We want to toast the future, the unknown. We want to make resolutions.

I asked Tablet Magazine’s readers and Facebook friends to share their vows for 2011.

One reader calling herself “Half a Jew” replied: “Use my time wisely, keep focused on my end goals, play with my cat more, and most important, keep remembering to tell my best peeps I love them.” Amen to that. Especially the playing with the cat part.

Another, named Jennifer, said: “The best new year’s resolution I ever made was to never turn down anything in the new year. Wanna go to a hockey game? Yes. Wanna join me for lunch? Yes. Wanna go on tour with me up the West Coast? Yes. That was the year that I did more, saw more. and experienced more fun than I had ever imagined … and all cause I said ‘Yes’ instead of ‘No.’ ” Love it.

My own parenting resolutions for 2011 are similar. “Try to say yes” is a great philosophy for life. (Stephen Colbert thinks so, too!) That doesn’t mean indulging the kids their every whim; it means aiming for “yes” and, if “yes” isn’t possible, figuring out a more affirmative “no.” I hate playing with Playmobil and Lego, but it wouldn’t kill me to do so more than I do. And if the sight of those little farshtunkiner plastic things makes my heart sink too much, I could offer a different “yes”—Blokus, Quirkle, Perfection, story-writing, tangrams or my girls’ new favorite game, “fake newscast.” It’s an old parenting trick, but one I could use more often: When the kids ask for a cookie, I don’t have to bark “No, it’s almost dinnertime.” I could say, “Yes—after dinner.” There’s a difference, and it’s not just semantic.

But back to reader resolutions. Writing on Facebook, one responded: “Same resolution I seem to make every other day—try to be more patient with my kids and enjoy the time I get with them.” True that, too. But like the traditional New Year’s resolutions about losing weight, going to the gym, and enrolling in an adult-ed class, this one is easier said than done.

For whatever it’s worth, here are my other resolutions:

I want to teach Josie to edit video, not only for “fake newscast” but also to encourage her finally to make her All-of-a-Kind Family movie.

I want to be better at scheduling flute practice; be a more attuned and encouraging listener; find more “performance” outlets (even if that just means making Bubbe to sit on the couch and kvell).

I want to be more religious about date night (as much as we love the spawn, being away from them more would be good for my husband and me).

I want to watch Matilda, Singin’ in the Rain, and Freaky Friday as a family.

I want to expand my children’s food horizons, even if it kills me (and them). Recipes welcome, people!

I want to keep better track of the comedy—you’d think as a writer I’d have a record of the kids’ best lines, but no.

And this summer, I swear, I will open a lemonade stand.

What about you?

Next slow day, Tablet’s readers can name our fish.

Earlier: Name the Cat

Every show on children’s television seemed to feature chirpy efforts to rescue Santa or induce some animated sourpuss to feel the spirit of Christmas. Before long Maxine was pouting, “Where is Hanukkah? Why is there no Hanukkah on these shows?”

“Because we live in a country that is mostly Christian,” I told her. “Hanukkah isn’t a major holiday for us, anyway—Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Passover, Shavuot, Sukkot—those are a way bigger deal.” I started to explain that Hanukkah has turned into a whole megillah in the United States because of its proximity to Christmas, but Maxie just wanted to watch Miss Spider’s Sunny Patch Friends.

Just as well. It’s not as if my answer was very satisfying.

That night, Maxie had some chicken soup, then she and her older sister Josie and I watched Glee. (I told you not to judge.) Maxie gazed wide-eyed as Britney the dumb cheerleader sat on Santa’s lap and told him that for Christmas, she wanted her wheelchair-using boyfriend Artie to walk. She yelled at the screen, “You can do it, Santa!” Josie and I gulped and looked at each other.

We sat Maxie down and explained that Santa was not real. But the kid insisted. “If you just believe in him,” she said, “he can help you.” I told her that Santa was an idea, a jolly symbol of kindness and harmony for our friends who are Christians, but not a real or powerful figure. She seemed unconvinced, and I went on thinking about the very different ways Jewish parents can address life during Christmastime:

Attitude No.1: The Blackout

Dora and Miss Spider are not invited into the home. Shalom Sesame is on an endless loop. There is no need for Hanukkah to compete with Christmas, because Christmas is not a factor. This attitude is hard to sustain halfway; it generally works better to commit year-round. Kids know when you’re uncomfortable, so suddenly insisting on pop-culture withdrawal the day after Thanksgiving is likely to bring up some thorny questions. In many ways it’s easier to pull the full Borough Park—keep the goyish world at a general remove year-round rather than trying to disengage from secular culture only in December.

Attitude No. 2: The Buy-In

Let’s get a Christmas tree! Christmas is really more about peace on earth and goodwill toward men than about religion! And the Christmas tree is really just a Hanukkah bush! And the kids look so cute on Santa’s lap! And even though he converted/even though she’s an atheist, Christmas is a lovely cultural tradition from my spouse’s childhood, and I don’t really feel right taking it away! It’s not like you can lock the real world out, you know?

Attitude No. 3: The Competitive Condescension

It’s way better to be Jewish because you get eight days of presents instead of one! Your friends are secretly really jealous! Jesus was a Jew! Don’t tell your classmates that Santa isn’t real because it will upset them, but you and I know he’s just a silly myth! (The same, of course, isn’t true of the tooth fairy. She’s legit.)

Attitude No. 4: The Dance of Ambivalence

Sure, we love to go look at the lights in the Dyker Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn and gape at Clopper the Donkey in the enormous Christmas display at the La Salette Shrine in Attleboro, Massachusetts. We’ll even help our friends trim their tree. But over and over we stress that it’s not our holiday. It’s normal to feel a little left out at Christmastime, but pretending it’s a secular holiday or puffing Hanukkah up to Christmas dimensions isn’t a solution. In fact, this is a good opportunity to talk about the commercialization of our culture. You know, Christmas isn’t a celebration of candy canes and thermonuclear reindeer and velvet bows and nebulous warm feelings. It’s the commemoration of the birth of a god. That’s a pretty big deal, and something that too many people forget. Some Christians are upset that Christmas has become this celebration of buying stuff and having parties rather than a serious opportunity to think about their faith, and—hey, wake up; I’m not done moralizing.

Becoming a parent is the impetus for a lot of us to examine some tangled and heretofore left-alone feelings about being a minority (albeit a minority that often doesn’t feel like a minority and often isn’t considered a minority) in a majority culture. Whether we marry Jews or non-Jews, many of us really don’t think through exactly how we’re going to do Judaism and secularism in the great big world. But when you have a kid, you have to make the call. Not deciding isn’t a decision.

As my (non-Jewish) friend Joe pointed out, this holiday is a fascinating opportunity to eat Chinese food and ponder a culture in which Bob Dylan, Barbra Streisand, and Barry Manilow can have top-selling Christmas albums and in which the biggest musical Christmas hits of all time were written by Jews. It’s the perfect chance to think about our strange middle ground as consummate insiders and consummate outsiders. Sure, government offices are closed on Christmas, but Hollywood’s biggest movies are all open, Hollywood being yet another thing our people run.

And you remember how that episode of Glee ended, right? Artie did walk, with the help of a robotic exoskeleton designed by Israeli scientists.

I’m working on a column about New Year’s resolutions and would love your input. Do you resolve anything? Why or why not? If you do have a resolution (or have ever had one), what prompted it? Was there a single moment of genesis? Please share your resolutions; please make them original, achievable and meaningful. They needn’t be Jewish, but if they are, that’s icing on the Clark. (Dick Clark, get it? That was a long way to go for a lame New Year’s joke. Sorry.) Post here or email me at marjorie@tabletmag.com.

Related: Recycling Time

Tefillin, of course, are traditionally for men. So these, by Israeli artist Ayana Friedman, could drive your average traditionalist to strangle himself with his own straps, which Friedman has no interest in using anyway because they are made of “dead animal’s skin.”

Not every piece in A Stitch in Jewish Time: Provocative Textiles is quite so provocative. The title is a bit deceptive, as some of the show consists of purely beautiful ritual objects made of fabric and designed by women. But most pieces are thought-provoking, sometimes funny, sometimes very moving.

Historically, textiles haven’t gotten a lot of respect. Sure, they covered the body, decorated the walls, kept folks warm in bed, added a little zhoozh to the floors. But anything having to do with thread or fabric, no matter how intricate, festive, or visually pleasing, was women’s work. Craft. Not until a 1971 Whitney Museum show, called “Abstract Design in American Quilts,” was this traditionally female textile form viewed as art. When quilts were hung on plain white walls, suddenly people saw connections to abstract expressionism, cubism, color-field painting, op-art. As the civil rights and feminist movements gained ground, the textile work of once-anonymous black and poor women was deemed valid.

Some of the women in the Hebrew Union College show are very famous—art-world rock stars Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro, members of the pioneering feminist art program at CalArts, are both represented. But it’s wonderful to see works by lesser-known artists, too.

Rochelle Rubinstein, Oy Girl, 2006.
Courtesy Rochelle Rubinstein

I was particularly drawn to the quilts. My college thesis was on quilting as a metaphor for women’s writing. Bear with me: Eudora Welty used to write snippets of narrative and character description on little pieces of paper, then move them around and pin them together. Her work reappropriates little bits of folktale, fairy tale, Greek myth, and Southern legend, clips them out of context the way a quilter salvages a bit of fabric from a frayed old garment, then creates something entirely new out of the pieces. Other women writers have talked about how they can only write in snippets, piecing things together when their children are napping. Of course, not all women’s writing is about asserting mastery over source material or stitching old things together. But in quilting, for me, the evocative sense of reclaiming a disrespected old feminine art form is always there.

That’s why I loved Esther Kessler Yarinsky’s quilt Gracia (2002), depicting the story of Dona Gracia Nasi, the wealthy 16th-century converso Jew. When her husband died, Dona Gracia took over his businesses, ran a fleet of merchant ships, got even wealthier, helped less-advantaged Jews escape persecution in various countries along her trading routes, and by the time of her death was living openly as a Jew rather than practicing in secret. Yarinsky’s quilt depicts her dressed magnificently, against a background of sea and sky. Embroidered around her are the names of the cities she did business in as well as the Hebrew names of other strong women in our tradition like Devorah and Esther. There are bits of tapestry, lace, traditional quilt-block patterns. It’s exuberant.

Lisa Rosowsky, Baker Street, 2007.
Paula Swift, courtesy Lisa Rosowksy

Another quilter, Rochelle Rubinstein, uses the Welty-ian strategy of making us see familiar text in a new way. She carves Ezekiel’s lament for Jerusalem, which he calls “a wicked prostitute”—“Oy, oy, lach,” woe, woe to you—on a printmaking block, as well as “Oy, oy li,” woe, woe to me. She prints them over and over in tiny squares over the woodblocked image of a little girl. Who is the girl? Any small girl in a coat tends to remind us of Holocaust victims being rounded up, but she could be any child who hasn’t yet felt the weight of the world’s boxes and constraints.

And Lisa Rosowsky’s Baker Street (2007) quilt made me cry. Made of cotton, silk, and “found tallit,” it’s a photographic collage depicting the West Roxbury cemetery in Massachusetts, where my dad is buried. Many of Rosowsky’s relatives are there too. As she notes in a caption to her work, rather than adhere to the 19th-century idyll that imagined the cemetery as the “sylvan garden,” gravestones in West Roxbury would “huddle and clump, locked in gossip … to me, it feels like home.”

I was drawn to a piece by Carol Hamoy, whose family worked for years in the garment industry, made of vintage white ladies’ gloves. Overlaid and overlapping, they’ve been turned into wings. Embroidered in red over the fluttering fingers is a reference to the book of Exodus, a story of becoming free. Also exploring the idea of freedom is Coat of the Agunot, by Andi Arnovitz, which incorporates digital scans of antique ketubot, Jewish wedding contracts, torn into pieces, tiled, and turned into the fabric of a high-necked, long coat. The hem and sleeves are sewn shut, and multiple threads dangle, reflecting the uncertainty and entrapment of an Agunah, a “chained woman” whose husband will not grant her a get.

Leslie Golomb and Louise Silk, Exodus from Deez Nights Be All Da Same to Me, 2003.
Courtesy Hebrew Union College Museum

Many of the pieces in this show consider the way women’s voices have been silenced or lost. Jane Trigere’s portraits of Orthodox women, using abandoned cushions from an upper Manhattan shul’s balcony seating section and pages of women’s prayer books, are wonderful. Leslie Golomb and Louise Silk‘s trio of quilts take a different tack, reflecting on Southern history and bigotry. Using as their starting point a pre-Civil-War photo of a Southern Jewish family and its slave, Golomb and Silk create a narrative that starts at a seder (the first quilt has a matzoh-patterned background); the slave reflects, in embroidery thread, that this night isn’t different from all other nights for him. (I wasn’t comfortable with the white artists’ attempt to reproduce black speech, but that’s a small flaw in a well-intentioned work.) The next quilt shows the scapegoat ritual from the Book of Leviticus and the slave boy escaping into the wilderness. The third has a repeat pattern of Stars of David, made up of bits of fabric from the previous quilts, reflecting the wish that the boy will follow his own evening star to safety and peace. The juxtaposition of quilt techniques associated with Southern history and tradition and a narrative about Judaism and civil rights is fascinating.

I don’t want to give short shrift to the few men in the show. Adam Cohen shows us an embroidered “laser gun army ant,” using comic book imagery to reflect on childhood, gender roles, and violence; Brooklyn artist Doug Beube creates a shocking suicide bomber vest with the cartridges filled with segments of the New World Atlas instead of explosives, indicating that “words can disseminate propaganda or wisdom.” Robert Forman creates a self-portrait in Huichol-style string painting of himself at different ages, looking at appropriation and self-perception as well as masculinity and Jewishness.

As you no doubt know, there’s a cool trend of “reclaiming” needlework, calling it “not your grandma’s knitting.” Oh, please. Your grandma was awesome. And there’s a whole line of grandmas, a whole tradition, with something to teach you whippersnappers. Calling an apron or sampler “punk rock” does not make it the revolution. On the flip side, there’s a countermovement of young, Waldorfian, stay-at-home mom crafting fiends who eschew punk-rockness and see their work as domestic, womanly, a return to tradition and homespun values. I’d like to take both sides to see this show; it’s proof that textiles can be legitimately insurrectionary and also reflective of woman’s history.

A Stitch in Jewish Time, curated by Laura Kruger, is at the Hebrew Union College museum in New York through June 11, 2011.

Other name contenders currently include Vanessa Doofenschmirtz (a character on the cartoon Phineas and Ferb—such a cat’s nickname could be Essie, which is nice for a Lower East Side/East Village cat) and Weezy (which meets the Harry Potter criterion—it’s what Dobby calls Ron Weasley—and is appropriate given that, being Jews, we have a houseful of asthma sufferers). But additional ideas for monikers would be very welcome.

Additional data point: The name or nickname should work with Yoyo, the name of the Ingall crew’s other cat. (Yoyo is short for Miss Sparkles Yoyodyne. You see the risk of allowing children to name a pet.) Please post suggestions in the comments, lest I wind up with a cat named Bellatrix. No one deserves that.

For the privileged hellion
If you really loved your adorable demon child, you’d buy him the vintage red tricycle belonging to little Damien in The Omen. The priceless mom-murdering prop from the 1976 film is up for auction at Bonhams in the UK. Sure, the estimate is £12,000-£15,000 (in the neighborhood of $20K) but do you want your kid not to be the first on the block with a possessed trike?

For the Sigmund Freud-to-be
From a German manufacturer (of course) come these not-at-all-tacky psychiatric plush toys. Kroko the paranoid crocodile, Dub the depressed turtle, Lilo the obsessive-compulsive hippo, and Dolly the delusional sheep (with a plush wolf inside her) all await your child’s ministrations.

For the progeny of mid-century design-obsessed hipsters
Alexander Girard Alphabet Blocks will help force any child into the box created by his parents’ rigid aesthetic sensibilities. This gift is beautiful and tactile and will allow parents to lecture the child about fonts, typographic frameworks, and folk art opulence until his ears bleed.

For the rebel
My First Bacon.

For the foodie fashionista
What goes with a fuzzy felt falafel hair clip besides, oh, everything? How about an F is for Falafel onesie?

For the too-cool-for-school teen
Teach her where Bubbe and the Park Slope Parents Mailing List came from by way of a fabulous filigree necklace shaped like a Brooklyn brownstone.

For the little frequent flier
Does your family jet off regularly to see the mishpocha in far-off states? Are you anxious about sending little Joshua through those radiation-emitting backscatters? Get him these timely underpants with “READ THE 4TH AMENDMENT, PERVERTS” emblazoned on the crotch.

For David Amrams in training
Conductor, composer, French horn player, flutist, Amram can do it all. And so can your child, if you give her this bathtub flute kit. The kid fills the brightly colored plastic flutes with water up to the graduated lines on their sides, then starts tootling away. The flutes come with color-coded sheet music printed on laminated cards that stick to a wet tile wall. If these don’t turn your child into a conductor-in-residence at the Philharmonic by age 7, you have failed.

For the kid who will be a doctor when she grows up, knock wood
The You Explore It: Human Body science kit includes a model of the human body, tweezers, forceps, and 21 squishy, squeezable internal organs (you’ll love the bladder!), bones, and muscles. Have the child practice on the plastic model, then on Uncle Murray at the seder in April.

For the itty-bitty Helena Rubenstein or Estée Lauder
Who doesn’t want a cosmetics mogul in the family? Scientific Explorer’s Perfumery will allow any child to craft different intoxicating scents, learn the science behind their creation, then sell them to classmates at a hefty profit with the promise of eternal youth and beauty.

For the doll-obsessed
Let’s assume our young collector already has Rebecca Rubin, the 1914 Lower East Side Jewish American Girl doll that sells for a mere $95. But does she have Rebecca’s Shabbat accessories (teeny challah, samovar, tea, and candlesticks) for $68, her Hanukkah set (itty-bitty menorah, wooden dreidl, and gelt) for $22, her schoolbag (eensy-weensy bagel, rugelach, pickles, and “you’re a grand old flag” sheet music) for $36, or her Coney Island souvenirs (infinitesimal postcards, Steeplechase Park flyer, music box that plays “over the waves” and admission token) for $32? How much money do you have? For a Lower East Side immigrant child, Rebecca has a lot of stuff. (The Rebecca books are quite good! But I know, I promised. No books. Feh.)

For the would-be comedian
Let’s be honest. Don’t we all need a remote-controlled fart machine?

For the animal lover/humanitarian
Yes, honey, we know you want a pony. You can’t have a pony. You can, however, have a llama. A llama from Heifer International that will not live in our house in Bloomfield Hills but rather go directly to a poor family in Bolivia so they can start a farm and sell wool and their children can have an education. And we will talk about gratitude and tzedakah and we will eat some latkes and make an online donation to Mazon, the Jewish charity that fights hunger. And fine, you can have this little toy llama. There is an awesome book that goes with it, Llama Llama Red Pajama, but I’m not even going to mention it. Chag Sameach.

I was shocked at how much I liked An Unspeakable Crime: The Prosecution and Persecution of Leo Frank, by Elaine Marie Alphin. It’s rigorously researched and very, very gripping. One spring day in Atlanta in 1913, 13-year-old Mary Phagan put on a pretty violet dress and went to pick up her paycheck at the National Pencil Company. She intended to go from there to the Confederate Memorial Day parade. She never made it. Her body was found in the factory basement, a cord around her throat, her dress pushed up past her knees. Leo Frank, the pencil factory’s supervisor, who was seen as a rich, dirty Yankee Jewish interloper, was convicted of the crime in a rigged trial. When Georgia’s governor commuted Frank’s death sentence to life imprisonment, a crowd of furious citizens kidnapped Frank from prison and lynched him. The miscarriage of justice led to the founding of the Anti-Defamation League. Alphin’s book, chock-full of photos and newspaper clippings, tells the story in an immensely readable way, like a horrifying, absorbing mystery novel. Alphin presents evidence about who really committed the crime, offers a picture of post-Reconstruction-era Southern bigotry, and names the prominent citizens who led the lynching party. For budding true-crime readers, this book would be a terrific Hanukkah gift. It’s my pick for both the Newbery Award (it actually is distinguished!) and the National Jewish Book Award. (Recommended for ages 12 to adult.)

The Song of the Whales, by Uri Orlev, translated by Hillel Halkin, is equally distinguished but will appeal to very a different audience. It’s a mystical, fairy-tale-like novel about Michael, a soulful 11-year-old boy who moves to Jerusalem from Long Island and develops a close bond with his grandfather. Michael soon discovers that his grandfather has a secret power—traveling through dreams. The two start taking fantastic voyages together, repairing broken dreams by infusing a bit of hope into them, taking beautiful dreams that have “faded like old carpets” and restoring them. As his grandfather becomes frailer, Michael shifts from merely holding his Grandpa’s dream tools to becoming the lead dreamwalker himself. When my daughter Josie, 9, finished this sweet, sad, minimalist tale, she said haltingly, “It’s beautiful, but I think it’s very metaphorical?” Indeed. (Ages 10 to adult.)

I was very taken with The Year of Goodbyes, by Debbie Levy, another slim book. This one should appeal to youthful poetry lovers and reluctant readers. There’s a lot of white space on the page, and the voice is approachable; it’s not at all intimidating. It begins:

I write these words

on the very first page

of my brand-new book,

my wordless

untouched,

blank-new book

with sturdy brown covers,

like heels of bread

spread with smooth butter pages inside.

It goes on to tell the story of Levy’s mother, Jutta, a privileged young girl in Germany in the 1930s. Levy’s jumping-off point is her mother’s actual poesiealbum, a sort of scrapbook kept by young girls. Levy shares some of the album’s inscriptions, drawings, and stickers, layering them upon her own verses about her mother’s life, told in the first person. Through Jutta’s life and friendships, we see the restrictions on German Jews grow. Jutta obviously survives—after all, we know that her daughter is writing her story—so kids who are terrified of Holocaust narratives should be able to handle this one. At the end of the book, we learn what happened to Jutta after she escaped the Nazis by sailing to America on the Queen Mary. We see family photos and learn the fates of Jutta’s friends. Part of me thinks the book would have worked better as a web site—a clickable version of the physical pages of the poesiealbum, looking as it really looked. Ms. Levy, perhaps an iPad app? (Ages 9 to adult.)

Under a Red Sky: Memoir of a Childhood in Communist Romania, by Haya Leah Molnar, is a more challenging read. When the story opens, Eva is a much-loved 6-year-old living in a cramped multigenerational household of sniping, snarking relatives in 1950s Bucharest. Her formerly wealthy, staunchly anti-Communist family is suffering under Romania’s Communist regime. Terrible things have happened during the war, but little Eva can’t quite figure out what. The secret police are everywhere. Family secrets are, too. When Eva’s family applies to emigrate to Israel, she begins to learn about her relatives’ history and her own Judaism. The ending—will the family make it out of Europe?—is suspenseful and dramatic. But the memoir has plenty of humor, too. Don’t be put off by the unappealing cover and dry, school-sounding subtitle; this is an engaging read as well as a thoughtful one. But because it looks forbidding, and the first few pages may be confusing, I’d only give it to kids who already love to read. (Ages 15 to adult.)

Ashes, by Kathryn Lasky, a Newbery Honor winner, also suffers from a slow beginning, but it gathers steam fast. It’s the story of 13-year-old Gaby, a pretty, book-loving non-Jew in 1930s Germany. Her father is an astrophysicist at the University of Berlin, a colleague and friend of Albert Einstein; her mom’s best pal, Baba, is a fabulous Jewish society columnist. Gaby’s life seems sweet—luscious descriptions of parties, society events, and fabulous outfits will delight fashion-loving girls—but the Nazis are gaining power, and anti-Fascist intellectuals like her family are disparagingly called “White Jews.” Einstein’s work is derided as “Jewish physics,” and Gaby’s beloved, chic literature teacher isn’t who she seems. Adults may see some of the plot twists coming, but kids won’t. Each chapter begins with a well-chosen, pointed quote from an author Gaby loves—Jack London, Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway, Heinrich Heine—authors whose books are burned by the Nazis at the book’s climax. Jewish kids need to know that not all Germans were Nazis, and this very readable book is a good way to teach them. (Ages 10 to adult.)

I did not want to like Once, by Morris Gleitzman. I hated the cover line: “Everybody deserves to have something good in their life. At least once.” More important, Once sounded to me like a rehash of The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, a book I loathed. Children (and adults) do not need faux-naif, manipulative, emotionally inauthentic Holocaust books. But I was wrong. Felix, a Jewish boy in Poland in 1942, isn’t an idiot. He’s in denial. As the book goes on and the horrors mount, Felix’s denial evaporates. Storytelling has been his shield and survival strategy. As he loses that ability to tell himself truth-deflecting stories, you feel sick. The pacing of this book is incredible—Gleitzman is known in his native Australia for writing funny, goofy, contemporary children’s books—and the book’s short paragraphs and use of humor will make it enticing to boys and non-book-lovers. But be forewarned, this was the only book on my list that made me cry. The Nazis’ brutality is explicit and disgusting; this should not be any child’s first Holocaust novel. (Start with Number the Stars instead.) Once, which is influenced by the story of Janusz Korczak, offers no false hope. (Ages 11 to 15.)

You may have noticed: This list contains a lot of Holocaust books, though I know many young readers would prefer books about the world they know, where the dramas involve cute boys, popularity, and finding oneself in a land of pop culture and plenty. Inconvenient, by Margie Gelbwasser, will engross those readers. Alyssa, 15, feels herself growing away from her best friend, Lara, who’s desperate to be part of the popular crowd. While Lara sucks up to the cool kids, Alyssa wants to get closer to Keith, her running partner on the school track team. What makes the story intriguing from a Jewish perspective is that Lara and Alyssa are Russian Jews whose families have emigrated to New Jersey. In their culture, alcohol is part of every gathering. Russians are used to laughing off hangovers, but Alyssa’s mom’s drinking is spiraling out of control. In this closed culture, where the belief in not airing your dirty laundry in front of the goyim also applies to the non-Russian Jewish community, Alyssa feels ashamed and isolated. Inconvenient isn’t perfect—Keith is the dreamiest boy ever, and Alyssa’s dad is underwritten—but the romance is very romantic (conservative parents should know that there’s some explicit fooling around), and the ending is perfect. (Ages 13 to 17.)

Perfect throughout is Hereville: How Mirka Got Her Sword, by Barry Deutsch. It’s a very weird, confidently drawn graphic novel about an 11-year-old Orthodox girl who fervently wants to fight dragons. Mirka Herschberg lives in a tight-knit community in an unknown time and place where boys have payos and married women cover their hair, but where the woods are full of trolls and witches and humungous crazed pigs. I love that the stepmother in this book is good instead of evil, and I love that Deutsch really knows how to tell a story in his chosen medium. Characters burst free of their panels; the interplay of image and text is flawless; the entire book is kinetic and action-filled, but thoughtful too. A must for graphic-novel fans. (Ages 8 to 13.)

A very different depiction of life in an Orthodox community is Hush, which I wrote about a few weeks ago. It’s terrific, but so harrowing I don’t think it’s for everyone.

There you go. Shop well, and Happy Hanukkah.

My favorite Jewish picture book this year, by far, is Beautiful Yetta, the Yiddish Chicken by Daniel Pinkwater and illustrated by Jill Pinkwater. This multi-culti immigration fantasy is funny and sweet. Written in simple, poetic sentences, it is the story of Yetta, who will not be soup. After being delivered to Phil’s Poultry World, she escapes and finds herself on the streets of Brooklyn. The pigeons are unhelpful schmucks. All seems lost until she rescues a parrot from cat-related disaster, and suddenly Yetta has friends to show her the ropes of city life. She speaks only Yiddish and her new parrot friends speak only Spanish (there are translations), making this book hilarious to read out loud, especially if you speak neither language. My 6-year-old now wanders around the house exclaiming “Gevalt!” and cooing “Meyn teyehreh kinder!” at her stuffed animals. The Yiddish feels organic to the plot, not grafted-on. (Recommend for ages 4-8).

The Rooster Prince of Breslov by Ann Redisch Stampler and illustrated by Eugene Yelchin, is a more traditional poultry-driven story—it’s based on an old folktale attributed to Rabbi Nachman of Breslov—with edgier, funkier illustrations. In this one, the prince suddenly decides he’s a rooster, rips off his clothes, and starts pecking around on the floor. The king and queen are at wits’ end until a mysterious, frail old man shows up and works wonders. Stampler retells the fable beautifully, and I love the oddball art. (Ages 5-9)

On the board-book front, Happy Hanukkah Lights by Jacqueline Jules and illustrated by Michelle Shapiro, is a fine choice despite its lack of poultry (actual or delusional). Saying “It’s better than Happy Hanukkah, Corduroy” is not the most rousing recommendation, but hey, it’s also better than Biscuit’s Hanukkah. Unlike some other books for the very wee, it mentions Judah Maccabee, the folk-arty illustrations are appealing, and the couplets actually scan: “Our smiles spin from face to face/ Like dreidels by the fireplace.” Plus the daddy is the one making the latkes. (Ages 1-4)

There are some kids—frequently boys—who love “true books.” For them, there’s Zishe the Strongman, by Robert Rubinstein and illustrated by Wendy Miller. Zishe, born Siegmund Breitbart in 1883, was a Polish Jew who toured the world demonstrating his strength—bending iron bars with his bare hands, cracking Brazil nuts between his fingers, pulling a wagonload of people down Fifth Avenue by his teeth. But Zishe was sensitive, too, playing his cello for hospitalized children and meeting with the Jewish community everywhere he went. The sepia-toned illustrations have a soft-edged, wistful, pencil-y feel, but with a cartoony zing that keeps them from looking too “historical” and therefore boring. (Ages 5-8)

Another wonderful nonfiction book is Emma’s Poem: The Voice of the Statue of Liberty by Linda Glaser and illustrated by Claire Nivola. We don’t get many historical portraits of wealthy American Jews in children’s books. So, the notion of Emma Lazarus—the rich, artistic 19th-century lady who wrote the poem inscribed on the base of the Statue of Liberty—caring about the fate of poor immigrants is appealing, and Glaser wisely focuses on explicating the famous last five lines of “The New Colossus” (the entire sonnet is reprinted in the back), which are the easiest for kids to understand. Plus, the painterly illustrations are so full of wonderful texture and detail that budding fashion and interior designers will plotz. (Ages 5-10)

Yet another story set in the late 19th century was a big hit with my younger daughter Maxie. Feivel’s Flying Horses by Heidi Smith Hyde and illustrated by Johanna van der Sterre is a dreamy little tale about immigration, this time from the perspective of a member of the huddled masses. Feivel, a woodcarver of ritual objects in the Old Country, leaves his beloved family behind to create a better life for them in America. He apprentices to a Coney Island merry-go-round maker, and every horse he makes is a tribute to a member of his family. In tiny letters, he carves his loved ones’ names into the saddles. Maxie’s favorite is the little pony covered in glittering glass jewels that Feivel makes for his baby Lena, who, he notes sadly, “was no longer a baby.” Finally Feivel finishes the carousel and can afford to send for his family. Reunited, they ride around and around. You get familial love, Coney Island, fancy horses, sorrow and sweetness. What’s not to like? A note in the back discusses the many Jewish artisans who became carousel artists in the late 1800s and early 1900s. (Ages 4-8)

And, hey, look, a contemporary story! A Tale of Two Seders by Minda Avra Portnoy and illustrated by Valeria Cis is about life after divorce. A little girl tries to get used to having a seder in each parent’s house (she notes that Passover, with its two seders, is “a lot easier than Thanksgiving, when there’s also lots of food but you have to decide where to eat it”). While she longs for her parents to get back together, she also comes to understand that “families are like charoset. Some have more ingredients than others, some stick together better than others, some are sweeter than others. But each one is tasty in its own way.” (In context, the quote isn’t as sappy as it sounds.) The brightly colored art, full of pattern and delightful outfits, does its part to keep sorrow at bay. Figures that the author of Where Do People Go When They Die?, one of the best Jewish children’s books about death, wrote an honest and bittersweet book about another tough topic. (Ages 4-8)

It’s been a good year for Pesach books. Passover: Celebrating Now, Remembering Then, by Harriet Ziefert, is ravishing—it’s like an illuminated manuscript in children’s book form. Illustrator Karla Gudeon is also a fine-art painter and ketubah artist. Her work’s the star here—the two-page spread of the Israelites crossing the Red Sea is breathtaking, alive with color and movement. There are flaps to lift, showing the differences between “then” (the story of the Exodus) and “now” (what we do to commemorate it today), so there’s a bit of interactivity to keep kids engaged. I could see the book standing in for a Haggadah for minimally observant families, but I think it would be welcome on anyone’s coffee table. (Ages 4-10)

I’m not sure why Howard Schwartz isn’t a bigger rock star. I couldn’t find a single copy of Gathering Sparks in any bookstore in Manhattan. A shandeh. Schwartz’s 2005 collaboration with illustrator Kristina Swarner, Before You Were Born, made my best-books list at the Forward that year. It’s now out of print. Another shandeh. Both books are serene, lovely, intimate—perfect bedtime books. In Gathering Sparks, told in the second person, you are a child asking your grandfather about how the stars came to be. He tells you the story of God filling vessels with light, the vessels shattering, the responsibility we all share to gather the sparks and heal the world. “For every good deed you do, one of those hidden sparks rises up and a little bit of the world is repaired,” the grandfather tells you. Again, Swarner’s radiant, hazy, mixed-media paintings work perfectly with Schwartz’s poetic text. The stars blend with the flowers and look like fireflies dancing around the storyteller and listener. Tikkun Olam is beautiful, and so is this book. (Ages 4-8)

Be sure to check back next week for the second half of the list—chapter books and graphic novels.

First up: Where the Streets Had a Name by Randa Abdel-Fattah, a young Australian author of Palestinian-Egyptian heritage. (Full disclosure: Tablet Magazine’s Liel Leibovitz helped fact-check the book, which his wife, an executive editor at Scholastic, published. I didn’t know this when I ordered it.) It’s the story of 13-year-old Haayat, growing up in Bethlehem in 2004—her family moved there after their farm in Beit Sahour was leveled for a new settler road. After losing his farm, her Baba changed. “The evidence of his demolition doesn’t show,” she says. “The rubble and ruins are inside him.” Haayat’s wounds are right on the surface—her face is badly scarred. Why? How? We don’t find out until late in the book.

Haayat’s beloved grandmother, Sitti Zeynab, has suffered as well. For generations, her family lived in what is now West Jerusalem; they fled from the Israeli army in the war of 1948. Refugees, they lived in exile until after 1967’s Six-Day War. Upon their return, they found a Jewish family living in their house. The Jewish woman lost everything—her mother, her father, her twin sister—in a concentration camp. “I’m sorry for what happened to your family and your people,” Sitti Zeynab told her. “But why must we be punished?“ The woman’s husband replied, “Go to Egypt or Jordan or Syria. You have many countries from which to choose.” Haayat’s uncle cried, “But this is our homeland! Would you ask an Englishman to move to America or Australia because they speak English in those countries too? Palestine is our home, not Egypt or Syria!”

When Sitti Zeynab takes ill, Haayat is determined to save her by letting her touch the earth of her village once more. So, Haayat and her best pal, Samy, a soccer-loving Christian hooligan who has emotional scars of his own, take an empty hummus jar on a Quixotic quest: to get some Jerusalem dirt. Jerusalem is only six miles from Bethlehem, but it might as well be a world away. What follows is a picaresque adventure of checkpoints and curfews, of buses, taxis, hiking, and wall-climbing. Our young heroes meet a variety of types—Jewish, Muslim, and Christian—and learn more about the fractured land they inhabit.

The book has a lot of humor (farts abound, which will delight the target audience—and, OK, me too) to leaven the upsetting stuff. And not all Israelis are depicted as evil. But too many of the book’s characters are merely sketches, and Haayat’s voice is wildly inconsistent. Sometimes it’s over-the-top lyrical, as when she’s describing the beauty of the land and its people. Sometimes it’s so literal and unimaginative, she seems like a dimwit. When Sitti Zeynab compares her sense of loss to “heartburn after a big meal,” which “burns inside and nothing you do takes the sensation away,” Haayat suggests drinking a glass of milk. This is the same kid who describes “the ubiquitous Wall, twisting and turning, devouring the landscape”? For some reason, florid, self-conscious prose seems to afflict many books about growing up in the West Bank. Abdel-Fattah’s earlier young-adult novel, about a girl in suburban Melbourne, Australia, who suddenly chooses to wear hijab to high school, has no such problem. (It also has the awesome title Does My Head Look Big in This?)

If Where the Streets Had a Name is a good choice for a middle-grade-to-young-adult audience (and it is), Sharing Our Homeland: Palestinian and Jewish Children at Summer Peace Camp is a good one for younger kids. It’s an extended photo essay (the pictures are by Cindy Karp; the words are by Trish Marx) about a summer camp for Israeli Jewish and Israeli Palestinian kids. Givat Haviva, an Israeli nonprofit peace organization, runs the two-week camp. Every summer 200 kids come together to learn about each other’s culture, practice respectful dialogue, and do the fun stuff of camp—crafts, swimming, sports, and song. Like Where the Streets Had a Name, Sharing Our Homeland doesn’t offer any easy answers, just reflections on the importance of trying to see the Other as a fellow human being.

For older teenage and younger 20-something readers, there’s How To Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less, cartoonist Sarah Glidden’s graphic memoir of a Birthright Israel tour. Glidden approaches the all-expenses-paid trip with the attitude of a somewhat entitled young lefty American—she cynically expects a nonstop barrage of pro-Israel propaganda. She’s surprised to find that Birthright offers her a nuanced portrait of a complicated country. She meets people on the left and on the right; she also works hard to learn the region’s history. Glidden is as tough on herself as she is on anyone else—she makes a snotty remark about pushy Russians to an Israeli who turns out to be a recent Russian immigrant; she realizes she’s misjudged some of her tripmates. She’s clear-eyed about her own neuroses and moral failings, and she’s a very thoughtful and endearing—and often funny—tour guide. The panels of the book are awash in pretty watercolors. I even learned something new about the Masada story! (I didn’t know the role of Shmarya Guttman, a young Zionist who in 1933 figured out how to market the destination to the Jewish National Committee as part of a stirring identity narrative.) Glidden doesn’t come to any sweeping conclusions about the tense reality in Israel, referred to as the Matsav (sense a theme here?), but she stops being so quick to judge Israel and find it wanting.

What all three books have in common is the insistence that we not lump an entire people into one undifferentiated mass we label the Enemy. This may seem like a naïve answer to a complex set of questions. But the ability to empathize goes a long way. “Although the fundamental political issues can only be resolved by the parties to the conflict, widespread efforts to promote pluralism and tolerance will begin to lay the groundwork for a future generation that can come to the negotiating table with open hands instead of clenched fists,” the author Robert A. Friedman recently wrote in Foreign Policy Digest. “Groups such as Seeds of Peace, which empowers young leaders from regions of conflict with the leadership skills required to advance reconciliation and coexistence, are needed more than ever. When mutual trust and respect are established at an early age, these bonds can last a lifetime.”

Too bad so few adults have gotten the memo. Queen Rania of Jordan (whose parents were from the West Bank) recently co-authored a picture book called The Sandwich Swap, about two little girls who fight over the perceived yuckiness of their respective lunches (hummus vs. PBJ). The book preaches multiculturalism and open-mindedness and was launched with a reading at the United Nations. But the queen has turned down several offers to publish a Hebrew version. She might have taken a page from Sitti Zeynab: “Nobody has realized that laughter sounds the same,” she tells Haayat, “whether it shakes its way out of an Israeli or a Palestinian.”

So, why hadn’t I heard of it?

A librarian who reads Tablet Magazine alerted me to its existence, saying she hadn’t seen anything about it in the Jewish press. Indeed, a Google search finds only a snotty thread (based on Amazon’s description rather than on the book itself) on an ultra-Orthodox-run discussion board called Hashkafah, and a rave review on the blog The Velveteen Rabbi (written by a female rabbinical student in the Jewish Renewal tradition). That’s it.

The book is certainly upsetting. But it’s also deeply readable and engaging. It’s the story of Gittel, a girl growing up in Hasidic Borough Park, Brooklyn, who witnesses her best friend’s Devory’s sexual abuse at age 9. The perpetrator is Devory’s brother, a promising scholar home from yeshiva. Horror ensues, but the entire community conspires to pretend nothing has happened. The novel ricochets in time between Gittel at 9 and Gittel at 17. Teenage Gittel should be happy as she prepares for her wedding, but thoughts of Devory haunt her. How will Gittel come to terms with the past? What does it mean to be a true eishes chayil? Who will support her if she refuses to keep quiet?

I expected Hush to be important and harrowing. I did not expect it to be warm and funny, too. The portrait of Gittel’s closed community is simultaneously affectionate and critical. There’s so much rich detail here about life in Borough Park, about growing up sheltered and naive. I laughed out loud at a scene in which little Gittel is confronted with a supermarket aisle of feminine-hygiene products. She initially thinks they’re adult diapers. But her mother gives her an extremely truncated “Eve’s sin” speech and tells her that one day she’ll be a woman and bleed. Gittel, terrified, ogles at all the choices: “Long Super Pads with Flexi-Wings and Long Super Pads with Flexier Wings and the Long Super Fresh Pads with the Flexiest-of-Wings. There were the Overnight Maxi and the All Day and Night Maxi and the Make Your Period Disappear Maxi, which wasn’t there but I kept searching for it anyway.” She then tries to make her mother buy every item in the aisle. “It was extremely important that I have all those wings, all of them,” she says. “What if I used the wrong pad? I needed all those maxis, because one could not know what unexpected circumstances might require the Extra Heavy pad or the Flexiest-of-Wings as I lay somewhere and died a sad and lonely death.”

There’s an equally funny scene involving a group of girls in a basement devouring an illicit copy of O, The Oprah Magazine, another about a young groom’s fervent belief that only goyish women have breasts, and a throwaway line that cracked me up, about someone seeing a specialist for secondary infertility after her fifth child.

Hush is clearly autobiographical. It’s also clearly written by someone who still feels a lot of love for a community that has repeatedly failed to protect its most vulnerable members. “In Bobov, in Satmar, everywhere—it’s a problem,” a sympathetic but powerless rebbe tells one of the characters. When this rebbe tries to take an abusive teacher out of a yeshiva, his own salary is docked for five months because “he could not destroy the income of a teacher, a father of six children, based on assumptions.” The rebbe says the only thing he can ever do is persuade the teacher to leave for another yeshiva, where, of course, he continues to teach. In another case the police try to get involved, but “there were never any witnesses; everybody was so fearful.” The consequences of lashon hara, having an evil tongue and speaking ill of others in the community, are dire. Gittel’s parents fear that the shadchan, the matchmaker, will never find their daughter a husband if she doesn’t shush, and the entire family will be shunned.

As in the novel, real-life ultra-Orthodox enclaves have discouraged families from going to the police after rapes and sexual abuse. The communities promise to resolve such problems internally, through rabbinical courts and counseling. But stories abound about victimizers who continue victimizing without consequence, and the social service agencies that are supposed to deal with sexual abuse have less-than-stellar historical records of punishing abusers and keeping them away from children. At the October 2009 sentencing of a bar mitzvah tutor and social worker who molested two boys, a New York State Supreme Court judge had bitter words for “a communal attitude that seems to impose greater opprobrium on the victims than the perpetrator.”

Increasingly, victims seem to be going to the police despite the dangers, because they don’t feel they can get justice otherwise. In 2009, 40 minors in Brooklyn Orthodox communities agreed to testify in court about their experiences. Maybe things are changing.

Hush doesn’t offer easy answers. The ending feels a bit pat, because the author clearly wants to end on a hopeful note. But I respect the feeling of authentic struggle.

I interviewed the author via email. (The book’s publicist ferried the messages). Fervent about retaining her anonymity, the author started writing the book at 23, then struggled with it for five years. As a child, she witnessed a friend’s molestation and grew up knowing of several other broken, victimized children in her community.

“It’s a book that came out of a need to tell a story that should have been told a long time ago,” she told me. As for the distinctive, childish, funny voice of Gittel, she said, “the voice was obvious to me and I never could have written it in any other way, because that was the experience. We were young girls when these things happened, and our world was processed through that mindset.” She seemed baffled by my questions about whether her use of humor was a strategy to make the story more bearable. “Humor is never a consideration; it’s an instinct,” she said.

“Eishes Chayil” worked as a journalist for several ultra-Orthodox newspapers; one such paper plays a role in the book. “The words ‘sexual abuse’ and ‘molestation’ did not exist” in the Ultra-Orthodox press, she said. “As for cherem [a ban by the community of a person, paper, or business], that happens for things far more trivial than [writing about] sexual abuse. When Mishpacha [an Orthodox magazine in Jerusalem] wrote about a modern Orthodox rabbi, there was an advertiser boycott until appropriate apologies were offered.” Sounds familiar.

“It’s been an extremely painful process for me, as the entire issue of abuse remains an open wound in the Orthodox community,” she continued. “Things are slowly opening up but will take a long time. Borough Park is not a democracy, and even when issues are finally acknowledged, they are done in a certain way, by certain people with the approval of certain authorities. An honest discussion about how this happened and why is not a possibility and is the reason so many victims leave the community entirely or break down.”

And does she still identify as Hasidic? “I currently identify as Extremely Confused Jewish Lady,” she said.

How does she think her former community will feel about Hush? “Obviously such a book is not ‘good for the Jews,’ but I don’t think the Orthodox community yet knows of its existence,” she replied. “It is very new, and I certainly did not announce its release at any wedding or bar mitzvah.” She predicted that the story will be “assumed to be a lie, written by some ‘self-hating Jew’ who ‘just wants attention.’ This is not a society that accepts criticism. And for the element that will know it is true, and applaud it, they must stay silent.”

I hope that’s not so. I hope the book finds its way to wounded, fearful kids and their friends, of every faith and ethnicity. Girls who love stories about friendship, feeling isolated, coping with grief and finding the courage to speak out against injustice will particularly respond to Hush. Its heroine is actually far more brave and empowered than Twilight’s Bella Swan, and she even finds a man who is worthy of her love. This is a powerful and beautifully edited act of storytelling.

Pondering the end of the season made me start thinking about the joys of derby names. The perfect derby name (see dozens of ‘em here) displays both aggression and humor; reveals something about the skater (she’s literary, she’s a mom, she’s vegan, she enjoys alcoholic beverages); and if the name’s a bit obscure, so much the better. As a fan of children’s books, I enjoy names derived from kid lit: Lemony Kickit, Eva Lasting Broadstopper, Laura Ingalls Piledriver, Veruca Assault, Pippi Headstomping. I also appreciate names that put a violent spin on pop culture: Beyonslay, Stevie Kicks (“I took your love, I took you down”), Splat Benetar, Soylent Mean, Dame Judi Wench. And who says the younger generation doesn’t follow politics? Witness: Sarah Impalin, Shockin Audrey, Tripper Gore, and a referee who goes by Stimulus Package (refs can be men).

Sadly, however, there are very few openly Jewish derby names. (Gee, I wonder why?) Looking at the current rosters, I found Gefilte Fists; Slammy Davis, Jr.; Anne Frankenstein; Ruth Hater Ginsburg; Uzi Quatro; Mazel Tov Cocktail; Nancy Jew; and refs Jew’d Law and Manny Schevitz. My favorite Jew-y derby name? Meshuggah Walls, who skates for the Emerald City Rollergirls in Oregon. (If you don’t get the reference, click here.)

Tablet Magazine readers: What would your Jewish derby name be? Be bold, be butch. Look to history, literature, and popular culture. And leave them in the comments.

As for me? I’d be Golda Slayir, Henrietta Schooled, Sharona Slaychem, Vashti’d Off, Isha Zona, Marjorie Mourningspar, or, if I want to go lowbrow, Torah Spelling. My ref name would definitely be Morris Ayin. (Some of these jokes are for Jewish Day School students only.)

Parents, I think, face these two dueling forces every day. Sometimes these voices come from inside us; sometimes they come from the media and the parents around us.

Any parent who’s visited a playground recently has met a Keep Fear Alive parent. She’s the one who’ll sidle up to us, narrow her eyes, and say, “Are you sure you want to eat that? No, I’m just asking. I definitely don’t want you to second-guess yourself or be anxious in any way! Because stress can cause headaches, lack of focus, short temper, back pain, menstrual problems, acne, obesity, and forgetfulness. And if you’re stressed you might be unable to calculate the digits of pi past the first 23 places, which would really screw up your next homeschool math session! Wait, you don’t homeschool? Wow. Um, wow. Well, I’m sure your children go to the top-of-the-line private school in your—oh. OK. Well, that’s great that you’re toughening them up for the real world! I bet they could fight a bear!

“Anyway, it’s great that you’re allowing yourself to Keep Fear Alive this way, luxuriating in the Fear and rolling around in it like it’s poop and you’re a golden retriever. Because that shows you really care about your kids. Fear is love! Our rabbis have told us you can’t have ahava, love, without yira, fear! Yes, I know they were supposedly talking about God, but I think they misspoke. What they meant was that it’s impossible to be a good parent without quaking in terror at all times. And there’s so much to fear! For instance, if you vaccinate your children they will get autistic and also cry, which means that you have betrayed their trust by letting someone stick them with a needle. And sure, chelation therapy is an option—ignore the stuff from ‘experts’ like the ‘board certified’ ‘pediatricians’ at the ‘Mayo Clinic’ who say it can cause fatal liver damage, because they’re all in the pockets of the pharmaco/rationality lobby—but it’s expensive. Fortunately it won’t be a problem if you skip vaccines completely. Sure, your kid will have to rely on herd immunity from other kids to avoid measles and whooping cough—the death rates of which are highly exaggerated by the mainstream media and ‘American history’—but kids today need to toughen up. If they can’t survive measles, they can’t survive competition with China. And this is one more reason to hate illegal immigrants, because they probably aren’t vaccinated, thus diluting the pool of vaccinated kids who give our unvaccinated kids herd immunity.”

The “Keep Fear Alive” parent has plenty to say about shards of glass in frozen peas, hormones in nonorganic milk that will give your 7-year-old son breasts, kids getting high on nutmeg. Which your teen is probably doing right now.

But for every Colbert there’s a Stewart, urging us to restore sanity.

“Dude,” the sanity-prone parent will say, “losing sleep over an unknowable future isn’t doing us or our spawn any favors. Blaming others—immigrants, gay people, poor people—for our troubles and our children’s troubles is foolish. Take a deep breath. Enjoy the actual process of parenting your actual child. Be present. Don’t let guilt paralyze you. And let’s try to encourage everybody else to simmer down, use inside voices, stop being hyperbolic and reactionary—and let’s do that without name-calling.”

Stewart put it best. In his invitation to the rally, he said that we need more of the sort of people “who think shouting is annoying, counterproductive, and terrible for your throat; who feel that the loudest voices shouldn’t be the only ones that get heard; and who believe that the only time it’s appropriate to draw a Hitler mustache on someone is when that person is actually Hitler. Or Charlie Chaplin in certain roles.”

Can we stand in solidarity about this, please?

Now there is a new version, a 12-part series already on sale (there will be launch parties at various JCCs on December 5).

This time, Grover will explore Jewish identity, history, and culture for the American Jewish preschool demographic. The show was filmed on location at several Israeli sites, and Jake Gyllenhaal, Christina Applegate, Debra Messing, and possibly Ben Stiller will make appearances. There’s an Ethiopian Israeli and a Russian immigrant in the cast, as well as an Arab-Israeli Muppet named Mahboub.

In this snippet, shared exclusively with Tablet Magazine, viewers learn about the famous rivalry between Hillel and Shammai, and hear the story of the guy who wanted to learn the Torah while standing on one foot. (When your three-year-old has finished watching it, teach him to read and then give him Joseph Telushkin’s new biography of Hillel, published by Nextbook Press.)

Shalom Sesame Exclusive Preview from Tablet Magazine on Vimeo.

Can the Muppets Make Friends in Ramallah? [NYT Magazine]
Related: Hillel [Nextbook Press]