The Best Jewish Children’s Books of 2024

It’s been a tough and eventful year, and Jewish parents have wrestled with how to discuss difficult subjects with their children. But keep in mind: All, or nearly all, of the books for Jewish kids published in 2024 were written, acquired, and edited well before the events of Oct. 7 and the ensuing war, so any trends in Jewish children’s literature may appear to lag a year or two, or even three, behind current events. So the best Jewish children’s books of the year may not directly address the biggest Jewish issues of the year.

Of course, some things are eternal: In picture books, Hanukkah and Passover are the most written about Jewish holidays; as far as Jewish food goes, challah always seems to take center stage; and Jewish folktales and midrash continue to form the basis of many titles. Stories about intergenerational relationships between a grandparent (or a grandparent stand-in) and a grandchild also have staying power. And while the recent flood of biographies of lesser-known Jews, especially women, is certainly slowing to more of a trickle, it has not dried up entirely. One newer trend is more stories about the Sephardic and Mizrahi experiences, some of which have made their way on to this list. Despite that, there is still always room for a good shtetl story and/or a dose of Yiddish. For older readers, bnai mitzvah are perennial pivotal events and, for better or worse, the Holocaust and WWII prove an endless source of inspiration.

Here are the best Jewish children’s books of 2024, starting with picture books and moving on to middle-grade and young-adult titles.

Shabbat is fundamental to the Jewish experience and Jewish observance, and it’s not Shabbat without challah! Challah for Shabbat Tonight by Sara Holly Ackerman is a rhyming slice-of-life (or slice-of-challah) story where we follow the bread-making process from start to finish, including the rising time, during which grandmother and grandchild play with cards, draw pictures, and look at old family photos. Illustrator Alona Millgram employs a retro palette of aqua, rust, mustard, and avocado and fills the pictures with plenty of details for a child to pore over while he or she listens, including the goofy antics of a pet bird and cat.

Rising by Sidura Ludwig is an equally beautiful but more contemplative look at the process and joy of challah-baking and Shabbat. Illustrator Sophia Vincent Guy employs a color palette similar to that in Challah for Shabbat Tonight but adds touches of deep red and blue as the book goes on. The text makes poignant connections between the rising of the dough and the growing belly of the pregnant mother, as well as the six strands of challah dough becoming one loaf, the way the six days of the week “become one Shabbat.” With the message that “everything grows in its own time,” this is a lyrical celebration of challah, Shabbat, and the passing of time.

Both books have appealing endpapers with cooking implements and/or ingredients and both include recipes for challah. A fun activity would be trying both recipes and seeing which you prefer: the great challah bake-off, if you will.

An intergenerational relationship is featured in Mr. Katz and Me, by Marc Kornblatt. Eighty-one-year-old Mr. Katz, shown with bushy white eyebrows by illustrator Nanette Regan, is a Russian immigrant who never had a bar mitzvah and is now studying for one with 8-year-old Sarah’s father. Mr. Katz shows Sarah—and the reader—that you are never too old to learn and teaches her and us, in an age-appropriate way, about antisemitism in the Soviet Union.

Two books based on old Jewish teachings are brought to us by Israeli authors and illustrators. 100 Rooms, by Haya Shenhav (translated by Gilah Kahn-Hoffmann) and illustrated by Yirmi Pinkus, and The Hedgehog Who Said, WHO CARES? by Neri Aluma (translated by Ilana Kurshan) with illustrations by Amit Trainin, both feature bright colors with a bit of a midcentury feel. 100 Rooms is based on a teaching in Pirkei Avot: the more possessions, the more worry. So it is here, where a man builds a house that is never big enough for him. He keeps adding rooms until finally, with 100 rooms, he discovers that he cannot find anything he needs. He settles in the last room, sells the rest, and finally finds peace and happiness. In The Hedgehog Who Said, WHO CARES?, the titular animal is building his burrow. As he does so, he flings dirt onto the road, impeding the path of his animal neighbors, caring only about himself. Of course, he learns the error of his ways. With rhyming text (no easy feat in translation), this is a fun read-aloud.

Another pair of books recount two diaspora communities’ returns to Israel. Ariana Mizrahi tells the story of the mass aliyah in the 1950s of Malabari Jews, one of several Indian Jewish communities, in The Blue Butterfly of Cochin. The vibrant, swirling illustrations in bright blues, greens, reds, and yellows by Siona Benjamin lend the story a tropical feel. And in Saliman and the Memory Stone by Erica Lyons, we learn about an earlier migration of Yemeni Jews in the 1880s. Illustrated by Yinon Ptahia in an appropriately more subdued palette of mostly reds and browns, the colors echo Yemen’s red mountains and deserts. Although the two main characters differ in many ways, they both encounter difficulties in adjusting to their new lives but find strength in their memories and their histories.

In Everybody’s Book: The Story of the Sarajevo Haggadah, Linda Leopold Strauss uses the lens of the journey of a single Haggadah, one that started in Spain in the 1300s and has ended, for now, in present-day Sarajevo, to illuminate (pun intended) the many displacements of the Jewish people. The Haggadah endured perilous times, including multiple wars and fire, and was often protected by non-Jews. While neither the text nor the illustrations (by Tim Smart) spare readers the horrors that befell the Haggadah—or the Jewish people—the overwhelming message is one of hope. My favorite detail is that restorers left the wine stains and marginalia intact, leaving me to ask: But what about the matzo crumbs?

When a trip to the shtetl is in order, you have lots of choices. My favorite this year is Jane Yolen’s The Many Problems of Rochel-Leah, in which Rochel-Leah’s dearest wish is to learn to read Hebrew. Yolen employs simple but beautiful language (when she is determined, Rochel-Leah’s “lips grew thin, like a dash on a page … her eyes turned gray, like the color of old ink … [and] her chin became … as pointed as the yad, the pointer used for reading the Torah scroll”) and Felishia Henditirto’s illustrations are incandescent. Although others have criticized the book for some historical inaccuracies, as detailed here, I can forgive them when the text and illustrations are so compelling and because Yolen acknowledges in an afterword that the book is a “true(ish) story.”

From the shtetl we move to the American Jewish immigrant experience, but probably not the one you are thinking of. Rather than the mass immigration from Eastern Europe of the early 20th century, An Etrog from Across the Sea by Deborah Bodin Cohen and Kerry Olitzky and illustrated by Stacey Dressen McQueen focuses on certain Sephardic Jews who came to America centuries prior. Dressed in typical 18th-century American clothing, a family awaits their Papa’s return from a trip to sea with the etrog he had promised. Based on a real Sephardic family in America, this is a nice addition to books about Sukkot.

We fast-forward to modern-day America with Miri’s Moving Day by Adam R. Chang and Stephanie Wildman, with illustrations by Dream Chen. In a kind of positive version of the well-known O’Henry story, Miri’s Chinese grandfather, Yeh Yeh, buys Miri a mezuzah to hang in her new home, on the advice of her Jewish grandfather, Zaydie; and Zaydie buys Miri two little stone lions to replicate the large ones that stood guard outside her old building. Meanwhile, the two grandmothers cook the first Shabbat dinner in Miri’s new home together. It is wonderful to see machatunim (in-laws) getting along, especially in-laws from different cultural and religious backgrounds. An afterword explains the significance of the lions in Chinese culture and the meaning of the mezuzah, as well as the prayer to recite while hanging one.

As for that trickle of picture book biographies, Abzuglutely!: Battling, Bellowing Bella Abzug by Sarah Aronson stands out. Dressed in bright colors by illustrator Andrea D’Aquino, and later in her trademark hats, Abzug nearly jumps off the page, as does the New York City of her childhood. Although Abzug’s political history is well-documented, it may come as a surprise to readers, as it did to me, that she insisted on saying Kaddish for her father in the men’s section of her shul. An afterword gives more details about Abzug’s life, including a timeline and photographs.

In Ping-Pong Shabbat: The True Story of Champion Estee Ackerman, Ann D. Koffsky celebrates the story of then-11-year-old Estee, who chose to forgo her chance at a gold medal rather than play ping-pong on Shabbat. The illustrations by Abigail Rajunov, punctuated with onomatopoeia, show Estee’s fierce determination and competitive spirit as well as her modest clothing, including long sleeves and a long skirt. Estee, now only a college student, will surely be an inspiring role model for both female athletes and shomer Shabbat athletes of any gender.

Finally, it’s time for Hanukkah! First we have Little Dreidel Learns to Spin by Rebecca Gardyn Levington, illustrated by Taryn Johnson. With rollicking rhymes and clever puns (Little Dreidel almost breaks her shin!), and a smattering of Yiddish (glossary included), this tale of persistence is handled with a light touch.

Joyce Shriebman takes on the valid complaint that “Hanukkah is not the Jewish Christmas!” in her epistolary picture book Oy, Santa!: Or, There’s a Latke to Learn about Hanukkah, illustrated by Gila von Meissner. Ollie Overstreet emails a well-meaning but confused Santa to explain that he does not celebrate Christmas, and a back-and-forth about Hanukkah—and other Jewish holidays—ensues. Children will delight in joining in the refrain “oy, Santa!” Any Jew who has ever seen challah displayed for Passover or ham being sold for Rosh Hashanah will get a kick out of Santa telling Ollie to enjoy his Hanukkah matzo.

When we talk about diversity within Jewish children’s books, people tend to mean racial and ethnic diversity, but diversity of religious observance and practice is often overlooked. Joshua S. Levy gives it some much needed attention in Finn and Ezra’s Bar Mitzvah Time Loop. Finn, a more secular Jew, and Ezra, an Orthodox Jew, are having their bar mitzvah parties on the same day in the same hotel. But at 1:36 p.m. on Sunday of their bar mitzvah weekend, time stops and they wake up on the previous Friday morning. If they want to escape this never-ending torture, Finn and Ezra are going to have to work together … but as family secrets are revealed, maybe they don’t want to escape this time loop after all.

Deborah Lakritz addresses middle-school friendship drama against a backdrop of the Yom Kippur War, Watergate, and PTSD in Things That Shimmer. Although today’s young readers will likely have limited knowledge about that history, they will easily relate to Melanie’s struggle to decide whether being a member of The Shimmers, the perfectly named popular crowd, is worth sacrificing other friendships and her own values. The book is a fun introduction to the early 1970s, complete with bell-bottoms and a “soundtrack” in which various songs by Elton John, the Carpenters, and a young Michael Jackson are mentioned.

The Sephardic experience is brought to life in Ruth Behar’s epic Across So Many Seas, in which we follow one family from 1492 Spain to modern-day Miami (skipping a few hundred years in the middle). When Paloma visits Spain in 2023 with her family, things come full circle. Music provides a beautiful through line to this family saga.

Many—too many?—middle-grade books are Holocaust stories or at least Holocaust-adjacent, and three books this year are intergenerational Holocaust stories. In Not Nothing, Gayle Forman takes the somewhat tired trope of a “delinquent” child who is sentenced to community service and is thereby transformed, and treats it with honesty and compassion. Alex, whose mother is mentally ill and who lives with an aunt and uncle who he feels do not want him, has committed an initially unspecified crime. His punishment is community service at a retirement home. It turns out that he has a special rapport with the residents, particularly the narrator, 107-year-old Holocaust survivor Joseph Kravitz who, until meeting Alex, had not spoken for years. Alex not only develops a bond with Joseph, but makes a friend in Maya-Jade (don’t forget the hyphen! She insists she can hear if you leave it out when you say her name), an Asian girl adopted by two moms, one of whom is Jewish, who also volunteers at the home where her grandmother lives. Alex learns from both Joseph and Maya-Jade that even the happiest family has its sorrows and he develops confidence and the ability to do—and want to do—teshuvah.

More than 30 years after her now-classic Number the Stars, Lois Lowry again tackles the Holocaust in Tree. Table. Book. Quirky 11-year-old Sophie Winslow informs us that she has made it her mission to make sure her next-door neighbor and best friend, Sophie Gershowitz (77 years her senior) can continue to live on her own. In pursuit of this goal, she asks Sophie G. to tell her stories about her past, which imply that the older Sophie lost her whole family in the Holocaust.

In The Color of Sound by Emily Barth Isler, Rosie, a gifted violinist with synesthesia is currently “on strike” from music, much to her parents’ chagrin. Rosie and her mom travel to spend the summer with Rosie’s maternal grandparents. When Rosie time travels and meets her own mom at her age, she is more confused than ever as to how the fun girl she meets could have turned into her uptight mother, but her grandparents’ history, including her great-grandparents’ survival of the Holocaust, sheds some light. A subplot about Rosie making new friends and trying improv gives the reader a break from the heavier family drama, but if I have one critique of this book, it’s that Isler tries to cram too much into one story.

Although Max in the House of Spies: A Tale of World War II by Adam Gidwitz is, as clearly delineated by its subtitle, a WWII story, it is not primarily a heartrending Holocaust story but a thrilling adventure story. Max, a German Jew, has been sent by his parents to England for his safety, where he still faces antisemitism. When he realizes that his familiarity with Berlin, perfect German, and his knowledge of radios would make him a perfect spy, he seeks to become one … and succeeds! And, oh, he just happens to have two immortal creatures sitting on his shoulders: Stein, a dybbuk, and Berg, a kobold, who provide a sarcastic running commentary on the action. Gidwitz provides historical context—and an explanation of dybbuks and kobolds—in an afterword and also includes an annotated bibliography. The book—the first in a duology—ends with quite the cliffhanger, as Max parachutes into enemy territory and finds himself unexpectedly alone.

In her young-adult novel The Blood Years, Elana K. Arnold is unsparing in her portrayal of what happened to the Jews of Czernowitz, Romania, through the lens of teenage Rieke. Rieke deals not only with the invasion of her town, first by the Russians, then by the Nazis, but with her weak, depressed mother, and her strong-willed sister. Arnold based this story on her grandmother and includes a foreword, an author’s note, a list of books for further reading, and a brief timeline of the history of Czernowitz.

Antisemitism appears in a very different context in the young-adult novel Just A Hat by S. Khubiar. It is 1979 and Iranian Jewish Joseph Nissan, the 13-year-old son of immigrants, faces the usual problems of growing up: girls, school, football, embarrassing parents, and bullies, as well as Jew-hatred. But the Iranian hostage crisis and a local drug ring make him even more of a target. Joseph finds refuge in his piano-playing and relationships with beloved piano teacher, his Latino friends, and a cousin. Although this is another book that is overly ambitious, it is a welcome window into a Jewish American experience and American history that is rarely shown in children’s literature.

One word of advice: Don’t let the fact that these are children’s books deter you from reading these gems yourself.