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294 “Thou Shalt Teach It to Thy Children” What American Jewish Children’s Literature Teaches about the Holocaust Peter Haas I Although a good deal has been written about Holocaust education at the college and university level, little attention has been paid to what is being taught in Jewish institutions for younger students, that is, in day schools, supplementary schools, synagogues, and the like. Even less is known about what Jewish children who have no formal Jewish education after Bar/Bat Mitzvah age know about the Holocaust. Our interest in this project was sparked by a desire to know what “Millennials”—children coming of age in the last decade or so—know or think they know about the Holocaust. It is our assumption that what they learn when they arrive on our college campuses is not only a result of formal Jewish education . It is also a product of popular culture, be it films like X-Men or material read in high school such as The Diary of Anne Frank. There is, however, a third medium which may also be highly influential and yet is not widely studied by scholars, namely fiction books about the Holocaust written especially for children below seventh grade. What follows is our first step to survey this literature and to draw some preliminary conclusions about its history, development, and message. We want to stress at the outset that in no way are we claiming to be comprehensive. The amount of material out there that could arguably be included under the rubric “Children’s Holocaust Literature ” is immense. What we have done, we believe, is looked at a varied enough sample to be able to draw some reasonably accurate, if tentative, conclusions. The conclusions themselves lead to some interesting broader questions about how the Holocaust might well be seen and understood by children today, and so about the nature of Holocaust awareness in the next generation of American Jewish leadership. Before turning to our discussion, we wish to bring certain central questions to the front. There is, first and foremost, an inherent tension in the genre of children’s Holocaust literature. On the one hand, the Holocaust is such a significant part of the contemporary Jewish narrative that it cannot, nor should not, be ignored. The younger generation needs to be made aware in a responsible way of this formative event in contemporary Jewish culture. On the other hand, the very nature of the Holocaust is such that it is not suitable for all children, especially those below fourth grade or so. Jewish educators and librarians thus find themselves in an awkward situation. In essence, they have to decide whether or not to make Holocaust information available to children below fourth grade and, if so, how to pres- “Thou Shalt Teach It to Thy Children” 295 ent a proper sense of the Shoah to young children without exposing them to its atrocities. This is an issue for parents as well, which in turn creates some market demand for writing Holocaust books for ever younger audiences. In most communities, the Holocaust is usually not taught until fifth grade, whether in secular or synagogue schools. As a result, many educators and librarians do not discuss the subject before fifth grade, leaving parents with the task of determining whether to shelter their children from this information or to prepare them for it in some manner, a job for which parents may or may not be prepared. Yet, for a variety of reasons, many parents do feel a need to expose young children to the Holocaust in some way at some time. Some feel this need so as to socialize their children into the Jewish community and give them some background for the classes they will have during the middle school years and for the many books about the Holocaust that were written for pre-teens. Others introduce children to the topic because of family members who were refuges or survivors. So the first question is, what should characterize children’s books on the Holocaust for this younger age group? A second question has to do with what one hopes to accomplish through a children’s book on the Holocaust. At all grade levels, there is the issue of how accurate and detailed an author needs to be when dealing with the Holocaust. It is important, of course, for children’s textbooks and novels to be accurate, but how graphic should they be especially in relation to atrocities? And if...

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