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A Recipe for American Jewish Integration: The Adventures of Ktonton and Hillels Happy Holidays
- The Lion and the Unicorn
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 27, Number 3, September 2003
- pp. 344-361
- 10.1353/uni.2003.0036
- Article
- Additional Information
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Two of the most popular Jewish children's books of the 1930s, Sadie Rose Weilerstein's The Adventures of K'tonton (Women's League of the United Synagogue, 1935) and Mamie Goldsmith Gamoran's Hillel's Happy Holidays (Union of American Hebrew Congregations, 1939), provide a window into the Jewish educational agenda of the interwar years. Both exemplify the balancing act that American Jews sought to perform between the prevailing assimilationist ethos and their allegiance to Jewish continuity. The publication of these two volumes signaled that American Jewish educators had embraced Horace Kallen's formulation of cultural pluralism, in effect rejecting both the radical paths of wholesale assimilation and ethnic isolationism.