No Small Matter Features of Jewish Childhood

For many centuries Jews have been renowned for the efforts they put into their children's welfare and education. Eventually, prioritizing children became a modern Western norm, as reflected in an abundance of research in fields such as pediatric medicine, psychology, and law. In other academic fields, however, young children in particular have received less attention, perhaps because they rarely leave written documentation. The interdisciplinary symposium in this volume seeks to overcome this challenge by delving into different facets of Jewish childhood in history, literature, and film.

No Small Matter visits five continents and studies Jewish children from the 19th century through the present. It includes essays on the demographic patterns of Jewish reproduction; on the evolution of bar and bat mitzvah ceremonies; on the role children played in the project of Hebrew revival; on their immigrant experiences in the United States; on novels for young Jewish readers written in Hebrew and Yiddish; and on Jewish themes in films featuring children. Several contributions focus on children who survived the Holocaust or the children of survivors in a variety of settings ranging from Europe, North Africa, and Israel to the summer bungalow colonies of the Catskill Mountains. In addition to the symposium, this volume also features essays on a transformative Yiddish poem by a Soviet Jewish author and on the cultural legacy of Lenny Bruce.

Anat Helman is a senior lecturer in the Department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She is the author of Young Tel Aviv: A Tale of Two Cities; A Coat of Many Colors: Dress Culture in the Young State of Israel; and Becoming Israeli: National Ideals and Everyday Life in the 1950s.

Symposium

No Small Matter: Features of Jewish Childhood

Paula Fass, Introduction: Jewish Children in the 20th Century

Uzi Rebhun, Jewish Reproduction and Children in the Modern Era

Yael Reshef, The Role of Children in the Revival of Hebrew

Eli Lederhendler, Children of the Great Atlantic Migration: Narratives of Young Jewish Lives

Yael Darr, Divided Unity: Jewish Writing for Children in the United States and Palestine at the Onset of the Second World War

Joanna Beata Michlic, Mapping the History of Child Holocaust Survivors

Nava T. Barazani, Hide-and-Seek: The Tale of Three Girls in the Giado Concentration Camp in Libya (1942-1943)

Amia Lieblich, The Children of Kfar Etzion: Resilience and Its Causes

Hannah Levinsky-Koevary, Catskills Idyll: Children of Holocaust Survivors and the Bungalow Colony Experience, 1950s-1960s

Liat Steir-Livny, Growing Up in the Shadow of the Past: Second-Generation Holocaust Survivors' Childhoods as Depicted in Israeli Documentary Films

Nathan Abrams, Rites of Passage: Jewish Representations of Children and Childhood in Contemporary Cinema

David Golinkin, The Transformation of the Bar Mitzvah Ceremony, 1800-2020

Essays

Anna Shternshis, The Child Who Cannot Ask: The Holocaust Poetry of Moisei Teif

Stephen J. Whitfield, The American Jewish Intelligentsia, the Claims of Humor-and the Case of Lenny Bruce

Review Essay

Deborah Dash Moore, Judaism and Jewishness in Histories of American Jewry

Book Reviews (arranged by subject)

Antisemitism and Holocaust

Aomar Boum and Sarah Abrevaya Stein (eds.), The Holocaust and North Africa, Denis Charbit

Havi Dreifuss (Ben-Sasson), Relations between Jews and Poles during the Holocaust: The Jewish Perspective, trans. Ora Cummings, Joshua D. Zimmerman

Otto Dov Kulka, German Jews in the Era of the ?Final Solution?: Essays on Jewish and Universal History, Richard Breitman

Hannah Pollin-Galay, Ecologies of Witnessing: Language, Place, and Holocaust Testimony, Eva Fogelman

Dan Porat, Bitter Reckoning: Israel Tries Holocaust Survivors as Nazi Collaborators, Gabriel N. Finder

Liat Steir-Livny, Remaking Holocaust Memory: Documentary Cinema by Third-Generation Survivors in Israel, Tobias Ebbrecht-Hartmann

Claus-Christian W. Szejnmann, Paula Cowan, and James Griffiths (eds.), Holocaust Education in Primary Schools in the Twenty-First Century: Current Practices, Potentials and Ways Forward, Eleni Karayianni

Arkadi Zeltser, Unwelcome Memory: Holocaust Monuments in the Soviet Union, Kiril Feferman

Cultural Studies and Literature

Omri Asscher, Reading America, Reading Israel: The Politics of Translation between Jews, Philip Hollander

Batya Brutin, Holocaust Icons in Art: The Warsaw Ghetto Boy and Anne Frank, Richard I. Cohen

Shalom Goldman, Starstruck in the Promised Land: How the Arts Shaped American Passions about Israel, M.M. Silver

Naomi B. Sokoloff and Nancy E. Berg (eds.), What We Talk About When We Talk about Hebrew (And What It Means to Americans), Hana Wirth-Nesher

History, Biography, and Social Science

Joyce Antler, Jewish Radical Feminism: Voices from the Women's Liberation Movement, Deborah Dash Moore

Jerold S. Auerbach, Print to Fit: The New York Times, Zionism and Israel 1896-2016, Stephen J. Whitfield

Jessica Cooperman, Making Judaism Safe for America: World War I and the Origins of Religious Pluralism, Deborah Dash Moore

Yaacov Falkov, Meragelei haye'arot: pe'ilutam hamodi'init shel hapartizanim hasovyetim 1941-1945 (Forest Spies: The Intelligence Activity of the Soviet Partisans 1941-1945), Samuel Barnai

Kirsten Fermaglich, A Rosenberg By Any Other Name: A History of Jewish Name Changing in America, Deborah Dash Moore

Viktor Kel'ner, Shchit: M.M. Vinaver i evreiskii vopros v Rossii v kontse XIX-nachale XX veka (Shield: M.M. Vinaver and the Jewish Question in Russia at the End of the Nineteenth-Beginning of the Twentieth Century), Brian Horowitz

Rachel Kranson, Ambivalent Embrace: Jewish Upward Mobility in Postwar America, Deborah Dash Moore

Laura Limonic, Kugel and Frijoles: Latino Jews in the United States, Ruth Behar

Daniel J. Walkowitz, The Remembered and Forgotten Jewish World: Jewish Heritage in Europe and the United States, Jack Kugelmass

Martina L. Weisz, Jews and Muslims in Contemporary Spain: Redefining National Boundaries, Daniela Flesler

Jack Wertheimer, The New American Judaism: How Jews Practice Their Religion Today, Deborah Dash Moore

Zionism, Israel, and the Middle East

Rachel S. Harris (ed.), Teaching the Arab-Israeli Conflict, Neil Caplan

Brian J. Horowitz, Vladimir Jabotinsky's Russian Years, 1900-1925, Abraham Ascher

Pnina Motzafi-Haller, Concrete Boxes: Mizrahi Women on Israel's Periphery, Hila Shalem Baharad

Hanna Yablonka, Yeladim beseder gamur: biyografiyah dorit shel yelidei haaretz 1948-1955 (Children by the Book, Biography of a Generation: The First Native Israelis Born 1948-1955), Israel Bartal

Note on Editorial Policy