Feminist Books for Young Readers
Sharing Shalom by Danielle Sharkan, illustrated by Selina Alko (Holiday House, $18.99)
The next day, Leila tried to blend in. She didn’t want anyone to see she was Jewish. She tied back her curls. She tucked in her Star of David necklace. She tried not to be too loud, too bold, or too right. She didn’t even want to eat her lunch. It was too Jewish.
This picture book was inspired by a 1990s act of vandalism at the author’s synagogue in Skokie, Illinois when Sharkan was a child. This book describes the coming together of a community to repair the damage done.
Call Me Gebyanesh by Arlene Rosenfeld Schenker and Gebyanesh Addisu, illustrated by Chiara Fedele (Apples & Honey Press, $19.95)
I kept my head down during Torah study, hoping no one would call me Rakhel. I didn’t need to worry. No one talked to me. They only stared.
Ethiopian born co-author Gebyanesh Addisu recalls her first day of school, at age seven, when her teacher, calling the attendance, told her they would call her Rakhel because it was easier for Israelis to say. This picture book is the story of her silent hurt and, eventually, with encouragement from her mother, her pride in reclaiming her name and her identity.
Elsa’s Chess Board by Jenny Andrus, illustrated by Julie Downing (Neal Porter/Holiday House, 18.99)
Six-year-old Elsa spent hours watching her brothers play chess…In Vienna, Austria, in 1906, all the people Elsa loved most played chess. She longed to play too.
Based on the life of the author’s resilient grandmother, this picture book tells the story of a young girl persisting in learning to play chess despite being told it wasn’t a game for girls.
Eventually, she meets her husband through playing chess, escapes Europe during World War II, and finds chess a helpful common language in her new country, the United States. Years later, her grandson recovers her missing beloved chessboard in a box in a garage—in time to play with her.
The Trouble with Secrets by Naomi Milliner (Quill Tree Books, $19.99)
The trouble with keeping secrets was that secrets led to lies, and one lie led to the next and the next…like a not-so- fun game of dominoes.
Becky Myerson’s parents—a rabbi and her busy-being- rabbi’s-wife mom—refuse to let Becky audition for the all-county orchestra, anticipating what Becky still needs to do to prepare for her bat mitzvah.
Soon she discovers that her sister Sara, a high school senior, is falling in love with the son of a minister, though she knows her parents would vehemently oppose an interfaith romantic relatiionship. The burden of keeping their secrets from their parents because they believe their parent’s attitudes are unreasonable, becomes too much for these two sisters. When an unexpected but not unrelated accidental death occurs in this loving family, readers get to witness a variety of grief responses, and also the hope of beginning to heal from a devastating loss.
The Keeper of Stories, written by Caroline Kusin Pritchard, illustrated by Selina Alko (Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, $19.99)
When others tried to erase these stories and their tellers, the keeper welcomed the words that were safe nowhere else.
After a fire tore through the library and rare-book collection of New York City’s Jewish Theological Seminary in 1966, many approaches were tried to save the books. Ultimately, a huge community of volunteers salvaged an estimated 170,000 volumes by placing paper towels between the waterlogged pages.
This picture book, especially poignant in a time of widespread book banning in the United States, makes the point that libraries are essential to keep all our stories alive. In this case, especially Jewish stories.
On The Wings Of Eagles by Tami Lehman-Wilzig, illustrated by Alisha Monnin (Apples & Honey Press, $19.95)
“Remember I told you that one day we will fly out of Yemen on an eagle across the desert to Jerusalem, in our beloved homeland?…It is no longer safe for us in Yemen. It is time for the eagle to come.”
This historical fiction picture book, told from the point of view of Leah Ma’Udah, a child at the time, recounts how in 1949–50 pilots from Alaska Airlines flew 430 flights from Yemen to rescue 49,000 Yemenite Jews and bring them to Israel.
A Party For Florine: Florine Stettheimer and Me by Yevgenia Nayberg (Neal Porter books $18.99)
If I could throw a party for Florine, I would serve: Blue pancakes. Orange jelly beans. A tower of fruit on a white plate. All of this against a black tablecloth. I would decorate the table with giant flowers as big as bicycle wheels!
Florine Stettheimer (1871–1944) was born to a Jewish family in Rochester NY. Her paintings, “exuberant, levitating, deceivingly naïve” hang in the Metropolitan Museum in New York where Yevgenia Nayberg—who became an artist, picture-book illustrator and author—first encountered them in 2017. She recognized in Stettheimer a kind of artistic doppelganger.
Details of Stettheimer’s artistic and fascinating life (she settled in a famous apartment building in Manhattan with two sisters and her mom where they were known for their elegant parties) are in the backmatter of this unusual picture book for young readers.
Where are the Women? The Girl Scouts’ Campaign for the First Statue of Women in Central Park by Janice Hechter (Red Chair Press, $18.99)
Pippa and the other ten-year-old Girl Scouts were shocked when they visited the Roosevelt House in New York during the summer of 2016, and the guide told them not one statue in Central Park honored a woman.
This nonfiction picture book includes details of the perseverance and the successful efforts of Girl Scouts in New York City to raise, in Manhattan’s huge and celebrated park, a large statue of Sojourner Truth, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton sitting together.
A World Worth Saving by Kyle Lukoff (Dial Books $18.99)
“Perhaps I am here because you are a trans fourteen-year old who has already claimed the right to name himself. You are in the midst of your own creation, which gives you strength beyond imagining. And like the twilight, like the shore, like every littoral edge, one in the process of becoming is imbued with holiness.”
A golem—actually maybe a golem still defining itself differently—tells this to A, the narrator of this fantastical and timely middle grade novel, whose parents have been taking them lately to terrifying meetings of Save Our Sons and Daughters at a local church. Among the helpers A seeks out in their journey to rescue another kid who has disappeared into the vortex of conversion therapy is the rabbi of their childhood synagogue and her scholarly husband.
Loudmouth: Emma Goldman vs. America, A Love Story by Deborah Heiligman (Farrar Straus & Giroux, $21.99)
Emma said that in an anarchist society, women wouldn’t have to stay home and raise their children if they didn’t want to. There would be “common homes, big boarding schools” where children would be “properly cared for and educated and in every way given as good, and in most cases better care than they would receive in their own homes.” This way women who desired a broader life would have a “a chance to attain any height they desired. With no poor, no capitalists, and one common purpose….”
This biography for young adults tells of Emma Goldman (1869-1940), born to an Orthodox Jewish family in Lithuania, who emigrated to the U.S. as a teenager. When anarchist activists in Chicago were wrongly convicted of causing violent protests following a worker’s strike in 1886, Goldman was inspired to learn more. She became an outspoken leader of the anarchist movement in her new country, advocating for the dignity and rights of all workers, for labor unions, against capitalism, for feminism, for reproductive freedom for women, and for free love. Though she was a contemporary of the suffragist movement, “she didn’t believe in voting because she didn’t believe in government.”
She was arrested and incarcerated several times for her controversial views and––under the Espionage Act of 1917––eventually deported.
—Naomi Danis is an editor emerita at Lilith and the author of several picture books, most recently “Bye, Car.”
Art credit: Yevegenia Nayberg
