the Dybbukby Mari Lowe was the Sydney Taylor middle grade winner and Big Dreams, Small Fish by the late Paula Cohen took a Sydney Taylor picture book honor. Three of Levine Querido’s Jewish-themed books published in 2022 won recognition at the 2023 American Library Association Youth Media Awards: When the Angels Left the Old Country by Sacha Lamb won the YA categories of the Stonewall Book Award and Sydney Taylor Book Award and was a Printz Honor title Aviva vs.

Because there’s more to any marginalized identity than the single most heavily identified story about that group.” We don’t want every book about Black people to be about slavery and sorrow, and we don’t want every Jewish book to be about the Holocaust or Hanukkah. And they say it’s important to show Jews of different religious levels, skin colors, cultural backgrounds, sexual orientations, or gender identities, demonstrating the many ways in which Jews can be intersectional.Īrthur Levine, founder of Levine Querido, says its mission is “battling against the phenomenon of the ‘single story’ for any historically marginalized group. Increasingly, writers are telling different types of stories-fantasy or contemporary, funny or serious-about characters who happen to be Jewish. Jewish representation in children’s books can’t just be about holidays, the Holocaust, or antisemitism, say authors and publishers. That vision led to her middle grade novel, Honey and Me (Scholastic, 2022), about two sixth-grade friends in a close-knit Jewish community. “I knew about their school and I knew about their family, and I knew that one family was slightly more religious than the other, and I knew what kind of camp they went to and what kind of shul they went to, and I could imagine their houses.” Because I imagined them in a religious community, I just suddenly knew all kinds of things about them,” she says. She had an image in her head of “two girls sitting on a bus, religious, and suddenly everything just crystallized. At first she wrote stories like the mainstream books she’d grown up with-those without Jewish characters-but they didn’t feel right to her. That experience stayed with Drazin when she started writing for children. “Those were the only representations of observant Jewish families that I read,” she says. When Meira Drazin looked for Jewish books growing up, she found Holocaust novels and the “All-of-a-Kind Family” series. From the left: Meira Drazin Arthur Levine Michal Babay Danielle Joseph R.

When angels left the old country