When Children's Literature is Not Defined by "Innocence"
June 10, 2013
Jodi Eichler-Levine is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh. She holds a joint appointment with the Women’s Studies Program.
Suffer the Little Children
by Jodi Eichler-Levine
NYU Press , 2013
What inspired you to write Suffer the Little Children?
When I was in graduate school, my (future) husband and I received a gag gift for Hanukkah. It was a two-foot-tall plush Judah Maccabee doll. The box said he was a "NOW a Huggable Hanukkah Hero." He smiled, but he also had a shiny silver sword and shield.
I had just finished reading all four books of the Maccabees in a class on ancient Jewish history. The contrast between those bloody tales and our "huggable hero" stopped me in my tracks. It's common, of course, to sanitize or glorify the past in our retellings (and even those ancient books are themselves retellings), but something about a huggable religious zealot really captured my imagination. All I wanted to think about was how we mediate the past for children—and how we tell stories about children who lived in the past. Writing about religion, memory, and children's literature became my way of doing that.
What's the most important take home message for readers?
From 1945 to the present, Jewish and African Americans were grafted into greater American civic acceptance through their children's stories—especially those stories with overtones of suffering, exodus, and sacrifice—in modes that have long been part of the grand narratives of American religious history.
http://www.religiondispatches.org/books/culture/7141/when_children_s_literature_is_not_defined_by__innocence_/
