Jewish American Heritage Month, Hungry Bears, And More Great Kids’ Books!

Where Rising is gentle and meditative, Challah Day! depicts the chaotic mayhem that often accompanies cooking with multiple children and pets. A family of four, plus their pet dog, prepare challah for dinner with grandparents. Offsay’s playful, rhyming text has the family joining together to follow the steps in baking the bread, while the illustrations show the mess that accompanies such preparations, from the baby throwing eggs on the floor to a braiding tug-of-war with the dog and creative ways of pouring flour. The illustrations take a whimsical turn when the children are depicted as smaller, climbing flour bags and hopping on sugar and oil. It’s a picture book full of Jewish joy. Back matter includes a description of why challah is important and a recipe.

This lovely picture book tells the story of Jewish life in Cochin, India. It is the first time I’ve read a children’s book centering Indian Jewish experiences. Leah is a storyteller, and after Shabbat, she tells stories to children in the synagogue’s courtyard. Butterflies listen nearby, and then one day, a butterfly notices that Leah seems sad and lands on her shoulder and asks why. She tells the butterfly that she and her family are leaving India to live in Israel. Leah misses India when she moves, but remembering her stories and the butterflies helps her.

This is one of my favorite middle grade novels of the year so far. It’s a beautiful historical fiction following four Jewish 12-year-old girls in the same family across the centuries. It begins with a young girl’s expulsion from Spain in 1492, then to Turkey, where the family finds refuge, then to Cuba, where Fidel Castro forces the family to leave, and finally to Miami. It’s really moving to read about how each journey is filled with terror and grief for lost homes and family, but then each new country becomes home and becomes loved and becomes integrated into the family’s culture, only for them to be rejected from the country once more for being Jewish. Behar has several other middle grade novels depicting Jewish experiences.

This joyful, cute middle grade is like a Jewish The Parent Trap and has sadly gone a bit under the radar. It takes place in the 1940s in a fictionalized city. Through some kind of magic, Shira and Esther were born nearly identical in the same hospital on the same day. But the girls could not be more different otherwise. Shira’s rabbi father looks down on her dreams of performing, while Esther’s stage performer mother is equally dismissive of Esther’s goals to learn more about Jewish religion. When the two 12-year-old girls meet for the first time, they hatch a plan to switch places and fulfill their dreams. It’s a delightful read.