This unique literary study of Yiddish children's periodicals casts new light on secular Yiddish schools in America in the first half of the twentieth century. Rejecting the traditional religious education of the Talmud Torahs and congregational schools, these Yiddish schools chose Yiddish itself as the primary conduit of Jewish identity and culture. Four Yiddish school networks emerged, which despite their political and ideological differences were all committed to propagating the Yiddish language, supporting social justice, and preparing their students for participation in both Jewish and American culture. Focusing on the Yiddish children's periodicals produced by the Labor Zionist Farband, the secular Sholem Aleichem schools, the socialist Workmen's Circle, and the Ordn schools of the Communist-aligned International Workers Order, Naomi Kadar shows how secular immigrant Jews sought to pass on their identity and values as they prepared their youth to become full-fledged Americans.

Through the lens of children's literature, explores the largely untold story of secular Yiddish schools in America

You want kids who feel great about themselves and love being Jewish...You want them to be happy and excited about Jewish activities...You want them to be outgoing and enthusiastic about Judaism...and frankly, you're not quite sure how to make this all happen. Book jacket.

A guide to reconciling Jewish tradition and modern, secular identity

Raising Jewish children in today's secular culture poses unique and serious challenges. How do parents pass on a positive, vital sense of identity, religion, and heritage without turning their kids off or overwhelming them? How do you explain what it means to be Jewish if you are ambivalent about it yourself? And perhaps most important, how do parents who have had little or no formal religious training themselves pass on rich, multilayered traditions that may have been missing from their own childhood experiences? In Becoming a Jewish Parent: How to Explore Spirituality and Tradition with Your Children, Daniel Gordis has written an invaluable guide for parents who are interested in introducing Judaism into their homes so that their children can grow up loving, understanding, and cherishing their heritage. Filled with delightful and inspiring anecdotes, thoughtful information about the history, holidays, and traditions that shape Judaism, as well as a useful glossary and incredibly thorough reference section, this book is a vital resource that you will want to refer to again and again. Becoming a Jewish Parent tackles major issues in contemporary life and offers thoughtful approaches and insights to dealing with such complicated subjects as using ritual to make space for feeling, talking about God when we have doubts, incorporating girls into what has been primarily a male tradition, and becoming part of a community that supports your ideals. Becoming a Jewish Parent is the book to turn to at every phase of a family's spiritual quest. If being a good parent means having a subtle, sophisticated, and appropriate sense of what is "honest" when it comes to love, sex, police, thegovernment, or other complicated issues, the same is clearly true with God. We could, when our children ask about God, tell them about all the things we're not sure about, all the reasons we could come up with to doubt that God is "out there."

What it means to be a Jew lies at the very heart of Confessions of a Secular Jew, a provocative memoir and a thoughtful speculation on the nature of Jewish identity and experience in an increasingly secular world. The legacy bequeathed to Eugene Goodheart was a "progressive" secular Yiddish education which identifi ed Jewish struggles against oppression with working class struggles against exploitation. In the vanguard was the Soviet Union. Goodheart's heroes were Moses, Bar Kochbah, Judah Maccabee, Karl Marx and that strange honorary Jew, Joseph Stalin, whose anti-Semitism would later become known to the world. Confessions of a Secular Jew is the story of Goodheart's disillusionment with the naive, even false, progressivism of that education. At the same time, it is an attempt to rescue and come to grips with the positive remains of that education and heritage.