The purpose of this research is to examine the portrayal of Jewish children in American twentieth century children's literature. The plan of the research will be to set forth the principal themes that emerge in literature and to show, as appropriate, shifts in such portrayals in works written before World War II and after, and to discuss, with reference to specific works, how and why the portrayal of Jewish children changed in postwar literature, in response to shifts in the culture at large.
The specialized quality of Jewish culture has been a subject of concern to some who have studied the prewar experiences of Jews in America and Europe. Its most striking characteristic is the degree to which, prior to the Nazi baiting period, it was essentially ignored. Before World War II, and particularly before 1920, East European Jews, who had comprised a good deal of turn of the century immigration, were considered entirely unassimilable into mainstream American culture and so were basically ignored by the public school curriculum. Indeed, as late as 1976, Schwartz and Isser note, most elementary school textbooks offered only token notice of Jews or other minority groups and so offered either stereotypes or virtually no role models for pupils. The implications of failure of children to assimilate on one hand and an insistence upon submerging the Jewish culture on the other are discussed in a study of elementary education of Jewish children in Weimar Germany (1920 1932), where the majority culture, not progressive minority reformers of education, set the educational agenda. Even within the Weimar Jewish culture, where social discrimination was always more or less a fact of life, a specifically minority oriented education was not considered especially significant; far more important were more generalized (i.e., mainstream culture) economic and social considerations (Levine passim; Schwartz and Isser 187 90). Curiously, the inculcati...