Through stories, children learn to recognize good and bad and to identify who matters and who doesn’t. Long before students develop the critical skills necessary to evaluate sources or recognize bias, narratives and repetitious imagery are imprinted in their minds. Those early impressions endure. When propagandistic manipulation of young minds is exposed, it is incumbent on the guardians of children to expose this and to present the facts about the flawed content.
In recent years, particularly since the horrific attack on Israeli communities bordering the Gaza strip on October 7, 2023, there has been, paradoxically, an increase in children’s books that present Israel in an extremely negative light. These depictions distort the true circumstances of Israel’s founding, falsely characterize Israel’s human rights record and conceal the longstanding Jewish presence in the land. Educator, book author and researcher, Marjorie Gann has documented such recurring patterns.
In widely used books, Zionism is deceptively fitted into a colonial framework which entails denying Jewish historical continuity in the land of Israel. Politically charged language is also employed without any historical basis. Many of these books implicitly or explicitly begin the story of the Israeli–Arab conflict with the establishment of the State of Israel, erasing the millennia of Jewish presence in the land, the waves of regional persecution that reduced the Jewish population to a remnant, the wars initiated by neighboring Islamic states, and the Arab rejection of the 1947 UN Partition Plan that would have set up a separate Arab state as well as a Jewish state in the land.
Maps are important as they provide a visual framework for students to understand Israel and the challenges it confronts. Some books provide maps that erase Israel entirely from the Middle East and replace it with alternative labeling. Others distort boundaries and frames of reference that mislead students about Israel’s size and vulnerabilities. Young people cannot be expected to understand that maps can be a political tool. For example the book Upside Down Iftar has a framed map depicting modern day Israel, overlaid with a keffiyeh pattern located both inside the book and on its back cover. When maps of Israel use only Arabic place names and are visually covered by a keffiyeh, a symbol associated with the Intifadas and violence against Israelis, students absorb messages that minimize or reject Jewish national identity and Israel’s legitimacy.
Books which indoctrinate students with false history and ideas do not circulate by accident. They move through established educational channels: educator associations and conferences, teacher unions, curriculum-sharing networks, professional review platforms, and school programming tied to cultural or heritage themes. In some cases, authors are invited into classrooms and public libraries as guest speakers.
A result of these alarming trends is that Jewish history is fragmented and incoherent in its presentation via books found in public institutions used by millions of Americans. Israel becomes an abstraction rather than a living, normal and diverse democratic state.
Teachers, librarians and students need exposure to literature that reflects the full breadth of Jewish history and Israeli life—literature that includes the many contributions of Jewish Americans to American society, and accounts of the real lives of Israelis, not propagandistic cutouts.
Such literature exists. There are many true to life books on Jewish and Israeli resilience in moments of historical rupture. They include Six-Day Hero and Beni’s War by Tammar Stein, stories that situate Israel’s early wars in a child’s emotional world—showing fear, courage, and survival not as abstractions, but as lived experience and pride in defending the country.
The Ship to Nowhere by Rona Arato tells the story of Jewish refugees attempting to reach the Land of Israel after the Holocaust, underscoring the historical urgency of Jewish refuge and return.
Other works document contemporary Jewish and Israeli experiences with clarity. Accounts of October 7, including Heroes of October 7, preserve testimony of civilian courage under terrible attack.
Books also focus on stories of Israelis in foreign lands. Titles such as Things That Shimmer, Not So Shy, and The Importance of Wings explore Israeli children navigating language, belonging, and cultural transition in the United States. Some of these stories unfold alongside real events, including the Yom Kippur War. These are not cardboard politically symbolic accounts but real and complex human stories.
Children’s literature can also help students understand the Jewish people’s ancient connection to the Land of Israel through history, archaeology, and lived experience. Books such as Tisha B’Av: A Jerusalem Journey, The Miracle Seed, and The Treasure of Tel Maresha each illuminate a different part of the history.
Tisha B’Av: A Jerusalem Journey introduces young readers to Jerusalem and the Jewish people’s enduring connection to the city through the memory of the First and Second Temples.
The Miracle Seed tells the remarkable true story of a 2,000-year-old Judean date seed discovered in an archeological site and brought back to life in modern Israel, creating a tangible link between ancient Judea and today. It introduces students to Israel’s achievements in scientific innovation.
The Treasure of Tel Maresha transports readers to ancient Maresha, where Jewish children and families lived 2000 years earlier in the Land of Israel, allowing young readers to experience daily Jewish life in the land thousands of years ago.
Together, these books help students understand that the Jewish connection to the Land of Israel is rooted in history, archaeology, and the continuous presence of the Jewish people long before the establishment of the modern State of Israel.
A fuller understanding of Jewish history also requires attention to communities too often absent from curricula and literature collections. Sephardic and Mizrahi narratives—such as The Wolf of Baghdad, Across So Many Seas, and The Girl with the Secret Name—restore Jewish life across Iraq, Spain, North Africa, and the broader diaspora, challenging the narrowing of Jewish history to a single geography or cultural lens.
And Jewish history is interwoven with American history. Books such as A Mitzvah for George Washington, Haym Solomon: American Patriot, The Boston Chocolate Party and The Polio Pioneer: Dr. Jonas Salk and the Polio Vaccine place Jewish figures within the civic and intellectual development of the United States itself, reinforcing a basic but often overlooked truth: Jewish history is not separate from the American story. It is a deep part of it.
Taken together, these books, and many others like them, demonstrate what factually grounded children’s literature can achieve in countering misleading and prejudicial accounts. They introduce students to the breadth of Jewish experiences across time and place, illuminate defining moments in Jewish and Israeli history, and present Jewish life through stories of family, resilience, immigration, innovation, and everyday experience. In doing so, they offer students the historical context and human understanding needed to engage thoughtfully with one of the world’s oldest peoples.
Schools and libraries have an essential responsibility. Their proper mission is to ensure the literature they select is historically accurate, intellectually honest, and worthy of the trust that parents and communities place in them. Students deserve books that expand knowledge, deepen historical understanding, and encourage thoughtful inquiry. The books students encounter today will shape how they understand Jews, Israel, and society as a whole.
Given the efforts to subvert the vital role of both school and community libraries in serving young readers, members of the public have a responsibility to review the offerings in their own locales and to take measures to promote sound literature.
