There is a particular kind of Jewish children’s book that many of us recognize immediately: A child learns about Hanukkah. A family prepares for Passover. Someone welcomes a newcomer. A grandparent shares an important tradition. Everybody learns a gentle lesson about kindness, identity, or belonging.
To be clear: there is absolutely nothing wrong with those books. Many are wonderful. They serve real purposes in homes, schools, libraries, and communities. But somewhere along the way, Jewish children’s literature started to become… careful.
Jewish books often feel as though they are expected to explain themselves, justify themselves or teach something important. To Carry Cultural Responsibility At All Times.
And when stories are carrying that much weight, they sometimes lose permission to be strange (which is unfortunate, because Jewish storytelling traditions have always been deeply weird). This is, after all, a culture that gives the world giant sea monsters, demons, mystical creatures made of clay, villages of fools, rabbis arguing about impossible hypothetical situations, and stories where people wrestle angels in the middle of the night. Jewish folklore is full of exaggeration, absurdity, dark humour, surreal logic, chaos, and comic disaster, and Jewish humour has long relied on anxiety, escalation, contradiction, and absurdity.
In other words, Jewish storytelling was never meant to live only inside safe boundaries.
Children from other backgrounds are allowed to encounter every kind of imaginative story imaginable. They get monsters, nonsense, danger, magical disasters, ridiculous humour, suspense, and chaos. Their cultural identity is allowed to exist inside stories that are playful, eccentric, and emotionally messy. Jewish children deserve that too. A Jewish story should not stop being Jewish the moment it becomes absurd.
In fact, absurdity often feels very Jewish. When I wrote Shark in the Sukkah, the intention obviously was to lean into the ridiculous, but also make it recognizably Jewish in its rhythms: communal panic, endless discussion, escalating opinions, a rabbi searching for answers, and ultimately a child calmly solving the problem by asking a simple question nobody else considered (kind of a kid version of yishuv ha-da’at).
In Don’t Unbraid the Challah, a child repeatedly unbraiding the challah to create increasingly elaborate inventions is silly and mischievous, but the story is also deeply connected to Jewish ritual, intergenerational relationships, and the idea that tradition can be alive, playful, and flexible.
But neither of these stories exist primarily to explain Judaism to outsiders. They simply allow Jewishness to exist naturally inside imaginative storytelling.
Representation is important. Cultural education is important. Stories about identity and history are important. But if those become the only kinds of stories we allow ourselves to tell, Jewish children’s literature starts to shrink. And a living culture needs room for nonsense.
It needs room for monsters and chaos and strange imagination. It needs stories where Jewish kids are not merely learning lessons or preserving traditions, but getting into trouble, making mistakes, solving bizarre problems, and inhabiting worlds that feel surprising. That’s because children do not experience life only as a series of educational moments. They experience it as weirdness, fear, curiosity, imagination, comedy, embarrassment, fascination, and disorder.
The good news is that Jewish storytelling traditions already contain all of those things, and we don’t need to invent weirdness from scratch.
We just need to remember that it was there all along.
