Limmud Toronto 2020

Children’s author Marjorie Gann will compare how authors from different interest groups (Jewish, Arab, and outside the invested communities) depict the history of the conflict and the lives of Jews and Arabs in Israel and the West Bank. Drawing on personal interviews with children’s writers in Canada and Israel, Marjorie will evaluate authors’ goals and research methods. Do they simply set out to tell a story, or is their purpose to educate or even indoctrinate young readers? Do they contextualize the horrors they depict, or cherry-pick incidents to make a political statement? Finally, how does this literature compare with other socially-engaged children’s books in Canada and the United States, from the mid-twentieth century to now? What comes first – literature or ideology?