On Jewishness, the Holocaust and other sorts of discontent – Marjorie Ingall in NYT, (thanks to a friend who forwarded me this article with the comment (‘I think we can count her among the discontented.’)
:

‘Every year, the Association of Jewish Libraries presents its Sydney Taylor Book Award to the most “outstanding books for children and teens that authentically portray the Jewish experience.” At this year’s ceremony, on June 29, not a single children’s book about the Holocaust won a gold medal. As one of the judges, I consider this a triumph.
Here’s why. Unfortunately, to “authentically portray the Jewish experience” all too often means to “focus on the Holocaust.” In the 53 years since the award’s establishment in 1968, 105 children’s and young adult books have won gold medals; of these, 31 are about the Holocaust. (That’s almost 30 percent, if you’re doing the math.) Looked at another way, there were just 23 years — fewer than half — in which a Holocaust book was not among the gold medalists.’

(…)

‘(Ask Jewish millennials about their childhood love of “The Devil’s Arithmetic,” a middle-grade time-travel novel in which a bratty tween girl opens the door for Elijah at her family’s Passover Seder and is transported to an Eastern European shtetl in 1942, where she learns not to be such a jerk. Four-word spoiler alert: Redemption through gas chamber.)
More and more Jews seem to base Jewish identity on the Holocaust. In 2020, 76 percent of respondents in a Pew Research Center survey of American Jews (up from 73 percent in 2013) said that “remembering the Holocaust” was essential to being Jewish — more than the number who rated essential leading a moral and ethical life, working for justice and equality in society, being intellectually curious, continuing family traditions or observing Jewish law. With violence against Jews on the rise worldwide — and the fact that 66 percent of millennials don’t know what Auschwitz was — it’s certainly vital for non-Jews to understand our tortuous history, full of expulsions and hatred, even if more recently it’s also been characterized by prosperity and comfort.’

(…)

‘Though the Holocaust books that have won Sydney Taylor awards are mostly excellent, the truth is that excellence in Holocaust books is rare. Most Holocaust kidlit is, in fact, godawful: age-inappropriate (why do we need a picture book about a cat witnessing Kristallnacht?), misleading (the vast majority of Jewish families were not, in fact, reunited after the war, yet children’s books need happy endings, so …) and based on elisions of fiction and fact (the king of Denmark did not wear a yellow star in sympathy with the Jewish community; a famous Italian bicyclistprobably did not save 800 Jews).
And too many focus on noble Christians rescuing passive, helpless Jews. We don’t need more righteous-gentile books; none will improve on Lois Lowry’s flawless “Number the Stars,” anyway. They’re the equivalent of white-savior narratives in Black literature. Show us Jewish resistance fighters, ghetto combatants, smugglers and spies! And genug with the well-meaning but lazy young adult novels that use the Holocaust as an atmospheric, high-drama backdrop for a love story, providing emotional intensity without true gravitas.’

(…)

‘And, oy, “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas.” Nine-year-old Bruno is the son of a Nazi commandant, yet he has no idea what his dad does or even what a Jew is. He befriends a Jewish boy, Shmuel, who somehow manages to slip away from his daily activities in Auschwitz to hang out with Bruno at an unelectrified, unguarded fence. This tale isn’t heartwarming; it’s a lie. Jews who managed to reach those (in fact, electrified) fences hurled themselves against them to commit suicide. Bruno would have known what Jews were; by 1935, 60 percent of German boys were members of the Hitler Youth. Bruno would not have thought the people in “striped pajamas” were on vacation; real inmates looked like walking skeletons. And the majority of 9-year-old boys were gassed on arrival at Auschwitz, so Shmuel probably wouldn’t have been there at all.’

(…)

‘Holocaust stories focus almost exclusively on Ashkenazi Jews, although the American Jewish population is increasingly diverse. The Pew survey found that 17 percent of U.S. Jews now live in households in which at least one person is Black, Hispanic, Asian or multiracial; among Jews in the youngest cohort, ages 18 to 29, 15 percent identify as nonwhite, compared with 4 percent of Jews 50 and over.
Publishers: Give us books about a Black Orthodox Jewish kid who solves mysteries, about college students debating Israel and Palestine, about keeping kosher at a state fair, about a Jewish girl on a harsh desert planet who rescues a fugitive droid and saves the galaxy. Give us biographies of important Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews. Give us more and better contemporary stories in which Jewishness isn’t the problem or even the main subject, but rather a facet of the protagonist’s nuanced identity. Parents, teachers, librarians: Buy these books!’

Read the article here.

Well, where shall we start? Assimilation, especially, in the US is a fact, and without the religious aspect of Jewishness much what remains is a kind of solidarity with the dead, in other words the Holocaust as secular religion. This has all kinds of less than positive side effects, and it’s only a matter of time before the Holocaust will become more and more something like the slavery of the Jews in Egypt, with this difference that we know that the Holocaust happened and is well-documented, whereas the Passover myth is most probably just a myth. But to criticize it means ignoring the fact that the Shoah is indeed much what remains of Jewish identity.

Whether a novel ‘about a Jewish girl on a harsh desert planet who rescues a fugitive droid and saves the galaxy,’ will do much to save Jewish identity in the US is doubtful. Will it save Jewish identity from becoming a war memorial? I'm not sure. And of course, fighting assimilation is not the core business of the children’s book writer or any other writer.

Most of the Jewish victims in World War II were Askhenazi Jews, this might not be according to the contemporary standards of so-called diversity, but the new standards are nothing but a mutation of the old social realism, that demanded that the novelist, and the artist for that matter, produced novels and art that were uplifting for the working class and hailed the ideal of the soon to be reached workers’ paradise.
All other novels and art were considered bourgeois, decadent and perverse, soon to be forgotten.

The demands of social realism made a comeback, with some minor changes, all in the hope to reach a worldly paradise. Novelists and artists should bow once again to the demands of the contemporary commissar and the helpers of this commissar.

Which is not to say that all is equally bad in this piece, Ingalls summary of ‘The Devil’s Arithmetic’ is hilarious.
And ‘The Boy in the Striped Pajamas’ has been thoroughly analyzed by Ruth Franklin.

Less Holocaust and more black Jews in Jewish kidlit, as if literature is about the content. Forget the style. Social realism after all found most of what we call style merely a bourgeois invention.
Soon we will be asked to skip Anne Frank’s diary, much too many Ashkenazi Jews.
Nowadays, we are longing for sexier victims than the old victims.