• Wishing Upon the Same Stars

    by Jacquetta Nammar Feldman
    2022

    Children’s books aiming at even-handedness on the Arab-Israeli conflict usually fail – as novels, because they’re didactic, and as political tracts, because they’re inaccurate. This book is a case in point.

  • Young Palestinians Speak: Living Under Occupation

    by Anthony Robinson and Annemarie Young
    2017

    Young readers can learn empathy when they listen to the voices of their contemporaries from other cultures. But when the words they hear are full of lies and distortions, they’re not learning empathy – they’re learning hatred.

  • Zain & Mima Stand for Palestine

    by Eman Kourtam
    2022

    Authors of picture books often seek to glorify their vision of moral courage. However, when an author’s vision relies on antisemitic stereotypes and inaccurate history, the resulting picture book will be offensive and even dangerous.

Featured author: Naomi shihab nye

Maligning Israel for young readers

The books we read as children stay with us all our lives. In our earliest stories, big, bad wolves threaten innocent children – and few of us grow up with warm, fuzzy feelings about wolves. Replace that wolf with an Israeli soldier, and you have an indelible image. That is the danger of the writings of Palestinian-American children’s poet and novelist Naomi Shihab Nye.