On Thursday October 27 at 3:00 p.m. in CL 501, the Children's Literature Program will host a talk by new VL Dainy Bernstein!
The texts that children read affect their view of the world. So what happens when children predominantly read literature produced by an insular community which views the outside world with distrust? For nearly seven decades from 1945-2011, children in the Orthodox Jewish community read the Olomeinu / Our World magazine, distributed monthly through their schools. Dainy Bernstein discusses the representations of locations in the magazine, their changes over the decades, and the effect of these representations on how the child understands the world, their place in it, and their relationship to other cultures.
Dainy Bernstein studies Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) Jewish children's literature and is a Visiting Lecturer in Literature at the University of Pittsburgh. Eir first book, Artifacts of Orthodox Jewish Childhoods, is an edited collection of personal and critical essays from scholars and laypeople. Ey is currently writing a short introduction to the development of Haredi children's literature in America.