An Introduction to Hebrew Children's Literature

Prof. Yael Darr

 

The aim of this course is to recount the history of Hebrew children's literature. We shall begin by investigating children's literature that was written in Hebrew and Yiddish in the first decades of the twentieth century in Europe and Palestine.  We will continue by discussing when a literary hegemony was established, what were its literary tastes, and who its agents were.

We shall then explore   the impact on the literary preferences of the shift from a pioneering ethos to a civilian one in the 1950s and 1960s, and the growing role, from the 1970s, of commercial culture.  We conclude by considering the present-day influence of globalization and new media on Israeli children's literature.