Jewish Children’s Magazines and Websites

As a writer, I fall midway between “frum” and “liberal.” I have been strictly Torah-observant for many  years. However, outside of time in Boston, where the Orthodox community is well integrated with the rest of the population, I have always lived “out of town,” that is, not in New York or another major Orthodox community. Additionally, I have no children. This means that my life experience is too different from the average Orthodox parent or child’s for me to write realistically about life within that culture.

At the same time, I have had little contact with liberal Jews and their lives. I have not had children living the lives of suburban liberal Jewish kids and have not run across many of those families. My neighborhoods have mostly been home to a mix of  non-Jews and Orthodox Jews.  Those Jews have been mostly “ba’alei teshuva,” people like me who accepted Orthodoxy as adults, so their culture is more like the American norm. The liberal synagogues and families have mostly been in other neighborhoods.

Yet I love our tradition and values, and feel called to share these with Jewish children. 

There are many Orthodox children’s magazine markets, but as I said I feel unqualified to write for them.

I believe I can write for ordinary American kids while inserting some Jewishness, so I began hunting for markets. But searching for liberal Jewish children’s websites and magazine markets that are looking for short stories and articles with Jewish characters and Jewish themes, I found exactly--zero.

BabagaNewz was mentioned frequently online. It was published between 2001, when I wrote several articles for it, and 2008. There was a lovely retrospective article about World Over, which I read as a child; it stopped publishing in the 1980’s. 

Honeycake (honeycakemagazine.com) is the only non-Orthodox Jewish magazine for which I  found a current website. According to the website it has produced two prototypes which have been sent to 1000 potential subscribers. The website says it will start regular publication in the near future.

PJ Library started a renewal in Jewish books for children, and a few new publishers have opened in order to feed PJL’s insatiable appetite. But where are the magazines, webzines and websites for our children? 

The educational and psychological literature is full of articles about the necessity for children, in order to develop strong and healthy self-images, to read about kids like themselves, and for children to read about those who are different. How easy is this? Not easy. 

I found only two magazines published in the USA for black girls (none for black boys) and one exclusively multicultural (“children of color, minorities, and under-represented populations”) magazine. So Jewish children cannot easily read about Jewish children, and non-Jewish children cannot easily learn about us. It is a lose-lose proposition.

So here is my Big Question: Why aren’t there magazines, webzines, and websites for Jewish kids?

Is there no interest among children? Have the attempts been too edgy or too politically correct to appeal to the masses? BabagaNewz was definitely only interested in edgy material; I know because a piece they commissioned from me was killed when what I discovered didn’t fit their edgy narrative. Was their slant what ultimately caused the magazine to die?

Are most parents simply not interested enough in passing on Jewish knowledge, tradition, or culture to pay a nominal fee to bring relevant information home to their children?

Or what? If you have any ideas, please put them in the Comments below.