The TV Anchors Helping Kids Understand Antisemitism

This month’s newsletters are sponsored by the Jewish Book Council in celebration of 100 years of Jewish Book Month. Stay tuned at the end of this newsletter for a book recommendation from the JBC team.

Hey GOLDA gang! A reminder to RSVP here for our shopping night at The Jewish Museum this Monday in New York City.

Journalists Bianna Golodryga and Yonit Levi met during the 2016 election, when Levi, the anchor of Israel’s popular Channel 12 evening news broadcast, came to New York for reporting. 

“We really hit it off right away and just stayed in touch over the years,” Golodryga, the Emmy-winning anchor and CNN global affairs analyst, told me. “I felt like I found a mirror image of myself, only smarter, in Israel 5000 miles-plus away.”

As Yonit put it, “We connected on an emotional level because we both have daily news programs. It's very taxing, especially in a time like this where you have to be very composed and you're presenting to so many people. I think for each other, we were a shoulder to cry on. We would talk late into the night—my late into the night—almost every day.”

After October 7, those nightly conversations took a more urgent tone. As seasoned journalists, they predicted a spike in antisemitism around the world. And as mothers, they wished there was a way to help their kids understand the ways anti-Jewish hate shows itself—and what to do if they encountered it.

“There were books on Hanukkah for kindergartners, and books on the Holocaust for high schoolers, but nothing for this very smart, inquisitive age group that still talks to their parents and asks questions,” Golodryga explained. 

So these two extremely busy women took on an unusual challenge: writing a book that addressed antisemitism in a way that kids and their parents and teachers could digest and discuss. The result is Don’t Feed the Lion, a middle grade book published this week. Boasting blurbs from Gal Gadot and Sacha Baron Cohen, Don’t Feed the Lion tells the story of what happens when thirteen-year-old Theo Kaplan's soccer hero posts an antisemitic message that goes viral—and turns his family, team, and school upside down. 

I talked to the unlikely children’s book authors about Jewish parenting after October 7, what their kids think of the book, and more. Here’s an edited version of my conversation with Yonit Levi and Bianna Golodryga.

This book really seems to be the labor of Jewish mothers. I think mothers have had a really challenging time over the past few years. In addition to the unique horror of October 7—what happened to mothers and children—there's all sorts of ways in which we're having to talk to our children, guide them, shield them, and bring them into realities that I think a lot of Americans, at least, did not think they'd have to talk about with their kids anymore. How did your experiences as mothers navigating this time inform the book?

Yonit: it's been, as you said, an impossible two years trying to explain to kids what is going on. There was a week we were sitting in the safe room because of rockets coming from Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, and Yemen, and I found myself in the situation of having to explain to my kids not just the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but also Yemen. And then there was the moment when my son asked me about antisemitism, and he said “I don't understand why people who never met me hate me.” You find yourself in these really difficult and dark situations.

A piece of advice I got from a children’s psychologist was to just present as much of the truth as you can in a way that's adaptable for children. And I think this is why we tried to write this. This is a way of exploring this problem without looking away from it, and making it digestible for kids of that age.

Bianna: I moved to the U.S. as a Jewish political refugee from the Soviet Union, where antisemitism was institutionalized. Everything from your library card to your birth certificate identified you as a Jew. All of a sudden this goes from an important history lesson to a reality that you're facing and have to talk to your kids about. It all happened so quickly, too. I mean, you had athletes and rappers and celebrities sort of getting away with dabbling in antisemitism. Now you have people concerned about displaying menorahs and mezuzot, wearing their Star of David necklaces, or even sending their kids to college. 

If we as journalists didn’t know how to address this, we can only imagine how others were struggling. And we've heard anecdotally from so many friends and family members and acquaintances about how much they needed a book like this.

What have your kids said about the book? 

Yonit: Mine is a very easy answer, because the main character is Annie Eleanor, and my daughters are Annie and Eleanor. So my son is saying, “why am I not a major character in the book?” and “you’ve got to write a new one.” 

That is the main critique I have received at this point. Bianna’s kids actually read the book.

Bianna: My son's a tough grader, and he said it's not bad! So I will take that. If that had been a blurb on the book, I would have been very proud.

It must be funny to be on the receiving end of questions on this book tour. You're normally the ones asking the questions, but now the tables have turned. What has that been like?

Bianna: I have a newfound respect for the interviewee! It's a learning experience. I think we’ve become more and more comfortable with it the more interviews we do. And thank goodness I have a co-author, because there's strength in numbers and we empower each other.

Yonit: It does teach you a lot about being on the other side. I think it might have made us better interviewers, this whole experience.

Thanks to the brilliant Bianna and Yonit for chatting with me. You can order Don’t Feed the Lion here.  

This Sunday, join GOLDA at the Jewish Book Month 100 pop-up bookstore on the Lower East Side. We’ll be hanging out there from 2 to 3 p.m.

And Monday is our big GOLDA night out at the Jewish Museum Shop! You can RSVP here. 

Stay GOLDA,

Stephanie

Jewish Book Council Recommends:

Unfinished Acts of Wild Creation, by Sarah Yahm, stayed with me as a sweeping yet intimate portrait of a Jewish family moving through love, illness, and the complicated pull of generational ties. It hits the emotional terrain I’ve been drawn to this year, especially in stories that explore how parents and children inherit, reshape, or sometimes break the patterns passed down to them.

-Naomi Firestone-Teeter, Jewish Book Council CEO