Three Boys, Two Lions: What Children’s Books Miss About Hatred

Review: Don’t Feed the Lion by Bianna Golodryga and Yonit Levi. Arcadia Children’s Books, 2025. 256 pp.

Bianna Golodryga and Yonit Levi’s Don’t Feed the Lion follows Theo Kaplan, a soccer player in suburban Chicago preparing for his bar mitzvah, who encounters antisemitism for the first time. Theo’s hero, a professional player named Wes Mitchell, declares that Jews can’t be trusted. A swastika appears on Theo’s locker. The school principal tries to bury the incident so the team can make the tournament. Theo’s coach eventually stands up for him, even though it may cost the team its spot. Angry teammates confront Theo, but Theo holds his own. By the end, the system has worked. The adults, once shamed into it, do the right thing.

The book, endorsed by Jake Tapper, Gal Gadot, Sacha Baron Cohen, and Israeli President Isaac Herzog, deserves credit for getting something right that books about antisemitism often miss. The Kaplans celebrate Shabbat every Friday night with their grandparents. Theo goes to synagogue. Judaism and Jewish values are part of his family’s life.

The writer Dara Horn, author of People Love Dead Jews, has criticized the Holocaust Museum’s children’s exhibit, “Daniel’s Story,” for doing the opposite. Its reconstruction of the room of a fictional German-Jewish boy (another soccer player, as it happens) focuses on his trophies and his father’s war medals. But the room leaves out what actually makes him Jewish. It has no tefillin, no Jewish texts, no youth-movement uniform. Daniel becomes a universal child so that any visitor can think: he’s just like me. A Holocaust survivor once challenged Horn on this point: wouldn’t it also be a tragedy if the boy had been a Yiddish-speaking Zionist? The museum’s display leaves the impression........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)