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 that those cases might be more complicated. Golodryga and Levi do not make that mistake. They do not de-Judaize their victims. What they de-Judaize is the hatred.

In Don’t Feed the Lion, antisemitism has no arguments or motivation. A celebrity says something ugly. A symbol is drawn on a locker. Classmates look away. The novel treats all of this as a failure of institutional courage, a simple problem that pressure can fix. The book’s title comes from advice Theo’s grandfather gives him: don’t feed the lion, meaning don’t let hatred consume you; feed your heart instead. Theo works the lesson into his bar mitzvah speech. It is a nice idea, and it is one of the morals at the center of the book.

It is also strange zoology. A lion you don’t feed does not disappear. It gets hungrier. A starving predator is more dangerous, not less. The metaphor undermines its own lesson.

But the deeper problem is not unique to this novel. Children’s literature about prejudice almost never gives the reader access to the arguments behind the hatred. In To Kill a Mockingbird, Bob Ewell is vicious and dishonest, but he never articulates why one race is inherently better than another. Racism appears as cruelty and social habit rather than as something people reason their way into. Even the Harry Potter series, which is explicitly built around an ideology, pure-blood supremacy, never really explains why anyone would believe it. Voldemort and the Death Eaters believe in blood purity, but the books never ask the reader to understand why it appeals to anyone. The bigotry functions as a sorting mechanism: good people reject it, bad people embrace it. This is an understandable choice. To explain hatred too clearly risks making it seem reasonable. But the cost is that prejudice comes to seem simpler than it is, like a character defect rather than a system of ideas that can actually convince otherwise decent people.

Lion Feuchtwanger’s 1933 novel The Oppermanns is one of the rare works that refuses that simplification. Berthold Oppermann, like Theo and Daniel, is a Jewish teenager and soccer player. He attends a progressive Berlin school where his beloved professor has just been replaced by a Nazi named Vogelsang. For a class presentation, Berthold argues that the German hero Arminius achieved a spiritual rather than a concrete military victory for Germany. Vogelsang is enraged and demands a humiliating public recantation. Berthold’s parents urge him to apologize. The school rector, who is sympathetic, tells Berthold plainly that he cannot protect him. Vogelsang, meanwhile, encourages another student to murder a similarly “traitorous” Jewish writer. The killer faces no consequences.

Feuchtwanger does not deliver a lecture on antisemitic ideology. What he shows instead is how the liberal world realizes too late that the hatred confronting it is not intellectually flabby at all. It is believed. It is confident. The Oppermann family initially trusts that the fever will pass, that people will come to their senses. Some do. A hospital director agrees that Jewish physicians are being treated unfairly but shrinks from confronting the authorities. The rector knows Berthold is being singled out but hesitates, hoping to preserve his own position. None of these people are antisemites. They are liberals. And what proves flabby is not the hatred but the liberalism, the assumption that decency, once appealed to, will prevail.

Berthold sees the truth before the adults do. He understands that no recantation will satisfy Vogelsang, that the system itself has turned, that the lion cannot be placated. He kills himself. Feuchtwanger had written the plague and then caught it. By 1940, his citizenship stripped, his home ransacked, his books burned, he was interned at Les Milles, a squalid camp near Aix-en-Provence. His fellow internee Walter Hasenclever killed himself there. Feuchtwanger prepared to do the same if the German army arrived. He escaped only because his wife Marta and an American consular official smuggled him out disguised in a woman’s overcoat, passing a police checkpoint as the diplomat’s mother-in-law. His novel offered no program for resistance. Its moral, if it has one, is not “speak up” and it is not “don’t feed the lion.” It is closer to: if you see a lion, run.

Don’t Feed the Lion teaches courage, and courage matters. But the antisemitism Jewish teenagers will actually encounter is not embarrassed. It is friends listening to Tucker Carlson nodding along as a guest explains that Jews are the real problem in America. It is Epstein memes on social media. It is caricatures of hook-nosed, money-grubbing Jews on platforms teenagers actually use, and exposés of Orthodox communities edited to incite hatred. On campus it is BDS petitions that frame singling out Israel as justice, encampments where you are told to go back to Poland, and the slow discovery that some of the people you like think Zionist is a slur or that violence against Israelis is justified. None of this will slink off in shame from adult scolding. The people doing it are convinced that hostility toward Jews is morally correct. A grandfather’s wisdom about not feeding the lion will not prepare anyone for that.

Golodryga and Levi wrote a book in which hatred is weak, and the system ultimately defeats it when good people refuse to be bystanders. Feuchtwanger wrote a book in which the system was fragile, and hatred robust. Both are about Jewish boys who play soccer and face antisemitism at school. The difference is that one author believed the lion was a metaphor. The other knew it was not.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)