Zohar Shavit – författare

A Past Without Shadow examines 50 years of German children's books in which the darkest horrors of the Third Reich have routinely remained hidden. The horrors of the Third Reich are systematically screened and filtered, allowing the darker, bleaker parts of history to escape illumination. Here Zohar Shavit explores 345 German books for children describing the Third Reich and the Holocaust, and finds a shocking distortion of the past: a recurrent narrative which suggests that the Germans themselves had no hand in the suffering inflicted on the Jews. These books, Shavit argues, have created the false historical lesson that the real victims of Hitler's crimes were the German people themselves. First published to great acclaim in Hebrew and now available in English, this book is a wake-up call for anyone concerned about German children's literature and its responsibility to past and future.

Since its emergence in the seventeenth century as a distinctive cultural system, children’s literature has had a culturally inferior status resulting from its existence in a netherworld between the literary system and the educational system. In addition to its official readership—children—it has to be approved of by adults. Writers for children, explains Zohar Shavit, are constrained to respond to these multiple systems of often mutually contradictory demands. Most writers do not try to bypass these constraints, but accept them as a framework for their work. In the most extreme cases an author may ignore one segment of the readership. If the adult reader is ignored, the writer risks rejection, as is the case of popular literature. If the writer utilizes the child as a pseudo addressee in order to appeal to an adult audience, the result can be what Shavit terms an ambivalent work.Shavit analyzes the conventions and the moral aims that have structured children’s literature, from the fairy tales collected and reworked by Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm—in particular, “Little Red Riding Hood”—through the complex manipulations of Lewis Carroll in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, to the subversion of the genre’s canonical requirements in the chapbooks of the eighteenth century, and in the formulaic Nancy Drew books of the twentieth century. Throughout her study Shavit, explores not only how society has shaped children’s literature, but also how society has been reflected in the literary works it produces for its children.

A Past Without Shadow examines 50 years of German children's books in which the darkest horrors of the Third Reich have routinely remained hidden. The horrors of the Third Reich are systematically screened and filtered, allowing the darker, bleaker parts of history to escape illumination. Here Zohar Shavit explores 345 German books for children describing the Third Reich and the Holocaust, and finds a shocking distortion of the past: a recurrent narrative which suggests that the Germans themselves had no hand in the suffering inflicted on the Jews. These books, Shavit argues, have created the false historical lesson that the real victims of Hitler's crimes were the German people themselves. First published to great acclaim in Hebrew and now available in English, this book is a wake-up call for anyone concerned about German children's literature and its responsibility to past and future.

Towards the end of the eighteenth century, the maskilim, a group of young Jewish intellectuals who were starving for universal knowledge and for engagement with wider social circles, set out to reform Jewish society by expanding its cultural boundaries and building a bridge to the Enlightened world. Through dialogue with the non-Jewish society, and by introducing their fellow Jews to the texts and cultural goods of that society, mainly through translation, they sought to promote their social agenda and impart to their readers a new habitus, new social models of Bürgerlichkeit and Bildung, and a new awareness of civil equality and civil rights. This book explores this translational project and the ways by which it strove to affect a profound cultural change in the Jewish world. Zohar Shavit, professor emerita at the School for Cultural Studies at Tel Aviv University, is an internationally renowned authority on the history of Israeli culture, child and youth culture, and Hebrew and Jewish cultures, especially in the context of their relations with various European cultures. In 2025, she won the Israel Prize in the field of Culture and Arts for her groundbreaking research on childrens' culture, cultural transition, and the cultural history in Israeli and Jewish society. .

Die auf 2 Bände angelegte Bibliografie hebräischer und deutsch-jüdischer Kinder- und Jugendtexte ist ein einzigartiges Monument jüdischen Lebens in Deutschland. Die über 2.400 aufgenommenen Titel sind um zahlreiche textgeschichtliche Informationen ergänzt. Dazu zählen insbesondere Informationen über Gebrauchssituation des Textes, Intention, Inhalt, Struktur, Gattungszuordnung und Rezeptionsgeschichte. Aus dem Blickwinkel der deutsch-jüdischen Kinder- und Jugendliteratur erscheinen 3 Jahrhunderte jüdische Kultur im deutschsprachigen Raum in völlig neuem Licht.