Strikes at Storytime: How Children’s Literature Transforms Jewish Women’s Radical Labor Activism into Capitalist Moral Instruction

This paper examines children’s literature about Jewish women in the labor movement in order to analyze what story about the Jewish past this particular body of work tells, and what kind of Jewish future it wishes to shape. I argue that this children’s literature overwhelmingly erases the politics of the Jewish labor movement, particularly ignoring socialism, communism, and often even unionization, while amplifying the graphic violence of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire. The resulting stories become moral tales of doing the right thing in line with capitalist American values, rather than ones of Jewish left radicalism which has the potential to inform a future of principled labor activism and working-class solidarity. Ultimately, this paper questions what happens to the past, the present, and the future of American Judaism and of the American labor movement when the radicalism is erased but the violence remains.