Talking to Kids About the Refugee Crisis, Again
National Refugee Shabbat takes place on March 20 and 21, 2020. You may recall that in 2018, this event triggered the Pittsburgh shooter; he posted on social media that part of his motivation for killing Jews was the fact that we were secretly smuggling undocumented immigrants across the border. Now, with xenophobia in the United States at a new high, and with kids crowded into overpacked cages in unsanitary conditions with insufficient medical care in Texas, it’s even more important not to forget about the plight of refugees, even as we worry about our own families’ health.
As a parent, you can tap Passover as an opportunity to draw parallels between what the holiday celebrates—our people’s escape from slavery and intolerable living conditions in Egypt—and the experiences of people living in modern-day slavery and persecution today. To that end, here are some beautiful, age-appropriate new children’s books about refugees, immigrants, and asylum seekers. (The fact that I picked up most of them at three longstanding Lower East Side libraries was not lost on me; all three existed when many of our own families arrived as immigrants; one, Seward Park, was the library frequented by both author Sydney Taylor and her All-of-a-Kind Family characters.)
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