by Elizabeth Laird
2016

A story of the Second Intifada that demonizes and dehumanizes Israelis has no place in education. Yet that is exactly what Elizabeth Laird’s A Little Piece of Ground, now required reading in Newark public schools, does.

by Wafa’ Tarnowska

2021

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Young readers deserve to learn about talented, ambitious women, but erasing Israel from the map and Jewish women from the Middle East falsifies history and geography.

by Ahlam Bsharat, translated by Nancy Roberts
2016

A novel for teens that idolizes terrorists as martyrs and erases Israeli suffering inverts the realities of the Middle East conflict.  It doesn’t belong in the hands of impressionable young readers.

by Jody Sokolower
2021

The book is based on visits Jody Sokolower and her daughter Ericka made to Israel and the West Bank to “research” the situation of Arabs in East Jerusalem. It is a propagandistic book informed by Sokolower’s pre-existing bias – she promotes BDS against Israel – rather than by any objective research.

by Hannah Moushabeck, illustrated by Reem Madooh
2023

The author’s nostalgic account of her father’s childhood in East Jerusalem is marred by a pernicious agenda: To erase Israel, Jews, and Hebrew from Jerusalem and prejudice young readers against Israel.

by Golbarg Bashi, illustrated by Golrokh Nafisi
2018

Reading a good picture book with a child can be a joyful experience. But picture books that privilege indoctrination over imagination aren’t really literature. They betray the bond of trust between adult and child.

by Ahed Tamimi and Dena Takruri
2022

Ahed Tamimi is not a model of nonviolent resistance — what she describes as an unarmed “grassroots resistance movement” was actually quite violent — but young readers with no background knowledge about the Middle East will be easily misled by her deceptive autobiography.

by Jacquetta Nammar Feldman
2022

Children’s books aiming at even-handedness on the Arab-Israeli conflict usually fail – as novels, because they’re didactic, and as political tracts, because they’re inaccurate. This book is a case in point.