"To Have it in Their Hearts"

Résumé du livre

PJ Library is an organization that sends free Jewish children's books to families every month. My project is to understand the life of PJ Library books -- their use, circulation, and uptake. My primary ethnographic research question is: How are the discourses and ideologies in PJ Library books taken up, (re)considered, and disputed at various stages of life? Sub-questions include: 1) What rhetorical strategies do Jewish children's media use to address and historicize the philosophical question of Judaism and homeland? 2) How do the children at the Congregation Beth Am nursery school in Northern California engage with PJ Library books? 3) How do Jewish college students respond to and reconsider PJ Library books from their childhood?

I use ethnographic research methods in two communities to explore my research questions. The first community is a synagogue-affiliated nursery school in northern California. The second community is a focus group of college students who grew up with PJ Library. I also interviewed a PJ Library staff member. My ethnographic fieldwork is composed entirely of participant observation and interview methods.

Secondary literature about PJ Library and discourses on the website presume a simple transfer of Jewishness to family; ethnographic findings complicate the picture of PJ Library books as a one-way indoctrinating force. I argue that the ideologies and discourses of PJ Library books are taken up in silly, strange, and thoughtful ways that reveal new possibilities for fashioning a Jewish self beyond agendas of Jewish institutions. My research contributes to larger anthropological questions about religious literacies and diasporic cultural production.