The World of the OLOMEINU / OUR WORLD Children's Magazine

• In Event: Mapping Jewish Experiences

Abstract

From 1945 to 2011, Torah Umesorah (the National Society for Hebrew Day Schools) published the Olomeinu / Our World magazine, distributed primarily through Orthodox Jewish day schools across America. Spanning the decades when America Haredism defined itself as distinct from Modern Orthodoxy (ca. 1960s, Heilman 2006), the magazine is a rich resource for tracking subtle shifts contributing to larger shifts in ideology. This mapping project surveys locations in the magazine's news pieces, historical and biographical sketches, fictional stories, and more, as part of an effort to visualize the shape of the world as the reader of this magazine might have understood it. This is especially important as the magazine moved from its broadly Orthodox reach in its first few decades to a more insular focus on Haredi ideology and communities, and as American Haredism itself grew more insular and increasingly limited children's access to non-Haredi texts. As attested to by several adults whose childhoods were heavily informed by the Olomeinu, the view of world geography and culture fostered by the magazine associates specific places with specific eras and events in Jewish history, creating gaps on the map and in the timeline where and when nothing deemed significant to Jewish history took place. The larger project interrogates associations made between figures in various spheres, including historical and contemporary; rabbinic and layperson; Jewish and political leadership; Jews and their non-Jewish neighbors; Haredi and non-Haredi Jews, or their equivalents before the advent of Haredism; and children and adults. Analysis of the relationships between people in various places and eras will aid in analysis of each place's overall characterization and therefore its influence on the Haredi child reader's understanding of the world and their place in it. This talk addresses some of the technical considerations and their effect on the overall project goal, including the treatment of multiple eras with differing political borders on a single map, the treatment of regions as defined by Jewish history rather than geopolitical history, and the preservation of spelling variations in place names in order to fully capture the image of the world as presented in the magazine.

Author

• Dainy Bernstein, University of Pennsylvania