Celebrate Purim with a Book About A Kid with Two Dads

The Jewish holiday of Purim begins Wednesday evening, so make sure to check out this Purim book featuring a boy with two dads!

Purim follows the formula of many a Jewish holiday: they tried to destroy us, we survived, let’s eat (and in the case of Purim, drink)! It commemorates the deliverance of the Jews in the Persian Empire from a plot to destroy them. Part of the story involves Queen Esther, wife of the Persian King Ahasuerus, revealing to him that she is Jewish and convincing him not to heed his evil counselor Haman, who wants to kill all the Jews.

Elisabeth Kushner’s The Purim Superhero came out a couple of years ago, but is always worth revisiting for the holiday. Kushner has explained, “Purim is very much about ‘coming out’ as yourself—[Queen] Esther is a great example of someone who comes out of the closet for a good cause. [To save her people.]” In her book, the protagonist Nate tries to remain true to himself in the face of expectations and peer pressure. Nate wants to dress up as an alien for Purim, but has doubts when he learns all of the other boys at his Hebrew school will be dressing up as superheroes. He asks his dads for advice, and they tell him, “Not all boys have to be the same thing.” Nate’s solution to the problem is original, yet feels like something a real boy would do.

I love that Kushner avoids trying too hard to prove that gay families are just like any others. She celebrates difference rather than touting sameness—while at the same time, depicting a two-dad family as an accepted part of a deep religious and cultural tradition. That’s important. With few exceptions, LGBTQ-inclusive picture books have largely shown culturally and religiously neutral families. Diversity of color has started to appear, but even those books don’t often explore the families’ various cultural and religious connections. (See my original piece about the book for more.)

And here’s a fun bit of LGBTQ history for the holiday as well. The publisher has called The Purim Superhero “the first LGBT-inclusive Jewish-themed children’s book published in English.” According to two reliable sources (a GLBTQ resources list from the American Library Association and Jaime Campbell Naidoo’s Rainbow Family Collections book), however, Patricia Schaffer’s 1986 book Chag Sameach! (Happy Holiday!) includes a lesbian couple and their child celebrating Havdalah, the end of Shabbat. You can see the page here at Google Books. What do you think?

As I see it, the couple could be read as sisters or friends, even if the author intended them to be a couple—so I think The Purim Superhero is still the first clearly LGBT-inclusive Jewish children’s book in English, and the first to focus on an LGBT family. But I have to imagine the Chag Sameach! image brought a smile to the face of some lesbian families back in the ’80s. (For perspective, 1985 was four years before the publication of Heather Has Two Mommies, and six years after the very first children’s book in English to feature same-sex parents, Jane Severance’s When Megan Went Away.)

Whether you’re celebrating Purim or not, spare a moment today to think about how you convey your cultural and/or faith traditions to your children. How do you find or create reflections of your family in them?

I am a member of the Amazon Associates program, and get a small referral fee from all purchases made at Amazon.com via links on this site. You are under no obligation to purchase through them.