"Albert E. Explains the Great Religions"—or, actually, he doesn't.

My son loves the Ich weiß was audiobooks, a German nonfiction series from Random House Deutschland covering many fields of basic knowledge in a way perfectly attuned to young minds. In the last year we have purchased and listened to nine installments, which I have reviewed very positively on this blog. We are looking forward to getting to all or most of the 48 of them eventually.

The audiobook on the major world religions, Albert E. erklärt Religionen, is the first one I have encountered with a flaw. But it's a serious one. Despite the cover picture featuring a rabbi with his arm around the pope ...

... and despite the announcement at minute 25:20 that "It's time to talk about the three great world religions," namely Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (one can question that ranking in today's world, but it has tradition in Germany), Judaism plays essentially no role in the audiobook. Worse, the particular way it plays no role is highly problematic when one reflects that the series is designed for impressionable young minds—specifically German minds.

All the other religions are discussed in detail for several minutes each (Buddhism 5:30-14:15; Hinduism 17:20-22:50; Christianity 27:48-35:36; Islam 36:20-42:00). Judaism gets less than 30 seconds (27:13-27:41).

Even worse: Judaism is excluded from the representation of community within the story, which features a bunch of children talking with each other about their beliefs. All the other religions are represented by a sympathetic child (Jenny for Buddhism [at least, she is learning about it in school and meditating at home]; Rashid for Hinduism, Jenny and Amalie for Christianity, and Nalan for Islam). Judaism gets no such representative. The only character in the story who explains anything about Judaism is ... a Christian pastor, in the context of a Christian confirmation lesson.

I mean, instead of the good pastor talking about Bar/Bat Mitzvah, how hard could it have been to script in four or five minutes with a Jewish child-friend of the group talking about going through Bar/Bat Mitzvah themselves? Maybe episode time was tight, but then there were 3.5 whole minutes on the religion of the ancient Egyptians at the beginning, which is cool to know about but which nobody practices anymore today, hello?

This minuscule amount of attention and lack of a representative in the community can leave two very unfortunate impressions about Judaism on the young German mind. First, that Judaism can be adequately represented and explained from the perspective of one of its "successor" religions. Secondly, and again, worse, that people of many different religions live and get along with each other in Germany, but no Jews. 

In an uncanny way, both of these impressions call to mind the worst sorts of historical associations when it comes to Judaism in the west, especially in Germany.

I really can't believe this audiobook got past a modern German editorial process.