When Darren and Suzanne Alexander’s eldest daughter aged out of Jewish day schools and youth programming in Edmonton in the late 2010s, they didn’t know how to keep her cultural Jewish education going.
Now, as their youngest son reaches that same threshold, the pair of educators are launching Yid Lit Club to help teenagers and young adults understand classic Jewish literature.
Students enrolled in one of the club’s three courses for the 2026-27 academic year will read one Jewish text or graphic novel per month from the 1930s onward and use the book’s literary techniques to write their own stories. Students will eventually publish their work in a Yid Lit Club podcast and a magazine, called Dor Almagor, that they design as part of the course.
“It’s a bit like the way being part of a high school play is so powerful for some kids,” Suzanne says of working on these collaborative projects. “You’re working together to create something, so that sense of purpose is so big.”
The Alexanders have more than 45 years of combined experience in education. Darren, originally from Toronto, has taught remedial literacy programs for adults, and communications courses at several colleges and universities across Canada. Suzanne worked in alternative schools before becoming an adult writing educator.
The couple have also run online workshops in the past. Over the 2025-26 academic year, they started Nifty Lit Club as a pilot project to help general audiences read classic books from as far back as the 1880s. They had a total of 28 students across five shorter courses.
But the dream to create a curriculum around Jewish reading existed years before the pilot project. Nifty Lit Club helped them test the at-home assignment format, which involves no video calls or lectures, before they brought it to their own community.
Yid Lit Club students will do close readings of their books independently to discover “the building blocks of the text,” a practice that’s often found in university literature courses, the couple says. Students will then work on creative writing assignments where they recreate the author’s style using their own worlds, characters and plots.
Suzanne says this format “demystifies the text” for students, which helps them appreciate it more. To Darren, it’s a format that can help youth regain higher-level reading skills as literacy rates drop for Canadians.
“I really do believe that this workshop approach is the way forward,” says Darren on improving literacy skills across the country.
Their three courses, especially Shmues, which is for 14- to 18-year-olds, will help youth learn to read advanced texts, Suzanne says. The syllabus includes works by Mordecai Richler, Chaim Potok and Dara Horn. Literacy rates have declined because teachers no longer help students bridge the gap between children’s books and adult literature, Suzanne says.
“It’s not that young people are not bright. They are very bright, and they are potentially just as capable at reading complex texts,” she says. “But they have not had the scaffolding that you need. You don’t go from reading Diary of a Wimpy Kid to Dickens.”
She adds that students will share their stories with peers as they progress through the workshops. This will help them connect with each other and their Jewish culture, which she says is crucial for adolescents who are still building their identities.
“The developmental task at that time for children is to become more independent, and to go outside of the family more,” Suzanne says. “Part of the impulse here is to provide a Jewish community experience and Jewish education that’s not explicitly religious in nature.”
Yid Lit Club’s course Shvel will give students aged 12 to 15 an “out of the box” extracurricular option by covering young adult books like Judy Blume’s Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret and Karen Hesse’s Letters from Rifka.
Their last year-long course, Schtick, draws on the history of Jewish graphic novels to teach children of any artistic skill level about visual storytelling.
“I think it makes sense to try and teach young people to read those in an insightful, creative way. Looking at those texts not just as a quick, pleasant read, but look at them as ‘How is this author-illustrator using the structure of the page to tell this story, and what is gained by having it in pictures instead of just in texts?’” Suzanne says.
Tuition for a year of workshops is $288. Each course has a maximum class size of 20 students.
But the couple says nobody is turned away from Yid Lit Club courses if they can’t afford tuition. They know enrolling children in extracurricular activities can be a difficult, expensive task for parents, and they want to increase access to literacy programs as much as possible.
“We really want to make sure that there’s no barriers,” Darren says. “It’s the beginning of something that’s going to be bigger down the road, and we really want to make sure that we’re giving back and making it available… Ultimately, in the end, it feels good to do that.”