I was just recently talking to someone who said that her parents didn’t let her read Harry Potter until high school because of kishuf. I simply did not chap- even if little kids think that magic is real after reading them, that’s still not kishuf. And even then, it doesn’t exactly take rocket science to figure out that magic really doesn’t exist, and it’s the rare kid past the age of about ten who still thinks magic is real- even all of those kids who sat up the night of their eleventh birthday waiting for an owl from Hogwarts don’t actually think it’s really true. Shocker. *sits back and waits for the cries of “heretic!”*
(Technically, according to the Rashbam, it wouldn’t be considered kishuf if only because it’s not listed in the Torah as being kishuf- he says that if it’s not in the Torah as kishuf, it could have a natural reason that we just don’t understand because it hasn’t yet been discovered. That’s one of the reasons, incidentally, that hypnosis was permitted long before it was discovered not to be magically based.
Oh, and the Shulchan Aruch would apparently permit nonverbal spells as they don’t mention the name of an avodah zara, but that’s an extrapolation, so feel free to correct me on that one.)
I don’t really get connecting Harry Potter and Judaism, and honestly it feels a bit squicky to me, but still, I don’t get all the kishufy stuff.
And I’ve read all of the books and seen a couple of movies (to my dismay… about ten hours of my life I’ll never get back) and I fail to see specifically Christian allegories. You find them if you look for them (and that’s incidentally my opinion on literary criticism as well, so if you’re into that then we’re at an impasse here).