How Mensches Were Made: Politics and Ethics in Yiddish Children’s Literature

Class starts Jan 5 10:45am-12:00pm

Tuition: $360 | YIVO members: $270**

This is a live, online course held on Zoom. Enrollment will be capped at about 25 students. All course details (Zoom link, syllabus, handouts, recordings of class sessions, etc.) will be posted to Google Classroom. Students will be granted access to the class on Google Classroom after registering for the class here on the YIVO website. This class will be conducted in English, and any readings will be in English.

Instructor: Miriam Udel

Starting just over a century ago, Yiddish educators and cultural leaders in both Europe and the US started to write, publish, and disseminate stories, poems, and plays for the children of the Yiddish secular schools. These works reflected diverse worldviews, aesthetic preferences, ideas about childhood, and aspirations for the Jewish future. Through close, attentive readings of the sources themselves, this course will examine the symbolic worlds that this literature constructed for Jewish children to inhabit. Authors will include well-known Yiddish literary figures such as Kadya Molodowsky and Isaac Bashevis Singer, as well as lesser-known authors such as Zina Rabinowitz and Yudl Mark.

Course Materials:
Students should purchase the following texts:

Udel, Miriam. Honey on the Page: A Treasury of Yiddish Children’s Literature (NYU Press). (Purchase)
(optional) Udel, Miriam. Modern Jewish Worldmaking Through Yiddish Children’s Literature (Princeton University Press). (Purchase)

The instructor will provide all other course materials digitally throughout the class on Google Classroom.

Questions? Read our 2027 Winter Program FAQ.

Miriam Udel is Associate Professor of German Studies and Jewish Studies at Emory University, focusing on Yiddish language, literature, and culture. Udel’s academic research interests include twentieth-century Yiddish literature and culture, Jewish children’s literature, and American-Jewish literature. She is the author of Never Better!: The Modern Jewish Picaresque (University of Michigan Press, 2016), winner of the 2017 National Jewish Book Award in Modern Jewish Thought and Experience, and Modern Jewish Worldmaking Through Yiddish Children’s Literature (Princeton University Press, forthcoming 2025). She is also the editor and translator of Honey on the Page: A Treasury of Yiddish Children’s Literature (New York University Press, 2020).

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