Modern Jewish Worldmaking Through Yiddish Children's Literature
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Book Talk
Admission: Free Registration is required. |
As migration carried Yiddish to several continents during the twentieth century, an increasingly global community of speakers and readers clung to Jewish heritage while striving to help their children make sense of their lives as Jews in the modern world. In Modern Jewish Worldmaking Through Yiddish Children’s Literature, Miriam Udel traces how the stories and poems written for these Yiddish-speaking children underpinned new formulations of secular Jewishness. Udel discusses how Yiddish children’s literature espoused various political ideologies and constituted a project of Jewish cultural nationalism before the Holocaust. Modern Jewish Worldmaking Through Yiddish Children’s Literature shows how Yiddish authors, educators, and cultural leaders, confronting practical limits on their ability to forge a fully realized nation of their own, focused instead on making a symbolic and conceptual world for Jewish children to inhabit with dignity, justice, and joy.
Join YIVO for a conversation with Udel about this new book, led by Marjorie Ingall.
This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.
About the Speakers
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).
Marjorie Ingall is the author of Mamaleh Knows Best: What Jewish Mothers Do to Raise Successful, Creative, Empathetic, Independent Children and Sorry Sorry Sorry: The Case for Good Apologies (with New York Times-bestselling author Susan McCarthy), as well as co-creator of the website SorryWatch, which analyzes apologies in the news, in history, and in the arts. She is also the author of Hungry (with Crystal Renn), The Field Guide to North American Males, and Smart Sex (with Jessica Vitkus). She often writes about children’s books for the New York Times Book Review. She has been a columnist for Tablet Magazine and The Forward; a contributing writer for Glamour and Self; and Senior Writer at Sassy, where she was also the books editor.