Modern Jewish Worldmaking Through Yiddish Children’s Literature

Modern Jewish Worldmaking Through Yiddish Children’s Literature

Join us on Monday, Dec 9 at 7:30PM at the Miami Beach JCC for an evening with Miriam Udel, discussing her latest book on the overlooked world of Yiddish children’s literature and what it reveals about modern Jewish life. Written with warmth and insight, the book reframes stories of childhood, migration, and resilience—offering striking echoes for our own time.

🎟 Free & open to the public — RSVP recommended.

Written in an accessible and humane way, the book considers the neglected corpus of literature written for children in Yiddish during the twentieth century as a new archive for reexamining the modern Ashkenazi experience, especially during the twentieth century. The book grapples with changes in family life and our understanding of childhood, alongside Jewish experiences of migration and the need to confront antisemitic violence. Because we all walk around now wondering which year of the 1930’s we’re currently living in, the book offers a lot of contemporary resonance.

MIRIAM UDEL is Judith London Evans Director of the Tam Institute of Jewish Studies and associate professor of Yiddish language, literature, and culture at Emory University, where she studies the Jewish encounter with modernity. She holds an AB in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations and a PhD in Comparative Literature, both from Harvard University. Her academic research interests include 20th-century Yiddish literature and culture, Jewish children’s literature, American-Jewish literature, and genre studies. She is also 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 Honey on the Page: A Treasury of Yiddish Children’s Literature (NYU Press, 2021). Udel was ordained in 2019 as part of the first cohort of the Executive Ordination Track at Yeshivat Maharat, a program designed to bring qualified mid-career women into the Orthodox rabbinate.

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