Department of Germanic Languages & Literatures University of Toronto
You are warmly invited to a research talk by Miriam Udel, associate professor of German Studies and Judith London Evans Director of the Tam Institute of Jewish Studies at Emory University. Research Talk Title:Children’s Literature: Materials for Yiddish WorldmakingDate: Tuesday, April 1, 2025Time: 2:00 – 3:30 PMLocation: Charbonnel Lounge, 1st Floor, Elmsley Hall About the Lecture:Around the turn of the twentieth century, a group of Jewish educators, authors, and cultural leaders undertook a bold project: creating a corpus of nearly one thousand books and several periodicals, which flourished in conjunction with the secular Yiddish school systems that spanned the globe in the 1920s and 30s. These vibrant texts cut across continents and ideologies but shared in their creators’ overarching goal: to write into being a better world, a shenere un besere velt—in a distinctively Yiddish key. The question of what a “better world” looks like is, of course, inextricably bound up in questions of political vision. No less political is the imagined figure of the young reader, set against the backdrop of changing conceptions of childhood and family life. We will reconsider a set of “orphaned texts,” the stories, poems, and plays written for children during the first half of the twentieth century, ... Read More »
Research Talk by Prof. Miriam Udel | 2pm, April 1, 2025
