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 Worldmaking
Date: Tuesday, April 1, 2025
Time: 2:00 – 3:30 PM
Location: 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, and trace the novel record they furnish of the movements—geospatial and ideological—that made Ashkenazi Jewry modern.
About the Speaker:
Miriam Udel is associate professor of German Studies and Judith London Evans Director of the Tam Institute of Jewish Studies at Emory University, where her teaching focuses on Yiddish language, literature, and culture. She holds an AB in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations and a PhD in Comparative Literature from Harvard University.
Udel is the author of Never Better!: The Modern Jewish Picaresque (University of Michigan Press), winner of the 2017 National Jewish Book Award in Modern Jewish Thought and Experience. She is the editor and translator of Honey on the Page: A Treasury of Yiddish Children’s Literature (NYU Press, 2020), winner of the Judaica Reference Award from the Association of Jewish Libraries. Her translation formed the basis for Theater Emory’s 2021 puppet film Labzik: Tales of a Clever Pup; a full translation of the twelve stories will appear next year with SUNY Press. In October, Princeton will publish her critical study Modern Jewish Worldmaking Through Yiddish Children’s Literature.
Her ongoing research looks to children’s literature and culture as a powerful force for political formation and a resource for the intergenerational transmission of culture, values, and ideology. She is spending 2024-25 in New York as the inaugural Robert S. Rifkind Senior Fellow at the Center for Jewish History, the Covenant Foundation Jewish Family Education Fellow, and the Emory College Chronos Fellow.
We look forward to welcoming you to this engaging talk!
