Miriam Udel, "Modern Jewish Worldmaking Through Yiddish Children's Literature" (Princeton UP, 2025)

Jan 6, 2026

Miriam Udel, an Associate Professor at Emory University and author of Modern Jewish Worldmaking Through Yiddish Children's Literature, delves into the rich tapestry of Yiddish children's literature. She highlights how these narratives shaped modern Jewish identities, from secular ideals to proto-feminism. Udel explores the genre's historical context, discussing feelings of shame, the importance of Shabbos, and its role in addressing Holocaust trauma. Her insights reveal how storytelling became a means of cultural resilience and political engagement.

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ANECDOTE

How The Project Began

Miriam Udel began this research while teaching Yiddish and parenting young children.
Her curiosity about whether Yiddish children's books existed launched over a decade of scholarship.

INSIGHT

Worldmaking Over Nation Building

Yiddish children's literature built symbolic worlds rather than conventional nation-states.
Authors used stories, poetry, and drama to give children an ideational homeland to inhabit and perpetuate.

INSIGHT

Shame And Loss Around Yiddish

Yiddish carried both shame and longing across generations.
Earlier shame called it a jargon, while modern loss produces guilt over not knowing the language.

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As migration carried Yiddish to several continents during the long 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 her book, Modern Jewish Worldmaking Through Yiddish Children's Literature (Princeton University Press, 2025), Miriam Udel traces how the stories and poems written for these Yiddish-speaking children underpinned new formulations of secular Jewishness.

Udel provides the most comprehensive study to date of this corpus of nearly a thousand picture books, chapter books, story and poetry collections, and anthologies. Moving geographically from Europe to the Americas and chronologically through the twentieth century, she considers this emerging canon in relation to the deep Jewish past and imagined Jewish futures before reckoning with the tragedy of the Holocaust. Udel discusses how Yiddish children’s literature espoused political ideologies ranging from socialism to Zionism and constituted a project of Jewish cultural nationalism, one shaped equally by the utopianism of the Jewish left and important shifts in the Western understanding of children, childhood, and family life.

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.

Interviewee: Miriam Udel is associate professor of German Studies and Jewish Studies at Emory University.

Host: Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Jewish Studies at Hunter College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com.