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 a groundbreaking work on Yiddish children's literature, explores how these stories reflect Jewish life and identity. She discusses how the literature served as a conduit for cultural nationalism while grappling with themes like shame, loss, and childhood ideals. Udel highlights the balance between secular Jewish pasts and modern futures, revealing how authors infused messages of political activism, empathy, and resilience in their narratives, especially in the context of Holocaust trauma.

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ANECDOTE

Project Sparked By Teaching And Parenting

Udel began the project while teaching Yiddish and raising young children and wondered if Yiddish had ever produced children's literature.
That question launched over a decade of research and a companion anthology, Honey on the Page.

INSIGHT

Yiddish As Worldmaking, Not Nation Building

Yiddish children's literature acted as a transnational project of symbolic worldmaking rather than conventional nation-building.
Authors used stories, poems, and drama to give children a conceptual homeland of shared values across continents.

INSIGHT

Two Kinds Of Yiddish Shame

Udel traces two dominant forms of shame around Yiddish: shame of speaking it and shame of having lost it.
Cultural leaders aimed to dismantle that shame by revaluing Yiddish through children's texts.

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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.

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