Modern Jewish Worldmaking Through Jewish Children's Literature

The Program in Jewish Culture & Society welcomed Miriam Udel to campus on February 23rd as a part of the Krouse Family Visiting Scholar in Judaism and Western Culture Fund's annual lecture series, with additional support from the Center for Children's Books. Udel is the Judith London Evans Director of the Tam Institute of Jewish Studies and associate professor of Yiddish language, literature, and culture at Emory University. The subject of her talk was her most recent monograph, Modern Jewish Worldmaking Through Yiddish Children's Literature (Princeton, 2026), which examines the process of worldmaking, or a framework for understanding what took hold where nation-building was not possible, in Yiddish children's literature of the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Udel defines the project as an attempt "to write into being a better world" (a shenere un besere velt) and argues that Yiddish children's literature is key to understanding Jewish modernity. Written during periods of rapid political and geographical upheaval, children's literature reflects changes in social and religious norms, nationalist and ethnographic projects, and new educational institutions. Providing an overview of key moments in the history of Yiddish children's literature, beginning in 1889 through the years immediately following the Holocaust, Udel demonstrates the geographic, ideological, aesthetic, and formal diversity of Yiddish children's literature.