Sunday, Oct 19, 2025 5:00 PM

Location:
A Cappella Books
208 Haralson Avenue, NE
Atlanta, Georgia 30307

How modern Yiddish children’s literature gave expression to emerging forms of Jewish identity across the twentieth century.

A Cappella Books is delighted to welcome Miriam Udel, a scholar of Yiddish language and literature, for a discussion of her latest work, “Modern Jewish Worldmaking Through Yiddish Children’s Literature.”

This event is free and open to the public; copies of the book will be available for purchase.

About the Book

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. 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.

About the Author

Miriam Udel is associate professor of Yiddish language, literature, and culture and the Judith London Evans Director of the Tam Institute for Jewish Studies at Emory University. She is the author of “Never Better! The Modern Jewish Picaresque” and the editor and translator of “Honey on the Page: A Treasury of Yiddish Children’s Literature.”