Modern Jewish Worldmaking Through Yiddish Children's Literature

Miriam Udel

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English

Princeton University Press
14 October 2025

Literature: history & criticism; Children's literature studies: general

How modern Yiddish children's literature gave expression to emerging forms of Jewish identity

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.

By: Miriam Udel
Imprint: Princeton University Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 235mm, Width: 156mm,
ISBN: 9780691254371
ISBN 10: 0691254370
Pages: 384
Publication Date: 14 October 2025
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

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.

Reviews for Modern Jewish Worldmaking Through Yiddish Children's Literature

""Although its comprehensive nature alone makes Modern Jewish Worldmaking Through Yiddish Children’s Literature laudable, Udel’s abundant gifts as an author, her exhaustive research, and elegant writing elevate her book above its subject matter.""---Emily Schneider, Jewish Book Council ""How do you contain an explosion? If it is ideas you put them in a book, connect the bright sparks, and make it an illuminating volume. Udel’s book is so rich with ideas and details that the best way for me to describe them is as a jampacked container of diverse insights connected into a coherent package.""---Gabor Por, Jewish Book World