CSWR Common Room, Harvard Divinity School, 42 Francis Avenue, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138
The Jewish Studies Workshop is proud to host:
“Umbrella Sky: Modern Jewish Worldmaking Through Yiddish Children’s Literature” | Miriam Udel
Around the turn of the twentieth century, a group of Yiddish-speaking educators, authors, and cultural leaders undertook a bold project: creating a corpus of nearly one thousand books and several periodicals, which flourished in conjunction with the secular Yiddish school systems that spanned the globe in the 1920s and 30s. These vibrant texts cut across continents and ideologies but shared in their creators’ overarching goal: to write into being a better world, a shenere un besere velt—in a distinctively Yiddish key. The question of what a “better world” looks like is, of course, inextricably bound up in questions of political vision. Investigated as an archive, the stories, poems, and plays written for children during the early twentieth century furnish a novel record of the movements—geographic and ideological—that made Ashkenazi Jewry fully modern.
Miriam Udel is Judith London Evans Director of the Tam Institute for Jewish Studies and Associate Professor of German Studies, Emory University. Her teaching focuses on Yiddish language, literature, and culture. She holds an AB in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations and a PhD in Comparative Literature, both from Harvard University. She was ordained in 2019 as part of the first cohort of the Executive Ordination Track at Yeshivat Maharat, a program designed to bring qualified mid-career women into the Orthodox Jewish rabbinate.
Udel is the author of Never Better!: The Modern Jewish Picaresque (University of Michigan Press), winner of the 2017 National Jewish Book Award in Modern Jewish Thought and Experience. She is the editor and translator of Honey on the Page: A Treasury of Yiddish Children’s Literature (NYU Press, 2020), winner of the Judaica Reference Award from the Association of Jewish Libraries. Udel’s translation of Chaver Paver’s 1935 story collection about the adventures of a lovable proletarian mutt became the basis for Theater Emory’s 2021 puppet film Labzik: Tales of a Clever Pup; her full translation of the stories will appear next year with SUNY Press. In October, Princeton University Press will publish her critical study Modern Jewish Worldmaking Through Yiddish Children’s Literature.
Her ongoing research looks to children’s literature and culture as a powerful force for political formation and a resource for the intergenerational transmission of culture, values, and ideology. She is spending 2024-25 in New York as the inaugural Robert S. Rifkind Senior Fellow at the Center for Jewish History, the Covenant Foundation Jewish Family Education Fellow, and the Emory College Chronos Fellow.
This event is co-sponsored by the Center for Jewish Studies and the Jewish Studies Workshop.