Choosing Jewish Joy with Miriam Udel

Join Miriam Udel as she gives a lecture entitled "Choosing Jewish Joy: How Yiddish Young Adult Novels Fostered Resilience After the Holocaust." This talk will draw on her new book, Modern Jewish Worldmaking Through Yiddish Children's Literature. The lecture will be followed by a reception. This event will not be livestreamed.

What did Yiddish-speaking teenagers in the Americas need to know about Jewish history during and immediately after the Holocaust? How ought the decimation of their cousins in Europe inflect their own Jewish lives? Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, the highest priority of educators in the secular Yiddish schooling networks of the New World was to help their students metabolize the violence in Europe and relate it meaningfully to their own choices as emerging adults. Historical fiction, richly woven with strands of myth, helped young readers to reflect upon a long history of resilience in the face of persecution and to imagine what Jewish thriving might look like.

Prof. Udel’s talk is part of the Leon and Alice F. Newton Lecture Series in Jewish Studies at Boston University. Since 1995, the Newton Lecture Fund has brought eminent scholars of Jewish Studies to lecture on campus.

Speaker Bio

Miriam Udel is associate professor of German Studies and Judith London Evans Director of the Tam Institute of Jewish Studies at Emory University, where 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 new book, Modern Jewish Worldmaking Through Yiddish Children's Literature, published with Princeton University Press, is a critical study of Ashkenazi Jewish modernity reimagined through the corpus of Yiddish children’s literature.