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Podcast: New Books in Literary Studies
Episode: Miriam Udel, "Modern Jewish Worldmaking Through Yiddish Children's Literature" (Princeton UP, 2025)
Description: 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. In her book, Modern Jewish Worldmaking Through Yiddish Children's Literature (Princeton University Press, 2025), 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 an...