The Sandra Seltzer Silberman HBI Conversations Series is sponsored by Debs Weinberg to honor her mother Sandy’s love of books and learning about Jewish women’s lives.

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Sandra Seltzer Silberman HBI Conversations Series. Cosponsored by The Jewish Library of Baltimore

Winner, 75th Nation­al Jew­ish Book Award in Edu­ca­tion & Jew­ish Identity

Miriam Udel’s rich Modern Jewish Worldmaking Through Yiddish Children’s Literature explores the world of Jewish literature written for Yiddish-speaking children during the 20th century when the community clung to Jewish heritage while also helping their children make sense of being a Jew in the modern world. Udel elegantly traces how these stories and poems underpinned new formulations of secular Jewishness, creating a world for Jewish children to inhabit with dignity, justice, and joy.

HBI is delighted to have supported Udel’s research for Modern Jewish Worldmaking. In 2022, Udel explored the “New Girl” — a creature of freedom and central character in Yiddish literature — as an HBI Scholar in Residence.

Dr. Miriam Udel is an associate professor of Yiddish Language, Literature, and Culture and the Judith London Evans Director of the Tam Institute of Jewish Studies at Emory University. She holds an AB in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations and a PhD in Comparative Literature, both from Harvard University, and was ordained in 2019 at Yeshivat Maharat. She is the author of Never Better!: The Modern Jewish Picaresque (University of Michigan Press) and the editor and translator of Honey on the Page: A Treasury of Yiddish Children’s Literature (NYU Press).

Modern Jewish Worldmaking is available at Princeton University Press, Bookshop, Amazon, and your local bookseller.