Podcast Summary: "Modern Jewish Worldmaking Through Yiddish Children's Literature"

Podcast: New Books Network
Host: Schneer Zalman Neufeld
Guest: Miriam Udel, Associate Professor at Emory University
Book: Modern Jewish Worldmaking Through Yiddish Children's Literature (Princeton UP, 2025)
Date: January 6, 2026

Overview

This episode features an in-depth conversation with Miriam Udel about her new book, Modern Jewish Worldmaking Through Yiddish Children's Literature. The work explores how 20th-century Yiddish children’s literature served as a vehicle for constructing new forms of secular Jewish identity, imbuing young readers with shared values, ethical frameworks, and imaginative worlds that transcended traditional nation-building. Udel and Neufeld discuss the corpus, its ideological ambitions, notable stories, and how these texts responded to historical currents ranging from the Enlightenment to the aftermath of the Holocaust.

Key Discussion Points and Insights

Miriam Udel’s Path to the Project

• Personal and Scholarly Roots: Udel describes how her own experiences as a parent and a Yiddish language instructor converged to spark her interest, leading to over 15 years of research (03:00).

  • Quote: “It came as a kind of convergence of my mommy track with my Yiddish lerka track...wondering whether there had ever been any Yiddish children's literature.” [01:56]

• Companion Volumes: Her latest book is a “companion volume” to her 2020 anthology Honey on the Page. She frames both as parts of an “idea ecosystem” for thinking about Yiddish children’s literature as a vital force for modern Jewish self-understanding.

Defining "Worldmaking"

• Contrast With Nation-Building: Unlike Hebrew or Soviet Russian children’s literature, Yiddish texts aimed to create an "ideational homeland" rather than a bordered nation—offering children a “symbolic world” bound by shared values and stories rather than territory (03:50–07:00).

  • Quote: “Yiddish educators and cultural leaders sought to hand the children...a kind of symbolic ideational homeland, a world, if you will, and to try to push the norms and values of that world toward their utopian visions of the good and the just.” [05:45]

• Transnationalism: Yiddish literature reflects diaspora identity, with children’s books published across four continents and embodying global connections.

Shame and the Yiddish Language

• The Double Bind of Yiddish Shame: Udel explores the persistent association of Yiddish with shame—first as a “degraded” language, later as a marker of cultural loss for descendants of Yiddish speakers (07:14).

  • Quote: “There is the shame of too much Yiddish...for many speakers, Yiddish is perceived as a kind of degraded, bastardized form of German. ... Today we are left with the shame of not enough Yiddish, of having lost Yiddish.” [07:14]

• Psychological Parallel: Both hosts discuss how this shame mirrors feelings of religious inadequacy among secularized Jews—underscoring the intertwined layers of Jewish identity, language, and loss (09:48–11:20).

The Corpus: What Is Yiddish Children's Literature?

• Secular Orientation: The focus is on literature produced for secular (“veltlech”) or secularist school networks—not for religious settings (13:12).
• Scope and Genres: Begins in the late 19th century, flourishes dramatically in the interwar years, and produces nearly a thousand standalone works, including poetry, picture books, novels, plays, and periodicals. Major publishing continued in post-Holocaust Americas, with some activity in Israel (13:12–17:11).

Ideals and Ambitions: “Writing a Better World Into Being”

• Founding Values:
  • Proto-feminism: Girls as protagonists, mixed-gender education.
  • Stewardship of nature and empathy: Literature encourages care for the environment and for others less fortunate.
  • Equality and anti-racism: By the 1930s, even explicitly leftist/communist works included anti-racist elements.
  • Child psychology: Recognition of children as a distinct audience with unique needs and capacities for delight and imagination (17:22).

Theoretical Frameworks: Utopia and Heterotopia

• Foucault's "Heterotopia": Udel borrows Foucault’s idea of heterotopia—an “other place” that reflects and distorts ordinary society, enabling reflection and critique—to frame how children’s literature operates as a unique imaginative laboratory (22:13).
  • Quote: “Children's literature can serve as a heterotopian space that is a little bit different...When we study children's literature critically, we can then take that back to our broader sense of how literature works and learn new things about it.” [23:30]

Mapping the Field: Structure of Udel's Book

Part 1: Claiming a Usable Past

• Orientation toward Jewish Time: Texts look inward, focusing on Jewish history, holidays, and mythic heroes.
• Secular Sabbatarian Stories: Even secular authors valorized Shabbat, framed as a technology of rest and resistance to capitalist exploitation—showing convergence between religious tradition and modern, secular ideals (24:41–29:20).
  • Quote: “Shabbos was a technology of rest, and rest was resistance. ... If the worker can claw back one seventh of his...time, then that means that that's 1/7 that the boss doesn't own.” [28:58]
• Notable Reading [30:20]: Excerpt from a story where an everyman tailor finds supernatural comfort and community on Shabbat.

Gender: For Whom Was This Literature Written?

• Audience and Protagonists: Targeted at boys and girls alike, with plots often featuring girls having adventures—sometimes as a crisis (lost child), other times as self-driven exploration (32:59–35:15).
  • Quote: “When we start to see girl stories...she is not where the adults expect her to be.” [34:49]

Part 2: Contesting the Jewish Future

• Universalist and Outward-Looking Texts:

  • Themes include democracy, nature, new ideas about gender and empathy, class and racial disparities, and leftist ideology (35:34).

• Medem Sanitarium Case Study: Bundist institution for urban children combined health, democracy, and nature education—with its ethos reflected in children’s stories. Stories turned the real-life activities of the institution into lightly fictionalized episodes, making its values portable for children unable to attend (37:03–40:52).

• Memorable Moment [40:24]:

  • Udel: “We voted on everything, including the question of whether to have spinach with dinner.”
  • Host: “Did spinach get voted out up or down?”
  • Udel: “At least some of the time, spinach got a yay vote because children knew it was good for them.”

• Distinctly Jewish Elements: In universalist stories, “Jewishness” is sometimes implicit—primarily evident in the decision to write in Yiddish and through the cultural context of the authors (42:05).

Empathy and Allegory: Kobach’s “The Wind That Got Angry”

• Emotional Life as Allegory: A story about the wind rejected by the world is interpreted as a child’s tantrum—showing how literature offered tools for processing complex feelings (44:42).

  • Reading: Udel shares a dramatic excerpt describing the wind’s growing distress and ultimate “blizzard” (44:42–46:45).
  • Alternative interpretation: The host suggests an allegory for the Jewish people negotiating the tension between assimilation and distinctiveness.
  • Udel: “One of the hallmarks of truly great literature is that it is susceptible to various interpretations.” [47:37]

• Political Allegory: Stories like Tales of a Clever Pup (Labzik) embedded leftist, democratic values—depicting working-class struggles, protests, and dog heroes symbolizing collective action (48:24).

  • Udel reveals she is translating all 12 Labzik stories for Suni Press (expected 2026) and mentions a recent Yiddish puppet film adaptation (51:07).

The Holocaust: Metabolizing Harm Through Literature

• Role of Postwar Stories: Yiddish children’s literature, mainly outside Europe, helped American and Latin American children process the trauma and moral consequences of the Holocaust, using both direct and indirect storytelling (51:49).
• Excerpt: Udel reads from Isaac Metzger’s romanticized account of Don Yitzhak Abravanel’s early exposure to religious persecution and the importance of Jewish commitment—serving as an implicit call for young readers to “double down” on Jewish learning as a response to historical violence (53:22–57:22).
  • Quote: “…the implicit message to the American Yiddish speaking teenager is that in the face of historical violence against the Jews, we double down on Jewish learning and Jewish self-expression.” [57:15]

Notable Quotes and Memorable Moments

• “They constitute a kind of idea ecosystem about Yiddish children's literature as a force for political and ethical formation.” — Miriam Udel [01:56]
• “If the worker can claw back one seventh of his...time, then that means that that's 1/7 that the boss doesn't own.” — Miriam Udel [28:58]
• “One of the hallmarks of truly great literature is that it is susceptible to various interpretations.” — Miriam Udel [47:37]
• “Stories like Labzik and his human beings go on adventures against authoritarianism in favor of democracy...” — Miriam Udel [48:24]
• “In the face of historical violence against the Jews, we double down on Jewish learning and Jewish self-expression.” — Miriam Udel [57:15]

Key Timestamps

• 01:56 — Udel on her research journey
• 03:50 — Definition and stakes of “worldmaking”
• 07:14 — Addressing the shame associated with Yiddish
• 13:12 — Corpus scope and secular orientation
• 17:22 — Enlightenment values and child psychology in Yiddish literature
• 22:13 — Foucault’s concept of heterotopia
• 24:59 — Mapping and organizing the book’s themes
• 28:58 — Shabbat as technology of rest and resistance
• 32:59 — Gender and intended readership
• 35:34 — Universalist texts and educational ambitions
• 37:11 — The Medem Sanitarium as a model institution
• 44:42 — Reading from “The Wind That Got Angry”
• 48:24 — Labzik and leftist allegorical fiction
• 51:49 — Yiddish children’s literature and the Holocaust
• 53:22 — Reading from The Life of Don Yitzhak of Bravanel
• 57:15 — Udel’s summation on literature’s response to Jewish trauma

Conclusion

Miriam Udel offers listeners a rich, detailed map of a “symbolic world” painstakingly constructed by generations of Yiddish writers for children—balancing nostalgia, boundary crossing, cultural affirmation, and political vision. Modern Jewish Worldmaking Through Yiddish Children's Literature provides both inspiration and a scholarly platform for further study, underscoring the power of children's literature to serve as a “heterotopia” where new Jewish identities and hopes could be imagined and rehearsed.