Dear Joseph Galron, I hope this email finds you well. I’m writing to see if you would be interested in Miriam Udel’s forthcoming book MODERN JEWISH WORLDMAKING THROUGH YIDDISH CHILDREN'S LITERATURE (October 14, 2025 | Princeton UP) which examines how modern Yiddish children’s literature gave expression to emerging forms of Jewish identity.
As migration carried Yiddish to several continents during the 20th 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. Miriam Udel traces how the stories and poems written for these Yiddish-speaking children underpinned new formulations of secular Jewishness. Moving geographically from Europe to the Americas and chronologically through the 20th century, she considers this emerging canon in relation to the deep Jewish past and imagined Jewish futures before reckoning with the tragedy of the Holocaust. Udel discusses how Yiddish children’s literature espoused political ideologies ranging from socialism to Zionism and constituted a project of Jewish cultural nationalism, one shaped equally by the utopianism of the Jewish left and important shifts in the Western understanding of children, childhood, and family life. MODERN JEWISH WORLDMAKING THROUGH YIDDISH CHILDREN’S LITERATURE shows how Yiddish authors, educators, and cultural leaders, confronting practical limits on their ability to forge a fully realized nation of their own, focused instead on making a symbolic and conceptual world for Jewish children to inhabit with dignity, justice, and joy. Please let me know if you would be interested in looking at an early PDF (available now) or physical review copy (available in October) of MODERN JEWISH WORLDMAKING THROUGH YIDDISH CHILDREN’S LITERATURE. Best, Will Pagdatoon, Promotions Associate Princeton University Press
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