Miriam Udel is Judith London Evans director of the Tam Institute for Jewish Studies at Emory University. She is the author of Modern Jewish Worldmaking Through Yiddish Children’s Literature, forthcoming in October from Princeton University Press”
Miriam Udel
By Miriam Udel
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Yiddish World Children taking part in a Seder while hiding from the Nazis
In Zina Rabinowitz's tale, a teacher keeps the children's fear at bay by appealing to their imagination
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Yiddish World Who was the audience for the rhyming Purim play?
This excerpt of Alef Kats’s ‘Purim shpil,’ presented in English, focuses on King Ahasuerus as a drunken fool
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Yiddish World Frankie’s Menorah (a Yiddish Hanukkah story)
The story, presented here in English translation, takes place during the California gold rush of 1849
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Yiddish World One thing the pirates couldn’t steal (a Simchat Torah parable)
Originally a Hebrew rabbinic tale, its Yiddish translation appeared in various textbooks of the Yiddish afternoon schools
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Yiddish World A story about a Sukkah on the Argentine grasslands
A farmer describes what Sukkos was like for his family when they immigrated from Russia and didn’t even have a house yet.
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Yiddish World ‘The rabbi who was late to Kol Nidre’ (folktale)
The Yom Kippur prayer service is about to begin and all the townspeople are there. But who’s watching the babies?
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Yiddish World Classic Yiddish holiday tales can provide hope in these dark times
Secular Yiddish children’s literature relayed the political aspirations, values and anxieties of Ashkenazi Jewry during the 20th century
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Culture In this classic Jewish children’s book, a Yiddish-speaking dog learns to reject racism
As America continues its intensified reckoning with questions of racial justice, parents and educators are keenly aware of the need to speak to children about race in ways that feel authentic and relatable. The Jewish community can look to Yiddish literature for models of antiracist storytelling that took shape long before the storied alliances of…
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