Lecture: “Discourse of American Yiddish Holocaust Education”
Monday, October 26, 6 – 7:30 p.m.
“In the Teachers’ Lounge With the Unthinkable: The Pedagogical Discourse of American Yiddish Holocaust Education”
Lecture by Miriam Udel (Fordham-NYPL Fellow)
This talk will examine the Yudl Mark’s Pedagogisher buleten and related periodicals as sources for understanding how the events of the Holocaust were presented to children in the American Yiddish after-schools during and shortly after the war.
Miriam Udel is Professor of Yiddish Literature and Culture at Emory University, where she has recently completed a term as Judith London Evans Director of the Tam Institute for Jewish Studies. She holds an AB in Near Eastern languages and civilizations and a PhD in comparative literature, both from Harvard University. She was ordained in 2019 as part of the first cohort of the Executive Ordination Track at Yeshivat Maharat, a program designed to bring qualified mid-career women into the Orthodox Jewish rabbinate.
Udel is the author of Never Better!: The Modern Jewish Picaresque (University of Michigan Press), winner of the 2017 National Jewish Book Award in Modern Jewish Thought and Experience. She is the editor and translator of Honey on the Page: A Treasury of Yiddish Children’s Literature (NYU Press, 2020), winner of the Judaica Reference Award from the Association of Jewish Libraries. Her 2025 critical study, Modern Jewish Worldmaking Through Yiddish Children’s Literature, won last year’s National Jewish Book Award in Education and Jewish Identity. Udel’s translation of Chaver Paver’s 1935 story collection about the adventures of a lovable proletarian mutt became the basis for Theater Emory’s 2021 puppet film Labzik: Tales of a Clever Pup; her full translation of the stories will appear in January with the Excelsior Editions imprint at SUNY Press.
Her ongoing research looks to children’s literature and culture as a powerful force for political and ethical formation and a resource for the intergenerational transmission of culture, values, and ideology. She is spending 2026-27 as the NYPL-Fordham Research Fellow in Jewish Studies.
