Yiddish Children’s Literature Today
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Discussion
Admission: Free Registration is required. |
The Jewish children’s literature field is booming and the call to provide representation of Jewish children, for Jewish children, has played a large part in that. The publication of Miriam Udel’s new book of translated Yiddish children’s literature, Honey on the Page, is the perfect opportunity to celebrate the history of Yiddish children’s literature, and to examine the roles it can play for children today.
What is the potential for Yiddish literature to educate not just Jewish readers, but non-Jewish readers? How is Yiddish literature different from other texts aimed at young Jewish readers? What can it bring to the field of Jewish children's literature that other texts might not? Join us for a conversation exploring these questions moderated by Rokhl Kafrissen (Tablet Magazine) with Miriam Udel, Naomi Seidman, and Jennifer Young.
About the Speakers
Rokhl Kafrissen is a journalist and playwright in New York City. Her ‘Rokhl’s Golden City’ column began appearing in Tablet in 2017, the only regular feature in the world dedicated to new Yiddish culture in all its iterations. Her op-eds on feminism, sociology and Jewish life appear in newspapers all over the world. She was a 2019-2020 14th Street Y LABA fellow, for which she wrote Shtumer Shabes (Silent Sabbath), a black comedy about the dangers of ethnography and human experimentation.
Miriam Udel is associate professor of German Studies and Jewish Studies at Emory University, where her teaching focuses on Yiddish language, literature, and culture. She holds an AB in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations from Harvard University, as well as a PhD in Comparative Literature from the same institution. 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 rabbinate. Udel’s academic research interests include 20th-century Yiddish literature and culture, Jewish children’s literature, and American-Jewish literature. She 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. Honey on the Page: A Treasury of Yiddish Children’s Literature appears on October 6 with New York University Press.
Naomi Seidman is the Chancellor Jackman Professor of the Arts in the Department for the Study of Religion and the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies at the University of Toronto. Her book, Sarah Schenirer and Bais Yaakov: A Revolution in the Name of Tradition, was recently published by Littman Library. Seidman did her research for this book as a Workmen's Circle/Dr. Emanuel Patt Visiting Professor at the YIVO Institute (2012) and an NEH Senior Scholar at the Center for Jewish History (2016-17).
Jennifer Young is the former Director of Education of the YIVO Institute and, as YIVO’s first Digital Learning Curator, founded its online education program. She has also worked at the New-York Historical Society, the Tenement Museum, and the Lower East Side Jewish Conservancy, where she created the walking tour “Radical Housewives: Jewish Women’s Activism on the Lower East Side.” She holds an M.Ed specializing in history museum education from the University of British Columbia, and also completed doctoral work in American History and Judaic Studies at NYU. Her article on Yiddish children’s literature and radical pedagogy appeared in Children and Yiddish Literature from Early Modernity to Post-Modernity (Legenda Press, 2015). Her writing has appeared in the Jerusalem Post, Time.com, and Atlas Obscura. She currently serves as a children’s book reviewer for Publishers Weekly, focusing on books about activism and resistance.