Miriam UdelAssociate Professor of Yiddish Language, Literature, and Culture
Education
Biography
Research Areas: Yiddish literature and culture, children’s and youth culture, Ashkenazi Jewish modernity, American-Jewish culture
Teaching Fields: Modern Jewish literature, Yiddish culture
Miriam Udel is associate professor of German Studies and Judith London Evans Director of the Tam Institute of 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 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. 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 with SUNY Press. In 2025, Princeton University Press will publish her critical study of Ashkenazi Jewish modernity reimagined through the corpus of Yiddish children’s literature.
Her new research looks to children’s literature and culture as a powerful force for political formation and a resource for the intergenerational transmission of culture, values, and ideology. She is spending 2024-25 in New York as the inaugural Robert S. Rifkind Senior Fellow at the Center for Jewish History, the Covenant Foundation Jewish Family Education Fellow, and the Emory College Chronos Fellow.