Emory University professor Miriam Udel won a National Jewish Book Award on Feb. 18, the second time her work — which examines century-old Yiddish stories for insight into modern Jewish life — has earned this national acclaim.
Udel, an associate professor in German studies for Emory College of Arts and Sciences and the Judith London Evans Director of the Tam Institute for Jewish Studies, took top honors in the “Education and Jewish Identity” category for her book “Modern Jewish Worldmaking through Yiddish Children’s Literature.”
“Dr. Udel’s work exemplifies the very best of humanities scholarship — deeply learned, attuned to intricacies of language and culture, and alive to the power of stories to shape our moral vision and communal aspirations,” says Joseph Crespino, Jimmy Carter Professor of History and Interim Dean of Emory College of Arts and Sciences. “I am happy that she has received this well-deserved recognition.”
Udel completed the book as the 2024-25 Emory College Chronos Fellow, funded by a grant from the Abraham J. & Phyllis Katz Foundation that supports ambitious scholarship among tenured faculty in the humanities and social sciences.
The winning book explains how children’s stories helped shape a global sense of Jewish identity while sharing a range of political ideologies that emphasized the importance of compassion, gender and racial equality, emotional intelligence and the reduction of wealth disparities — all elements of building “a shenere un besere velt,” or a better and more beautiful world.
“While this topic can initially strike people as ‘niche’ or highly specialized, there’s no set of questions more universally relevant than how we shape the world through story for the young people in our midst — and how stories shape us,” Udel says. “At a moment when humanities scholars feel so embattled, recognition like this spurs a broader public to appreciate the beauty and intellectual vigor of our research.”
Udel’s latest winning work builds on her scholarship that explores and explains the political significance of Yiddish literature. She won the Jewish National Book Award in 2017 for her debut book, “Never Better! The Modern Jewish Picaresque,” which examines the evolution of protagonists in modern Yiddish fiction.
From that informal focus on education, she shifted into studying children’s literature, which required the significant effort of reading hundreds of stories and poems published between 1889 and 1974 in order to select and translate nearly 50 of them.
The result was her second book, “Honey on the Page: A Treasury of Yiddish Children’s Literature,” a landmark anthology of tales, most never before published in English. The book won the 2020 Judaica Reference Award, and five of its stories were the basis of an hour-long radio play in Seattle.
Her new book suggests those stories serve as a historical archive for understanding the politics and aspirations of Jews, whether they be socialists, communists, Zionists or dedicated Yiddishists, united by the common language.
Udel’s next book is a translation of Chaver Paver’s 1935 story collection about an emotionally intelligent mutt adopted by a working-class leftist Bronx family during the Great Depression. The work, which served as the basis for Theater Emory’s 2021 puppet film, “Labzik: Tales of a Clever Pup,” is forthcoming from SUNY Press in 2027.
The Jewish Book Council will honor Udel and the 20 other recipients of this year’s 75th annual awards at a gala celebration on March 25 in New York City.