During the first half of the twentieth century, a corpus of nearly 1,000 children’s books and several periodicals took shape in Yiddish across four continents. The overarching goal of the authors and educators who created this canon was to “write a better world into being” by helping form their young readers into mensches, or decent human beings. They embedded a sophisticated mechanics of empathy within their deceptively simple stories and poems. Drawing Dr. Miriam Udel’s new book, Modern Jewish Worldmaking Through Yiddish Children’s Literature, this lecture will examine how these texts taught empathy a century ago—and how they might speak to us now.
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