Modern Jewish Worldmaking Through Yiddish Children’s Literature
Feb 23, 2026 5:00 pm
Illini Union Room 210
- Sponsor
- The Program in Jewish Culture and Society
- Contact
- Samantha McLain
- slangley@illinois.edu
- Originating Calendar
- Campus Humanities Calendar
Around the turn of the twentieth century, a group of Yiddish-speaking educators, authors, and cultural leaders undertook a bold project: creating a corpus of nearly one thousand books and several periodicals, which flourished in conjunction with the secular Yiddish school systems that spanned the globe in the 1920s and 30s. Investigated as an archive, the corpus furnishes a novel record of the movements that made Ashkenazi Jewry fully modern.