1996-1997
Miriam Udel is assistant professor of German Studies and Jewish Studies at Emory University, where she teaches courses in Yiddish language and Modern Jewish literature and culture. She is at work on her first scholarly book, “Never Better!: The Modern Jewish Picaresque,” an examination of the un-heroic hero in Yiddish modernist fiction and its literary offshoots. The title gestures at the sly insouciance that such characters drape over their existential despair. She also works intermittently on an intellectual autobiography, excerpts of which have appeared in The Forward.