Mikhail Krutikov is the Preston R. Tisch Professor of Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan and a regular contributor to the Forward. You can reach him at krutikov@umich.edu.
Mikhail Krutikov
By Mikhail Krutikov
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Yiddish World The ideological journey of the Forverts in the first half of the 20th century
Read this article in Yiddish. Transatlantic Russian Jewishness: Ideological Voyages of the Yiddish Daily Forverts in the First Half of the Twentieth Century Gennady Estraikh Academic Studies Press, $119, 354 pp In the history of American journalism, the Forverts is a genuine outlier. Over the course of the first half of the last century, the…
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Yiddish World Becoming an ordinary American in the shadow of the Holocaust
“The past dominated our present,” writes Michael (Menachem) Fox in his compelling coming-of-age memoir as a child of Holocaust survivors from Poland. And indeed, his story isn’t meant to be a chronological narrative. A professional psychologist, he relates his experiences and feelings through isolated episodes, which had imprinted themselves on his memory and left traces…
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Yiddish World Poet Abraham Sutzkever’s memoirs of the Vilna Ghetto are now in English
Abraham Sutzkever From the Vilna Ghetto to Nuremberg: Memoir and Testimony Edited and translated by Justin D. Cammy Afterword by Justin D. Cammy and Avraham Novershtern McGill-Queen’s University Press (2021), 488 pp. Although Abraham (Avrom, in Yiddish) Sutzkever is usually referred to as one of the greatest Yiddish poets in the twentieth-century, he also played…
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Yiddish World Yiddish Folklore Inspires American Artist Debra Olin
Read this article in Yiddish. As seen in a new exhibit at the Museum at Eldridge Street, artist Debra Olin has created large format monoprint collages that explore Jewish folkloric superstitions and religious practices, particularly those of women in the Russian Pale of Settlement. Olin based her art on the information she gleaned from an…
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Yiddish World What does Yiddish scholar Samuel Spinner mean by Jewish primitivism?
Samuel J. Spinner Jewish Primitivism Stanford University Press, 272 pp. According to the Russian־Jewish art critic, Abram Efros (1888-1954), modern Jewish art needs to embody two principles: European modernism and Jewish folk art. In his article, “Aladdin’s Magic Lantern,” Efros wrote that “the face of modernism is turned outwards, while folk art turns inward.” Efros’…
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Yiddish World The first Jewish Holocaust museum wasn’t in Israel or the US
If you were to ask people which country had the very first Holocaust museum, most would likely answer “Israel” or “the United States.” The true answer, though, is Vilna (Vilnius), and what’s more surprising, is that it was founded even before World War II was over, in 1944 – a dramatic history detailed in David…
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Culture Prairie Sonata: A new novel of Canadian Jewish life
Read this article in Yiddish. Prairie Sonata Sandy Shefrin Rabin FriesenPress, 2020, 288 pp. Yiddish culture always had better luck in Canada than in the United States. Partly this was because Jewish immigrants to Canada were more cohesive and better organized, and Canadian society in general displayed greater respect for cultural diversity. As a result,…
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Culture Jewish music in Germany after the Holocaust
Read this article in Yiddish. Tina Frühauf Transcending Dystopia: Music, Mobility, and the Jewish Community in Germany, 1945-1989 Oxford University Press, 2021, 644 pp. Immediately after World War II, the German rabbi Leo Baeck, who had survived the war in the concentration camp Terezin, declared: “The history of German Jews has ended once and for…
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