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 Five Centuries of Yiddish Poetry, Written by Women
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. A remarkable history of women’s poetry in Yiddish was recently published by Joanna Lisek, a scholar of Polish literature. The book is currently available only in its native Polish, but it’s imperative that it be translated into English as well. The monograph, “Kol Ishe: The Voice of…
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Culture After WWII, Her Stories Gave New Life To A Shattered Jewish World
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. The story of the Jews during the Holocaust era is usually divided into that of two zones: the Jewish zone, which includes the ghettos and the camps under the Germans and their allies, and the “free” zone, which includes the territories that were free of Nazi domination….
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Culture How Yiddish Education Got Its Start In America, From Zionism To Socialism
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. Are Jews a people or a religious community? This reductive question has been debated for more than two centuries, since the time of the Jewish Enlightenment. Its stakes are particularly high with regard to Jewish education. Religious subjects have an old and fixed place in the Jewish…
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Culture A Transgressive, Brilliant Leftist Satirist’s Work Finds New Life In English
The works of Yiddish writer and satirist Moyshe Nadir in English translation are gaining a wider audience these days. The newest addition to this growing collection is Nadir’s acerbic comic play “Messiah in America,” translated by Michael Shapiro and published by Farlag. The Yiddish word farlag actually means publishing house. Both the selection of the…
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Yiddish World How The Café Reinvented Jewish Culture
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. Jewish literature is full of references to cafés, like the Café Fanconi in Odessa described by Sholem Aleichem’s hapless hero, Menachem Mendl, or the Café Royale on the Lower East Side, frequented by Jewish socialists, writers and artists. These literary descriptions of café settings are often read…
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Culture How The Vilna Troupe Took Yiddish Theater Global
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. The world-famous Yiddish theater that eventually became known as the Vilna Troupe had its beginnings under remarkable and completely unexpected circumstances. Before World War I, Vilna had a high-quality Russian theater that attracted a mostly Jewish audience, in part due to the Polish intellectuals’s boycott of Russian…
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Yiddish World How Chabad Was Born In Smolensk
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. The Russian city of Smolensk is located in a region that has historically been contested between Russia and Lithuania, which later became part of Poland. Smolensk became part of Russia following the Russian-Polish wars in the 17th century, but its Lithuanian roots left a clear imprint on…
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Yiddish World How Vilna’s Jews Rescued Their Books From the Nazis
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. For hundreds of years, books played a powerful role in the lives of Vilna’s Jews. The city was home to the two most influential publishing houses of religious and secular books, Romm and B. Kletskin, as well as the great Strashun Library. Several synagogues, houses of study…
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