Shabbat Service and Cultural Program

Historically, the gender division in Yiddish was arguably the most notable among European languages. For centuries, Yiddish has been commonly perceived as the women’s tongue, as opposed to Hebrew, viewed as the language of men. However, while the main consumers of popular Yiddish literature were women, it was produced mostly by men. Women, Men, and Books: Issues of Gender in Yiddish Discourse includes contributions by twelve scholars from the US, Israel, Germany and Poland which investigate the variety of representations and constructions of gender in Yiddish culture.

Mikhail Krutikov is the Preston R. Tisch Professor of Judaic and Slavic Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He holds a Ph.D. in Jewish Literature from the Jewish Theological Seminary. He is the author of Yiddish Fiction and the Crisis of Modernity, 1905-1914 (Stanford University Press, 2001), From Kabbalah to Class Struggle: Expressionism, Marxism and Yiddish Literature in the Life and Work of Meir Wiener (Stanford University Press, 2011) and Der Nister’s Soviet Years: Yiddish Writer as Witness to the People (Indiana University Press, 2019). He co-edited ten collections of writings on Yiddish literature and culture. Since 1999 he has been a cultural columnist for the Yiddish Forward. A collection of his Yiddish essays, Tsvishn shures: notitsn vegn yidisher kultur (Between Lines: Notes on Jewish Culture), was published in Israel in 2018.