CONTRIBUTOR

Cecile E. Kuznitz

Bard College

Cecile E. Kuznitz is Associate Professor of History and Patricia Ross Weis '52 Chair in Jewish History and Culture at Bard College (Annandale-on-Hudson, NY). She is the author of YIVO and The Making of Modern Jewish Culture: Scholarship for the Yiddish Nation (Cambridge University Press, 2014) as well as numerous articles on the Jewish community of Vilna, the history of Yiddish scholarship, and Jewish urban history. She has held a Lady Davis Fellowship at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a Ruth Meltzer Fellowship at the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies (University of Pennsylvania), as well as fellowships at YIVO, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies.

RELATED ARTICLES

Blog

Three Giants of Modern Jewish Literature at YIVO: Excerpts from the Diary of Ezekiel Lifschutz

Cecile E. Kuznitz

Ezekiel Lifschutz’s diary from his time as YIVO chief archivist in the 1960s offers striking evidence of the institute’s importance in the wider Jewish world. In these passages, we see the personalities of three giants of modern Jewish literature — Yiddish poet Abraham Sutzkever, English novelist Saul Bellow, and Hebrew writer Shai Agnon — and their relationships to the Yiddish language.

Article

Is There Such a Thing as “Yiddish Architecture”?

Cecile E. Kuznitz

The “spatial turn” in the humanities has opened up new kinds of thinking about Jews’ relationship to place. Yet how can this approach—which focuses on the physically concrete—be applied to the field of Yiddish studies, which after all is defined by the intangible factor of language? 

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