New York University has named Gennady Estraikh, a renowned Yiddish Scholar, the Rauch Clinical Professor of Yiddish Studies. The appointment, effective Sept. 1, follows Estraikh’s three-year tenure as a Rauch Visiting Professor of Yiddish Studies in NYU’s Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies.
New York University has named Gennady Estraikh, a renowned Yiddish Scholar, the Rauch Clinical Professor of Yiddish Studies. The appointment, effective Sept. 1, follows Estraikh’s three-year tenure as a Rauch Visiting Professor of Yiddish Studies in NYU’s Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies.
Estraikh is also a staff writer at Vayter, a new supplement in the Forward, a weekly newspaper on the American Jewish Community. The monthly supplement, written in simple Yiddish and geared toward teenagers and university students, is designed to address the shortage of contemporary Yiddish reading material.
Born in Ukraine in a Yiddish-speaking family, Estraikh lived in Moscow from 1976 to 1991. In 1979, he became a refusenik, or dissident, against the Communist Regime. During the perestroika period under Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, Estraikh was the managing editor of Sovetish Heimland, the only Yiddish literary periodical in the Soviet Union. In 1989 and 1990, he published two editions of the Concise Yiddish-Russian Dictionary, which were the first publications of this kind in the post-Holocaust Soviet Union. In 1991, Estraikh moved to Oxford, where he worked at the Oxford Institute for Yiddish Studies, editing its Yiddish literary journal Di Pen. Estraikh also lectured at the London School of Oriental and African Studies.
His most recent book, In Harness: Yiddish Writers’ Romance with Communism (Syracuse University Press, 2005), recounts the lives of Yiddish writers enthralled with Communism at the turn of the 20th century through the mid-1930s.
Estraikh’s appointment marks a continuation of NYU’s commitment to Yiddish Studies. In 2005, NYU began housing the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research’s Uriel Weinreich Program in Yiddish Language, Literature, and Culture, an internationally recognized intensive summer program in Yiddish language. The program has historically drawn students from all over the world, including Poland, Russia, Slovakia, Israel, Australia, South Africa, Chile, Argentina, China, Korea, Japan, and western Europe, as well as the United States and Canada.