Gil Ribak is the Shirley D. Curson Associate Professor of Judaic Studies at the University of Arizona. While there are many studies of antisemitism, his research reverses the perspective and examines how the Jewish minority viewed the surrounding majority, as well as various ethnic and racial groups within that majority both in East Europe and the United States. He is the recipient of numerous fellowships, including the European Union’s Marie S. Curie Senior Fellowship at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies (2021-2022), a research fellowship by the Gerda Henkel Foundation (2022), and the “Social Relevance of the Humanities” fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study – Sofia (2024). 

Crude Creatures is a new cultural history that provides a critical revision, correcting the accepted rosy narrative of Black women and men’s portrayals in Yiddish culture. The book draws on a mixture of previously unexplored Yiddish press, theatre, and literature from Eastern Europe and the United States through 1929 to examine how Black Africans and African Americans were depicted. It charts a significant gap between the sincere condemnation of lynching, violence against Black Americans, and racial segregation on the one hand, and the ways in which Jewish authors, newspapers, playwrights, actors, and theater managers actually represented Black people on the other. In those portrayals, Yiddish writers reflected European and American cultures’ depiction of Black people as being oversexed, prone to violence, childlike, or just happy-go-lucky people.