Mikhal Dekel is an author and academic who has spent a lifetime highlighting the plight of displaced people. Born in Israel to a Holocaust refugee father and an Israeli-born mother, Mikhal's work is framed by the specifics of the past and the universality of the modern refugee experience.
Mikhal is a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and a Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the City University of New York, where she also directs the Simon H. Rifkind Center for the Humanities and Arts.
Her latest book, Tehran Children: A Holocaust Refugee Odyssey, is part-memoir and part historical account of Polish refugees fleeing the holocaust through Soviet Central Asia and the Middle East. A finalist for the Jewish Book Award, the Sami Rohr Prize, and the Chautauqua Prize for Contribution to the Literary Arts, Tehran Children has been featured in the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, C-Span, the BBC, Süddeutsche Zeitung, among many other publications and international media outlets. The book is also the focus of a short film by the London-based Iranian production company IranWire.
With more people displaced by world crises today than at the height of the Second World War, Mikhal's work is particularly relevant as she traverses the globe to trace the migrations, pilgrimages, and destinations of refugees fleeing conflict. She eloquently examines our current handling of aid, resettlement, and rehabilitation through the lens of past refugees and how their experiences reshaped and redefined their identities and those of the new communities they formed.
Mikhal is a co-creator and director at the Rifkind Center, which aims to promote CUNY's intellectual and cultural activities in the Humanities and Arts, support faculty research, organize and sponsor events and interdisciplinary faculty seminars, and organize student outreach programs and several college-related publications.
Mikhal is also the author of The Universal Jew: Masculinity, Modernity and the Zionist Moment, and the Hebrew monograph Oedipus be-Kishinev (Oedipus in Kishinev), which explores the emergence of tragedy in turn-of-the-century Hebrew literature.
Frequently featured in interviews and reviews for the New York Times, the Guardian, the BBC, the New York Review of Books, Foreign Policy, and the New York Daily News, to name a few outlets, Mikhal is also the recipient of many awards, including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Mellon Foundation, the Lady Davis Foundation, and the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton University.
Journeys of Hope: The Past & Present Stories of Refugees and Displaced People. There may be no greater force to displace a people than war. During World War II, hundreds of thousands of families were driven from their native lands and scattered across the globe. Children were separated from parents, families were torn apart, and those of working age were forced to become transient workers, slave laborers, and among the poorest and most ostracized members of society.
Inspired by the life of her father, a Polish Jew who fled to Tehran during WWII, Mikhal Dekel is a researcher and academic who has spent much of her career investigating and tracing the lives of displaced peoples. Drawing from her years of travel and research, Dekel brings to the stage the journeys of refugees, with their daily unknowns, their minor and major inconveniences, their life-or-death decisions, and the inevitable triumphs. By minutely reconstructing these stories, Mikhal offers insight into what millions are facing today, from the inception of collective trauma to the end result of a novel group identity.
Tehran Children: The Forgotten Story of Jewish Refugees in Central Asia and Iran. By the end of World War II, only 10% of the Jews living in Poland were still alive. Of these survivors, over two-thirds survived not in Europe or America, but in various countries in Central Asia, the Middle East and Africa. This diaspora marks a chapter in history misunderstood or overlooked altogether by historians. It's a story unknown even to many of the descendants of these quarter-million Holocaust survivors.
Professor, Author, and Researcher Mikhal Dekel is the daughter of one such refugee who made the unlikely journey to Iran to become one of the “Tehran Children.” Researching extensively across Russia, Central Asia the Middle East, retracing footsteps, and delving into secret Soviet archives previously unavailable to Western scholars, Mikhal brings to the stage the gripping narrative of so many refugees fleeing the horrors of the Holocaust. Unearthing this forgotten history recasts current relations between Iran and the Jewish community through a historical lens that shows how it got to this point and where it may be headed.
Keywords: refugee, immigration, Mideast, Russia, migration, World War II, Asia, holocaust, Israel, zionism