Ken Krimstein
Ken Krimstein is an award-winning author and cartoonist. His book, When I Grow Up – The Lost Autobiographies of Six Yiddish Teens, is one of NPR’s favorite reads of 2021. It also featured on Washington Post’s “Top Ten Graphic Novels of 2021” and is one of the Notable Fall reads by the Chicago Tribune. For his book on Hannah Arendt, Ken Krimstein has presented lectures at many venues (including universities, art galleries, cultural organizations) in the United States and Canada and the UK. He’s also presented in-person at the Jewish Museum in Berlin and the Literaturhaus in Munich.
Ken was a featured speaker at The Chicago Humanities Festival in 2019. He talked about Hannah Arendt in-person to over three hundred people.
In February 2019, the Spertus Institute created a six-month installation in its lobby for The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt. The event was launched with Ken’s interview on-stage by Alexandra Salomon, editor of WBEZ, Chicago’s NPR station. 600 people attended. The Institute on Arendt held subsequent panel events and lectures. Ken discussed the revival of Yiddish in current culture.
Ken has also presented lectures on his book of Jewish cartoons through the Jewish Book Council. He presented these lectures at Kvetch as Kvetch Can at JCC’s, Jewish book festivals, and synagogues around the country. In addition to being a creative director in NYC for 20 years, and doing countless presentations and speeches, he’s been a professional lecturer at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and DePaul University for 10 years, and has lectured to advertising industry groups and professional organizations on topics including creativity, strategy and innovation, brand marketing, design, and idea generation around the country.
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Hardcover
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From the award-winning New Yorker cartoonist, a graphic narrative revealing the pivotal year in Prague when Einstein became “Einstein,” Franz Kafka became “Kafka,” and the world changed forever....Read More
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Hardback
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An NPR Best Book of the Year
A Washington Post Best Book of the Year
A Chicago Tribune Fall “Best Read"
An Alma most anticipated book of November
...Read More
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Hardback
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For Persepolis and Logicomix fans, a New Yorker cartoonist’s page-turning graphic biography of the fascinating Hannah Arendt, the most prominent philosopher of the twentieth century....Read More
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Everyone’s an Einstein
How a Swiss Patent clerk named Albert Einstein fled to Prague to try to save his marriage and ended up creating a whole new cosmos, and became “an Einstein.” And how you can learn from him and realize your own inner Einstein, even if you don’t know any math.
When I Grow Up
Discovering the lost teenagers of “Yiddishuania,” my journey discovering their stories, as told in my graphic narrative: “When I Grow Up – The Lost Autobiographies of Six Yiddish Teenagers”.
Climbing Everest Every Tuesday
What it’s like to be a cartoonist for The New Yorker Magazine.
Kvetch as Kvetch Can — Jewish Cartoons
A presentation of my humor book of gag cartoons on all things Jewish, which can be expanded into a longer presentation that I’ve given as part of a short course for Bard College: It Only Hurts When I Laugh — What is it with Jews and Cartoons?
There are no Dangerous Thoughts — Thinking Itself Is Dangerous
What Hannah Arendt can teach us about how to think, how to live, and how to get along with one another — from my graphic narrative: The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt – A Tyranny of Truth.
Winning in the Virtual Bazaar — A Physical-Digital design-oriented way to thrive in our brave new world
Based on a book proposal and my teaching regarding creativity and human-centric marketing strategy.
Graphic History—Why It Works, Why It Matters
Understanding history has never been more important and new directions in graphic narratives from Maus to When I Grow Up are enlightening readers from all quarters.
Graphic Narratives—Reading, Creating, and Appreciating Them: It’s not just for bubblegum wrappers anymore.
Read this Chicago Magazine article about Ken Krimstein speaking about salvaging the stories of pre-Holocaust Jewish youths.
Krimstein illustrates in Haaretz about life in the 1930’s as a Jewish Teen.
“It was such a pleasure for our south suburban Jewish community to hear the story of YIVO holding a contest in the late 1930s asking Yiddish speaking teenagers to send in written accounts of their lives and how many of these texts were discovered five years ago in a church cellar in Lithuania. It was fascinating too to hear about your journey to Lithuania, the translation of the texts, and your decision on how to visually depict these anonymous teenagers. Your book is very beautiful and moving and I will always treasure owning a copy with your inscription in it.”
— Shir TikvahPraise for Einstein in Kafkaland: How Albert Fell Down the Rabbit Hole and Came Up with the Universe
“Clever, charming, amusing, and just plain brilliant. Ken Krimstein is the most inventive graphic biographer on the planet—and certainly the only one who could explain both Einstein and Kafka. A page turner on gravity and relativity!”
— KAI BIRD, Pulitzer Prize-winning co-author of American Prometheus, the biography that inspired the Oscar-winning film OppenheimerBending real history into a fantastical tale of two young thinkers in pursuit of “the true truth,” [a] playful graphic novel by New Yorker cartoonist Krimstein… Irreverent yet full of tenderness for its subjects, Krimstein’s experiment is a dizzying delight.
— Publishers Weekly, Starred ReviewEinstein in Kafkaland is crisply written, witty, and with art that evokes places in time and feelings in the way all great graphic stories should. Along with some of Einstein’s important physics, you may learn just what Kafka was driving at. One man manages to convince his readers the universe is impossible to understand; it’s mysterious, even hostile. The other discovers the universe is knowable, if we embrace a future determined by gravity. If that seems weird and Kafka-esque, read on.
— Bill Nye“Art and science collide in Ken Krimstein’s new graphic biography. In this book, the author of the brilliant and whimsical The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt similarly translates careful research into scenic, emotive comics—in this case tracking the potential effects of an adventitious meeting in Prague between two geniuses on the cusp of world-changing discoveries.”
— NPR, “Summer Books Our Critics Can’t Wait to Read”“[Krimstein] engagingly chronicles a significant time period for both [Einstein and Kafka]…A fun, amusing fantasy about an important year in two icons’ lives”
— Kirkus Reviews“Krimstein builds a remarkable historical fantasy that draws [Einstein and Kafka] together, each pulled along in their own way by the White Rabbit (yes, THAT White Rabbit)…readers seeking to go down the rabbit hole and feel the truth will be at home in these pages.”
— BooklistPraise for When I Grow Up: The Lost Autobiographies of Six Yiddish Teenagers
“Poignant … Ken Krimstein’s latest book sketches a powerful portrait of Eastern European Jewish youths, full of angst and optimism, on the eve of the Holocaust … Yearning is, in fact, the collection’s dominant emotion.”
— Chicago Magazine“Deeply affecting yet often joyful … these recovered works form the basis of Krimstein’s narrative, and the fact that almost all of the young writers perished at the hands of the Nazis casts an ominous shadow. Yet the six young people who come alive in pencil and watercolor are hopeful, defiant, lovelorn, and smart … Krimstein’s loose-lined drawings shift between sobriety and humor, while footnotes provide context … By depicting the personalities of youth lost—with easy beauty and a lack of preciosity—rather than how they died, Krimstein conveys the depth of human and cultural loss that much more profoundly.”
— Publishers Weekly, Starred ReviewBook This Speaker
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