Polish Jewish Collecting and Museums, 1891–1941
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Book Talk
Admission: Free Registration is required. |
Displays of Belonging illuminates the lives and work of Polish Jewish collectors and museologists, who sought to preserve the treasures of the Jewish past while demonstrating Jewish belonging on Polish soil during the interwar period. At the turn of the century, Jewish ethnographers and museum creators staked their claim to belonging to the civic nation through the display of Jewish folk art, fine art, and Judaica. After World War I, the nearly three million Jews in the Second Polish Republic were suddenly challenged with finding a place for themselves in a state that increasingly defined itself as a creation of the ethnic Polish nation, to which Jews, by many accounts, did not belong.
By tracing emergent documentation and display practices in partitioned Poland and in the interwar Second Polish Republic, Sarah Ellen Zarrow offers an analysis of how integrated Jews identified with Polish culture and history and with non-Jewish Poles, and how they conceived of, negotiated, and argued their collective place within Poland. The book places Jewish ethnographic practice and art collection within a Polish context, and sheds light on ways in which ideas about belonging and national identity were negotiated in the space of museums.
Join YIVO for a discussion with Zarrow about this book, led by Jeffrey Shandler.
This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.
About the Speakers
Sarah Ellen Zarrow is Associate Professor of History at Western Washington University, where she holds an endowed chair in Jewish History. Her ongoing research focuses on Jewish life in Eastern Europe, particularly in Poland. I am especially interested in Jewish museum practices, language politics, and schooling. She previously was a Research Fellow at New Europe College Institute for Advanced Studies in Bucharest, Romania, and a Visiting Scholar at the Center for European and Mediterranean Studies at New York University. She holds a doctorate from the joint program of the Skirball Department of Hebrew & Judaic Studies and the History Department at NYU. Zarrow has also served as a consultant to archival and museum projects at YIVO and POLIN: Museum of the History of Polish Jews, designing exhibits and creating educational programming.
Jeffrey Shandler is Distinguished Professor of Jewish Studies at Rutgers University. His publications include Adventures in Yiddishland: Postvernacular Language and Culture (University of California Press, 2005); Shtetl: A Vernacular Intellectual History (Rutgers University Press, 2014); Yiddish: Biography of a Language (Oxford University Press, 2020); and Homes of the Past: A Lost Jewish Museum (Indiana University Press, 2024). Among other titles, he is editor of Awakening Lives: Autobiographies of Jewish Youth in Poland before the Holocaust (Yale University Press, 2002) and translator of Emil and Karl (Square Fish/Macmillan, 2006), a Holocaust novel for young readers by Yankev Glatshteyn.