The Centre for Anthropological Research on Museums and Heritage (CARMAH) together with the Department of European Ethnology (IfEE) is hosting this lecture to which you are warmly invited. The talk will take place as part of the IfEE‘s Tuesday Colloquium on November 1st, 2016 from 6pm (c.t.) to approx. 8pm.
Are Jewish museums in Europe today Holocaust museums by another name? Is it possible to recover a thousand-year history of Jewish life in the very places where millions of Jews perished? This is the challenge for Jewish museums in Europe today. This talk will explore these questions through the unique perspective of the newest of them, POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw, which opened its multimedia narrative exhibition, a journey of a thousand years, in October 2014.
Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett is Chief Curator of the Core Exhibition at POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews and Professor Emerita of Performance Studies at New York University. Her books include Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage; Image before My Eyes: A Photographic History of Jewish Life in Poland, 1864–1939 (with Lucjan Dobroszycki); They Called Me Mayer July: Painted Memories of a Jewish Childhood in Poland Before the Holocaust (with Mayer Kirshenblatt), The Art of Being Jewish in Modern Times (with Jonathan Karp), and Anne Frank Unbound: Media, Imagination, Memory (with Jeffrey Shandler), among others.
