Materializing History: The Making of POLIN Museum’s Core Exhibition: Lecture 3

Materializing History: The Making of POLIN Museum’s Core Exhibition
The Leon Levy Foundation Lectures in Jewish Material Culture by Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett
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The idea to create a museum of the history of Polish Jews emerged in 1993, inspired by the opening of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., that year. After more than a decade as a project, the Museum of the History of Polish Jews was cofounded in 2005 by the Association of the Jewish Historical Institute of Poland, which initiated the project, the Ministry of Culture, and the City of Warsaw. An international architectural competition for the building followed.

Facing the Monument to the Ghetto Heroes, POLIN Museum is located on the site of the Warsaw ghetto and prewar Jewish neighborhood. After suppressing the Warsaw ghetto uprising in May 1943, the Germans reduced the area to rubble. As a result, the museum project began without a historic neighborhood, without a building, without a collection, and without funds. Its greatest asset was the story it would tell, a thousand-year history of Polish Jews. In exploring the creation of POLIN Museum’s Core Exhibition and extensions of it, this series of lectures by curator Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett will explore how the museum materialized history and created and discovered novel kinds of objects.
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Lecture 3: The Post-Jewish Object
As a result of the Holocaust, a new category emerged: “post-Jewish” property, which included land, buildings, and objects. Defined by dispossession resulting from the fate of Jews during and after the Holocaust, this category was the organizing concept for POLIN Museum’s most recent temporary exhibition, (post)JEWISH…Shtetl Opatów Through the Eyes of Mayer Kirshenblatt , which explores how the shtetl became a post-Jewish town. Original memory paintings of Jewish life before the Holocaust are juxtaposed with post-Jewish objects and more broadly with the “post-Jewish” town as it evolved in the decades since the Holocaust.
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Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett is University Professor Emerita and Professor Emerita of Performance Studies at New York University and Ronald S. Lauder Chief Curator of the Core Exhibition at POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, in Warsaw. Her books include Destination Museum: 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 and 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).

She was awarded the 2021 Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Folklore Society, honored for lifetime achievement by the Foundation for Jewish Culture, received honorary doctorates from the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, University of Haifa, and Indiana University, the 2015 Marshall Sklare Award for her contribution to the social scientific study of Jewry, and was decorated with the Officer’s Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and awarded the Dan David Prize. She serves or has served on Advisory Boards for the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, Council of American Jewish Museums, Jewish Museum Vienna, Jewish Museum Berlin, and the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center in Moscow, and as Vice-Chair of ICMEMO International Committee of Memorial Museums in Remembrance of the Victims of Public Crimes. She also advises on museum and exhibition projects in Lithuania, Belarus, Albania, Israel, New Zealand, and the United States.