Curating between hope and despair | Creating POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews

2017 Lillian and Marvin Goldblatt Lecture in Jewish Studies 

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.

Join Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Chief Curator of the Core Exhibition at POLIN Museum and University Professor Emerita of Performance Studies at New York University, as she presents her talk.

Barbara’s 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.

*POLIN Museum is at the site of the former Warsaw ghetto and won the European Museum of the Year Award in 2016.

This lecture is FREE and open to the public

For more information, contact Professor Celia Rothenberg, rothenb@mcmaster.ca or 905-525-9140 ext. 24363

Date: Thursday, January 12, 2017 
Time: 7:00-9:00 p.m.
Place: Great Hall, University Club