Polish Jewish Collecting and Museums, 1891–1941

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.

You may also like the following events from YIVO Institute for Jewish Research:

• This month, 17th August, 11:00 am, YIVO Learning and Media Center Open House (For Educators) in New York
• Next month, 18th September, 07:00 pm, The Great Dictionary of the Yiddish Language in New York
• Next month, 21st September, 01:00 pm, The Great Dictionary of the Yiddish Language in New York

Also check out other Arts events in Ambala , Fine Arts events in Ambala .