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?

McMaster’s Department of Religious Studies invites you to join Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Chief Curator of the Core Exhibition at POLIN Museum and University Professor Emerita of Performance Studies at New York University, to explore these questions and more in her talk, Curating between hope and despair: Creating POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews.

Kirshenblatt-Gimblett will explore the challenges facing Jewish museums in Europe today through the unique perspective of 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.

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

When: Thursday, January 12, 2017 @ 7:00 p.m.

Where: Great Hall, University Club

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

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.