Homes of the Past

A Lost Jewish Museum

Jeffrey Shandler (Autor)

Buch | Softcover

170 Seiten

2024
Indiana University Press (Verlag)
978-0-253-06999-3 (ISBN)

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Homes of the Past tells the powerful story of how immigrant Jewish scholars in 1940s New York sought to build a museum to commemorate their lost worlds and people. Among the Jews who arrived in the United States in the early 1940s were a small number of Polish scholars who had devoted their professional lives to the study of Europe's Yiddish-speaking Jews at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. Faced with the devastating knowledge that returning to their former homes and resuming their scholarly work there was no longer viable, they sought to address their profound sense of loss by continuing their work, under radically different circumstances, to document the European Jewish lives, places, and ways of living that were being destroyed. In pursuing this daunting agenda, they made a remarkable decision: they would create a museum to memorialize East European Jewry and educate American Jews about this legacy. YIVO scholars determinedly pursued this undertaking for several years, publicizing the initiative and collecting materials to exhibit. However, the Museum of the Homes of the Past was abandoned shortly after the war ended.

With insight and clarity, Jeffrey Shandler draws upon the surviving archival sources to tell the story of the purpose, development, and ultimate fate of the Museum of the Homes of the Past.

Homes of the Past explores this largely unknown episode of modern Jewish history and museum history and demonstrates that the project, even though it was never realized, marked a critical inflection point in the dynamic interrelations between Jews in America and Eastern Europe.

Jeffrey Shandler is Distinguished Professor in the Department of Jewish Studies at Rutgers University. He is author, editor, or translator of sixteen books on modern and contemporary Jewish life, including Yiddish: Biography of a Language.

Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. The Turn to Museums
2. Home on Two Continents
3. The Museum of the Homes of the Past
4. Afterlife of the Past
5. Homes of the Past Today
Glossary
Notes
Index

Erscheinungsdatum	01.05.2024
Reihe/Serie	The Modern Jewish Experience
Zusatzinfo	15 b&w illus.
Verlagsort	Bloomington, IN
Sprache	englisch
Maße	152 x 229 mm
Gewicht	259 g
Themenwelt	Kunst / Musik / Theater
	Geschichte ► Allgemeine Geschichte ► 1918 bis 1945
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Hilfswissenschaften
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte
ISBN-10	0-253-06999-8 / 0253069998
ISBN-13	978-0-253-06999-3 / 9780253069993
Zustand	Neuware