Building Bridges: Polish-Jewish Perspectives

Visiting Professor Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett

Saint Louis, Missouri

October 8 – 11, 2018

We are pleased to announce a series of upcoming lectures coming to St Louis this Fall. Our guest will be Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Chief Curator of the Core Exhibition at POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews and the Association of the Jewish Historical Institute of Poland.

The program will include the following lectures open to the public:

  • Tuesday Oct. 9, 2018 4:00 PM at the Washington University

Painted Memories: A Jewish Childhood in Poland Before the Holocaust 

  • Tuesday Oct. 9 , 2018 at 6:30 PM  at the Missouri History Museum

Rising from the Rubble: Creating Polin Museum of The History of Polish Jews 

Note: The lecture is free and open to the public. If you want to attend the reception please RSVP at the  Eventbrite website 

  • Thursday Oct. 11, 2018 at 7:00 PM at the Holocaust Museum and Learning Center

What’s happening with Poland? The Role of Museums in Historical Debates  For registration please follow this link

This program is of particular importance to our community for number of reasons such as: It facilitates dialogue between various community groups interested in our ancestry and multi-ethnic history of Poland; it helps all of us better understand complexity of Polish-Jewish relations and overcome fears and prejudice which contribute to reinforcing stereotype, and it educates the public about amazing contributions of Jews of Poland to world cultural heritage.

We are confident that this program will help us to achieve these goals. Professor Kirshenblatt-Gimblett is a very engaging and thought-provoking lecturer. She presents clearly, colorfully, and concisely, yet thoroughly a very interesting philosophy of what a museum should be and how history can be approached.

Below is Professor Kirshenblatt-Gimblett bio and agenda.

Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett was born in Canada during the Second World War to Jewish immigrants from Poland.  She is Chief Curator of the Core Exhibition at POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews and the Association of the Jewish Historical Institute of Poland. She is University Professor Emerita and Professor Emerita of Performance Studies at New York University, where she has been affiliated with the Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies.

Her 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.

She was honored for lifetime achievement by the Foundation for Jewish Culture, received honorary doctorates from the Jewish Theological Seminary of America and will receive an honorary doctorate from the University of Haifa in 2017. She received with 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 for her contribution to POLIN Museum. She was recently elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She serves 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. She also advises on museum and exhibition projects in Lithuania and Israel.